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Comment It will empower the people who own/direct it (Score 1) 417

the people who are paying for the development and paying the power bills. Everyone else will be viewed as just a resource to be exploited.

Fictional take on this --- Marshall Brain's novella _Manna_ --- available free on-line: http://marshallbrain.com/manna...

The first half seems all-too-likely, the second, likely impossible.

Comment I'd like to buy one (Score 1) 101

I've been a big believer in pen computing since reading Niven & Pournelle's _The Mote in God's Eye_ and using a Koala Pad graphics tablet attached to a Commodore 64 in high school.

Reasons I prefer tablets w/ a stylus:

  - drawing
  - note-taking
  - annotation
  - more efficient usage of some programs, esp. those which can be configured w/ pie menus or menu structures which can become gestural (Punch in Altsys Virtuoso was a gesture for me on my Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet attached to my NeXT Cube)
  - lighter weight / smaller --- currently trying to ``upgrade'' to a ThinkPad x61 Tablet (convertible) from a Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 slate and the former won't fit in my old laptop bag.

Almost bought an Asus Vivotab Note 8, and would've bought the Microsoft Surface 2 from sales this past weekend, but didn't. Concerns I had:

  - poor build quality for the Asus --- there's a DIY fix posted for the digitizer ceasing to work
  - standard LCD, not daylight viewable
  - the Surface 2 which was on sale was the RT model, so can't run Macromedia Freehand --- the Pro 2 was out-of-stock

I'd be sleeping on the couch tonight if someone would make a pen slate which:

  - ran either Mac OS X or Windows --- or if there was a drawing program for Android as nice as Macromedia Freehand
  - was a pen slate w/ a Wacom digitizer
  - had a daylight-viewable display (transflective LCD or better) --- I use my machine as a map reader when traveling and to control my CNC mill on the back porch
  - had a resolution higher than 1024 x 768 and was not much larger than a letter-sized notepad

Comment Re:PDF? PDF??? (Score 1) 62

PDF was open enough from the beginning to have its specification available in print from the days of Acrobat 1.0: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

Here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pd...

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/con... --- for some reason they don't have the first edition available (not that it's all that useful these days).

Comment Re:Memory mapping? (Score 3, Funny) 200

More importantly, the Bible tells those who believe in it that nothing is unknowable: Genesis 11:6

>The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language
>they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do
>will be impossible for them.

So it's blasphemous for Christians (or Jews or Muslims) to say that humanity can't understand such things (or anything).

Comment Re:Beach (Score 1) 264

The problem is, you can't have a shoreline which is all cove --- look at North Carolina's Outer Banks --- Waves/Rodanthe/Salvo lose sand, while it builds up at the tail end down past Hatteras.

Comment Re:They tried to raise prices 20% unnanounced (Score 1) 392

Getting over-the-air TV isn't as easy as it used/ought to be.

When all the stations went digital they also reduced their transmission power, so I went from being able to receive in my basement to getting no signal for the local PBS affiliate.

Had to run a cable from the basement to the living room and build a special-purpose digital TV antenna in order to be able to receive a signal again: http://cachefly.oreilly.com/ma...

(I'm pretty sure PBS had the plans originally, but I can't find the link)

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