You bring up a very good point, and that is console sessions. Swype convinced me to drop the hardware keyboard (I stopped using the physical keyboard on my OG Droid almost immediately after discovering Swype.) But Swype is *not* particularly good for console use (especially the beta version a few years ago that insisted on capitilizing the 'I' in exIt)
On the other hand, the Hacker's Keyboard gives me access to contol keys, alt keys, and so on, more than the old hardware keyboard ever did. And I can switch between keyboards trivially. Hacker's Keyboard if I'm using ssh, Swype for everything else.

My first smartphone was the OG Droid, and one reason I went for it was that it had a hardware keyboard.

Then I found the Swype beta, and the hardware keyboard was never used again.

That's been my experience as well. Base install of Mint might take 15 or 20 minutes, futzing around to get just the desktop setup I want maybe an hour or two. Cloning the result to different hardware is no problem under Linux, but has always been a problem under Windows.

When I create a base Windows machine to clone, now *that's* a time sink.

Author Eric Flint makes the argument that it takes practice to get good at anything, including writing. If we want good quality creative work (books, music, etc.) then we have to create an environment where authors and musicians and other creative types can actually make a living while creating.

If they can't, it doesn't mean we won't have books or music, but it does mean we won't have *good* books or music. Plenty of "idiots who want to try" can and will step up to publish albums or books, but Sturgeon's Law will have to be revised to say "99.9% of everything is crap."

When I was a poor college student driving a VW bug I had a great manual on everything to do with working on VWs. A hippie classic.

The author thought that everyone should be driving a VW bus, "spread-eagled across the front like an Aztec sacrifice." He figured that would bring the accident rate down sharply.

About 40 years ago (when I was a college student) I was pulled over in Michigan while on a freeway.

The cop had three beefs with me:
1) I was exceeding the speed limit.
2) I was in the left lane traveling slower than the flow of traffic and he wanted me to move right.
3) I had out of state plates.

Number three was the one he was most upset about. He didn't write me up for any of them, but gave me quite a talking to.

*All* telecom companies are evil.

But T-Mobile is the least evil available in the US.

AT&T, on the other hand, *define* evil.

Thanks. Are we sure that the truecryptcheck site has clean checksums?

But it does appear to be unavailable if you don't already have a copy. Source is gone as well.

I'm not sure if everyone else in this thread watched the same hearing I did.

I don't know what any of the voted for, since I haven't seen the details of the proposals.

But I know what they said. The Democrats argued in favor of Net Neutrality. Not the label of Net Neutrality, but the substance. The Republicans argued against the substance of Net Neutrality.

So if you try to convince me that the Democrats might actually vote for something contrary to what they said, I'll concede the point. Same with the Republicans.

But I'm a bit skeptical of the notion that both voted for the opposite of what they said, in effect each voting for their opponents' stated position.

Actually, it is. But even inside the center console, I feel safer with the low profile flash drive. The slot is on a ledge about halfway up the front of the compartment, so it's reasonably well protected, but I could still imagine dropping something on it or catching it as I put something in there.

Are there still cars with built in storage?

Ford included a whopping 10GB hard disk in their fanciest tech package 5 years ago. You can't get that now. Instead you get a USB port in the center console.

I've got a 64G low profile thumb drive plugged in with most of my music collection. Standard MP3s, no DRM issues. There are *other* issues -- the system has only so many slots to hold metadata, so if I add too many songs it will freak out and re-index the USB each time I start the car. But as long as I don't exceed some limit it behaves just fine.

For my purposes anyway, no storage and USB is far superior to built-in storage.

You might be underestimating the cost of a PC. I bought my first PC in 1982 and it came out to almost exactly $3000. That *was* upgraded a bit -- it had *two* floppy drives and they were double sided. *And* I upgraded the memory to 256K, and got a CGA card and an amber monitor.

I was still using punch cards in school (FORTRAN and PASCAL) as of 1978, but turnaround was much faster than overnight. It seldom took more than two or three hours to run my several hundred millisecond program.

My bad. Flashblock doesn't help. No luck blocking it with the ad blocker either....

It's both. Copyright is for authors. Patents are for inventors.

Congress later (1909) broadened the meaning of what an author is, so now copyright covers more than just text. Patents are still for inventors.

Whether either actually works to promote progress is another discussion, but it was clearly the intent of the framers.