The worst is the lack of tactile inputs on the console because everyone wants to look 'futuristic!'. You can't just reach over and turn the radio off because you can't find the knob w/o looking. It's dangerous, and stupid. Put the physical dials back.

I don't know what country (or maybe I should say state) you live in. I haven't seen any sign of the republicans being the ones to listen to people

Here in Boston, we have: winter and road-construction as our two seasons.

There have been several serious attempts to figure this out. Most notably at CMU. For more information read, "Unlocking the Clubhouse"

Are you female? If you are not, then how do you know they aren't interested? If it's because they all say they do, have you asked them why? Do they even know why? Do you know why you do like to program?

I am a female programmer. I have been programming heavily for 14 years, starting with C during my senior year in high school (with some off and on summer camps and after school programs through grade school and middle school). I love programming. I love making a computer do what I want. I love making things.

I also love to sew for the same reason.

There are lots of reasons to love programming. Some of them are the same reasons why women like some of the other hobbies they currently enjoy. So what's different here?

As an aside, I avoided those programs for attracting women like the plague. I really hated them.

My husband and I played a lot of turn-based strategy games.

Specifically, we played Heroes of Might and Magic II and III. (available on gog.com) There isn't much storytelling here, but there's collaboration and exploration. I liked turn-based strategy games for long distance because there was no time pressure so we could be chatting about anything during the game - game related or not.

We also spent a lot of time playing Diablo II. If you want to go modern here, you could play Diablo III or Torchlight II. They're quicker, IMHO, than your average MMO.

I've seen my friend's horses try to unlock the stall doors after the human locks the stall door, with disturbing accuracy. This doesn't seem unusual to me.

I read that to specifically refer to capacitive screens that support touching the screen, as opposed to resistive/wacom tablets (The original TabletPC) that supported hi-res drawing/pen interactions as well.

If I have a touch screen anyway (I have a surface pro for the sketching on the wacom), then it's fun to play games with my husband on it - like mahjong. But that's all it is - a bit of amusement. I would never buy a laptop that had a capacitive screen - that's not a good interactive model for a laptop unless you're playing a game where you only need one or two fingers. The mouse is much quicker and more accurate than any touch screen interface I've seen. I love my resistive screen, but that's because I like to be able to draw wherever/whenever.

If you get this, you better hope you don't want to upgrade the graphics card - there are no PCI-e slots for independent graphics cards. What you see is what you get.

I work primarily in computer graphics. My close friends/family mostly work in video games and simulators. I find that I need to understand advanced math a fair amount - Linear Algebra, Discreet Math, Graph Theory. My friends in simulators or the graphics of core games end up working on some pretty snazzy math problems as well. My family member that works in casual games only uses Trigonometry.

StarCraft II has an editor and many of these moddable games have a scripting language for events.

Blender allows you to write mods to it in Python - you can make movies or other fun final products.

I love NoScript but I find it causes too much confusion for people using my computer. Some email services don't handle being loaded through NoScript well (which I would say is a sign of a badly written email page people shouldn't be using but I can't dictate what email services my friends use...)

There are perfectly valid reasons to keep Windows around, such as playing video games. (Yes I know, you can play through Wine, but I prefer not to). Dual booting to Linux for guests, however, seems perfectly reasonable.

I grew up in Concord, MA and would have loved to ban tourists in the fall. People out leaf-peeping in the fall near Old North Bridge... sometimes in the street with their cameras to get just the right angle.

As much as it would be fun to ban 'things I don't approve of' there are some real safety hazards. Texters on sidewalks often end up in crosswalks and expect cars to be looking because they can't be bothered (yes, pedestrians have the right of way... except when there's a walk light that they didn't check). Sometimes they're at the top of the escalator causing a pile up on said escalator.

There are also common courtesy items that go out the door more and more as people get more self absorbed in their devices. People stopping randomly to check their texts in the middle of a busy sidewalk, during rush hour, rather than taking just a moment to make sure they aren't going to cause a sudden pile up of people who thought said person was going to continue to... walk forward. It really doesn't take long to just do a quick check on the flow of traffic and make sure you're clear before doing something unpredictable.

Yes. A relative of mine works for a company that wanted to do a racing sim and they eventually gave up because of the nightmare that was trying to get permission to use real cars like Porsche or Corvette.