Hear, hear! I couldn't agree more. I find it impossible to take notes and listen to somebody speak at the same time. That said, the OP's wife is a woman(!) and apparently they can multi-task!

Hmm... I suspect that most people distrust anybody who lives more than five miles away from them. Just so you know, in England, southerners think that northerners are uncivilized, uneducated idiots, and northerners think that southerners are shandy drinking pansies.

I'm so glad to see your comment "not every human is equally adept in recognizing images". I thought it might just be me: for years I've been inadvertently clicking on the print icon instead of the save icon. To my mind, they are generally rectangular and similar colours; unless I stop and think about it for a second there's a 50% chance I'll hit the wrong one. Recently, I made the mistake of putting bookmark icons for Gmail and BBC iPlayer next to each other and removing the text. Both icons are reddish and have triangular bits.

Although I much prefer text based interfaces, I appreciate that some people have problems distinguishing words. A good UI needs to give people the choice.

You mean the same US government that has accumulated a $14.5 trillion debt? Surely no organisation on the planet has ever been so poor!

Joking aside, I think you're probably right; Apple will drop OSX as soon as they possibly can. I don't think they should, though.

Huh?! I've been with Virgin broadband for years, currently on the 20Mb service - I stream music and surf the web all day long, watch hours of BBC iPlayer in the evening, plus can download gigabytes of software. I have never been throttled. The last time I checked, I can download 10.5Gb per day (and it's completely unlimited at night). I suggest you have a word with whoever is sending you such big emails!

You wouldn't trust an automatically controlled boat today, in 2011, on the basis that a partly automatically controlled boat sank after hitting an iceberg in 1912?

A robotic bus just might be safer than a human driver if all the other vehicles are driven by robots. All vehicles could then communicate with each other wirelessly, making traffic signals unnecessary - although I guess it would be useful for pedestrians to know when it is safe to cross. The only thing that robots might have a problem with then are unforeseen circumstances like dry ice, grit, children playing... I suspect that robots can probably already react more quickly to such events than humans.

I put a 32MB hard card in my Amstrad PC1512. It was the first hard disk of any type that I ever owned; I guess this was around 1988. Before that the machine just had twin 5.25" floppies.

Actually I do pretty much always try to figure out how to do things myself. When I needed some wiring doing in my house I researched what needed to be done and realised that it would probably take more time to get a quote from an electrician than to actually do the work myself. The same thing applied to plumbing; I was astonished at how easy basic plumbing is - I re-plumbed my entire bathroom in about an hour.

On the other hand, when my car needed work doing, I found out that the equipment required would cost more than getting the work done professionally, even if I was being over charged. Also, I don't like getting my hands dirty!

If I needed my appendix removing I would trust a doctor, rather than try the operation myself. Probably.

On this faceless internet, it seems like you're supposed to hate everybody and everything.

Have you noticed that, in the UK, newspapers report cold weather in Celsius - 0C sounds colder than 32F, but hot weather is reported with Fahrenheit - 100F sounds much hotter than 37C.

About a decade ago I saw a ruler (rule for the pedants) which had been issued when the UK converted from imperial to metric back in the 70s. It had a guide to metric units - it included definitions of micrometer, millimeter, centimeter, decimeter, meter, decameter, hectometer, kilometer and megameter. No wonder people were scared by it all!

I guess converting to the lowest common denominator is something that you do on a regular basis and I guess it wouldn't occur to you that somebody could struggle with something so trivial; however, I (in the UK) vaguely remember doing this in one maths lesson at junior school (aged about 8). I haven't done it since. I don't know how to add two fractions, never mind multiply or divide them. There is never a need to use fractions with the metric system.

I think the easiest system to use is whichever you have most experience with.

You might be shocked to hear that I (a UK metric user) have no idea how to add or subtract two fractions. I can do simple things like 1/16 + 1/16 = 2/16 = 1/8, but I wouldn't know where to start with something like 1/16 * 5/6 - there simply isn't a need for fractions with the metric system.

My point is that, if an imperial user is forced to use metric, it will seem clunky and complicated, but the exact same thing applies to a metric user who tries to use imperial for the first time.

(By the way, if you ever need to use metric again in the future, just use millimeters. That way you only ever deal with whole numbers. One millimeter is more than accurate enough for carpentry (it's about the thickness of the pencil line).)

There is a move/rotate/scale manipulator that can be used to constrain to certain planes. Many blender tutorials suggest turning this off because it "gets in the way" and blender is so dependent on keyboard shortcuts* that it's just as easy to press x, y or z. * keyboard shortcuts are a Good Thing - much faster than moving the pointer across the screen to an icon, only to move back again to perform the operation. I think this probably applies to every application, not just 3d.