That would be Vernor Vinge's science fiction short story ``Long Shot'':

http://books.google.com/books?...

Then, tell me you don't want your kids vaccinated.

Jet engine on motorcycle --- MarineTurbine 2000: http://www.marineturbine.com/d...

Agree, the OP would be better served by a Surface or similar device --- my problem w/ the most recent crop of them (I need to replace my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121):

  - display not daylight viewable --- no one seems to use a transflective LCD aside from some ruggedized units intended for military/police use
  - moving away from Wacom stylus technology --- the Surface 3 uses an N-Trig digitizer, and I've had my fill of AAAA batteries and weird driver support issues

You forgot to insert ``3-axis'' before CNC mills at the beginning of your comment.

A 5-axis machine can make pretty much anything which the tooling is appropriate for, and they're getting much more affordable: http://www.pocketnc.com/produc...

Ted Nelson wanted to do that (bill content reader and pay content creator) w/ Xanadu --- well worth reading up on.

Does anyone make one?

I still haven't found a replacement for my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 (I use it as a map-reader when travelling, and to control my Shapeoko (hobby-level CNC mill) when I'm using it on my back porch) --- the transflective display seems the best option, but no one seems to be making units w/ it outside of ruggedized units for the police and military (which are heavier than I'd prefer).

hearing ``click'' when you want to hear ``bang''.

How many instances will there be of a firearm refusing to fire and thus endangering the life of the user?

How many of those 4,000 children had firearms safety training?

Given that shooting is the only academic sport which has _never_ had an injury in the U.S., why not mandate that it be a part of the curriculum, and that all children receive firearms safety education appropriate to their age each year?

It's just like requiring backup cameras on cars --- it might prevent a handful of injuries statistically (and 4,000 incidents for over 300,000,000 firearms is rather a small handful, no?) --- but it will increase the expense for everyone.

Have fun monetizing your project w/o being able to bill U.S. clients.

The problem is, Adobe has bought up so much of the industry that they have a huge warchest of patents.

They also aren't terribly nice about sharing information to competitors --- look at how poorly FreeHand handled .pdfs for one example --- the devs complained that Adobe was _not_ forthcoming about aspects of the format which were needed to improve it.

It's nice that there are alternatives for some of the apps, but things don't look so good for other apps:

  - InDesign --- Quark still hasn't caught back up, and Scribus is painful to use, w/ bizarre feature limitations --- I use LyX and xelatex (and moving to lualatex) instead, but not many people are willing to do that
  - Illustrator --- I'd rather have FreeHand, but still find Illustrator more capable than Corel Draw and Inkscape
  - PhotoShop --- fortunately, these are just pixel files, so anything will work, but the blunt truth is, if one is billing by the hour, you're probably leaving money on the table if you're not using PhotoShop

&c.

The sad thing is, I'm pretty sure that Adobe has had this in the works for over a decade now --- it's pretty obvious that for each application they identified a couple of killer features and set them aside to not be implemented for any version w/ perpetual licensing, implementing them only after the move to pay-as-you-go.

It also makes the ``release'' of CS2 when the activation servers were taken off-line look like an effort to take the wind out of the sails of competing products, incl. free and opensource ones.

The first CD I ever bought was Bob Dylan's _Real Live_ back in 1984 --- still plays fine.

My favourite take on lines of code as a metric is from the early days of the Macintosh:

http://www.folklore.org/StoryV...

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a form that each engineer was required to submit every Friday, which included a field for the number of lines of code that were written that week.

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000.

I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied.

Contemporary industrial farming practices consume (via combustion or conversion into fertilizer) 10 calories of petro-chemical energy for every 1 calorie of food energy produced.

Why don't they require that ID be presented when showing up for the game, and that it match a name used to make the reservation?