That's a fair question. I use Openbox with XFCE because you can customize keybindings for any kind of window manipulation you like - shoving windows to the left and right border, resizing, vertical maximizing, flipping between workspaces...

It's a nice middle-of-the-road solution for people who are sick and tired of fiddling with windows with the mouse but aren't ready to go whole hog with a tiling WM or setting up a desktop with panels, etc. from scratch.

The opposite-hand-of-the-mouse reason makes sense. But since I'm going to type with two hands anyway to search for something, it still seems faster to hit slash than a Ctrl+F stretch.

Anyway, as someone said, it's all about muscle memory we've developed. When I bang the slash key and nothing happens, that's immediate negative feedback when I'm using Chrome.

Do any of them let you map forward-slash to searching within the page?

I don't have a smartphone yet, but I know the same thing will happen to me. In fact, that's the universal testimony: "I thought I didn't need it and now I can't live without it."

Have you ever thought about why? It's because this is the closest we've come to having our brains plugged directly into the intertubes 24/7. Information is a powerful drug. Getting used to having a smartphone changes YOU, even if only a little. Maybe it's ultimately for the good, but people should carefully weigh this before jumping on. I say if it helps you interact with the real world better and be more efficient in it, good. If it just makes you an even-more-distracted, angry-birds-playing information junkie, then not good.

I've used xfce since forever, sometimes trying more 'leet' window managers but I could never get proficient enough to do everything I wanted with them. Recently I replaced xfce's built-in window manager with openbox and I couldn't be happier. It's easy to define all the shortcut keys you want for flipping windows around, and I keep the advantage of xfce's panel, session management, etc. It was a big productivity boost for a minimal investment.

Yes, human creativity is still providing us with clever new ways to describe the act of defecation. As for me, I always take my Kindle to the bathroom.

That's amazing! I'm still teaching my 3-year-old how to self-wipe.

Amen. The productivity-killing chiclet keyboard disease is spreading from Apple and infecting laptops and even desktop keyboards everywhere. Does nobody realize there was a *reason* key caps have been concave for the past, oh, 100 years? As you said, if they don't do any real work, they don't notice.

"My story begins in nineteen-dickety-two. We had to say dickety because the Kaiser had stolen our word twenty. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickety-six miles."
--Abe Simpson

Just substitute "Steve Jobs" for "the Kaiser" and "pod" for "twenty", and there you go! History repeats itself.

Using DRM to create artificial scarcity for digital media can never be more than a stopgap solution.

As for the question "How will authors get paid" -- have you considered that just maybe the world might be a better place if *fewer* people were able to make a living by writing?

If you produce something that's not a good or service that tangibly contributes to human welfare, it should be harder to earn money from it. This is already the case to some extent.

I'm not saying that writing and arts and other intangibles cannot contribute to human welfare--on the contrary, they can do so in ways that ordinary goods and services cannot. What I AM saying is that 90%+ of books and CDs are steaming piles of manure written to make a buck and contribute absolutely nothing. Maybe artificial scarcity of media has made it too easy to get paid for producing something of zero worth.

If someone has a strong enough passion for writing/creating, they will create no matter what. Some of those will be recognized and compensated in their lifetimes, and others will not. Of course, it's not "fair". But is it less fair than the way the big publishers, who rely absolutely on scarcity, treat content creators now?

I still feel the quality of discourse in society would greatly improve if the only people who were writers were people who were at least willing to be poor for it.

Bah-weep-Graaaaagnah wheep ni ni bong! (Ref)

Can't believe no one posted that one yet.