You need to change your basic premise: There is no possible way to prove that software is bug free. The best you can do is to test a piece of software and then fix the problems that you find. Software verification and validation are tough problems.

Touchscreens could just become the single biggest public safety hazard of the 21st century. The user instructions on all the ones I have read (including popular ones such as the iPad) expressly forbid cleaning them with any sort of liquid other than water.

People have dirty hands. Sometimes very dirty hands. I rather doubt that a little water on a lint-free rag is going to remove the huge smudgy colonies of bacteria and other things that collect on them.

There are all sorts of nice trackballs out there now. This wiki page from my favorite input device website might be of some interest: http://geekhack.org/showwiki.php?title=Island:10242

The CST LaserTRAC Trackball looks especially promising. You could replace the provided ball will a pool ball or a perfect sphere of any material, so long as it was the same size. This means you could try out heavier trackballs.

Apart from the users of 3D CAD packages like SolidEdge, most people have no knowledge of the nice 6-axis-of-rotation 3D input devices out there. 3Dconnexion jumps to mind as a good manufacturer, and they even have new drivers to open up the use to non-CAD users.

Every six months or so, I trawl the Internet looking for any new heads-up displays which add their signal to the one your eyes are already receiving instead of blocking out the world altogether and replacing it with some sort of display.

Are there any augmented reality HUDs out there? I've yet to see any good ones that you could walk around outside with while managing not to be mugged or hit by a bus.

If anyone ever commercializes the Chordite one-handed mobile keyboard, please wake me. It has been a hobbyist project for far too long.

Whether you prefer buckling springs in IBM Model M keyboards, ALPS keyswitches on a DELL AT101/AT102, or Cherry Blue keyswitches on any one of the tens of models out there, this thread is for you.

> In OS X, I can [...] use a variety of Finder replacements.
The Finder still has horrid usability problems, but I guess that I'm the only Mac user who needs to manipulate files on his disk drives, so no one else notices.
Care to list all the non-sucky Finder replacements out there? I've yet to find one.

If "Splice" is an indication of the type of movie treatment we can expect for Neuromancer, then we should all be very very afraid.

Apparently, movie ratings are currently suffering from score inflation. I see lots of healthy B-grade scores hovering with an average of 7/10 for Splice.

Based solely on this thread, I just watched Splice. It wasn't worth it. I am sure there are worse movies on earth, but this one has nothing redeeming to it. It's a 1/10 at best. The only thing that impressed me about it is that someone bothered to finish and release it to the public.

William Gibson continues to write fantastic novels. I'm not sure they can be called Science Fiction anymore, but they are wonderful nonetheless.

Max Headroom (the TV show on ABC in America) proves that cyberpunk can be done well on the screen. There's no reason why Neuromancer is necessarily doomed.
Personally, I'd be delighted if it was a huge flop for general audiences but a huge hit for those plugged into the book.

Then again, I'm a huge fan. I disliked the BBC radio play for Neuromancer because even if the same things happened that were in the book, they happened for different reasons in the play. That alone ruined it for me, and the BBC was attempting a faithful copy.

Agreed. Neuromancer really rewards the reader on the third reading. Then you know the lingo, you know the pacing, you know the plot, and you can enjoy it all.

I used to learn new languages by buying the local translation of Neuromancer. Since I already knew the text inside out and backwards in English, I could focus on the words and structures of the foreign language that I was learning. Of course, you end up speaking like Case or Molly. That may not work to your advantage.

The movie will bear no resemblance to my mind's rendition of Neuromancer, and I will be profoundly disappointed. I will probably watch and rewatch this movie a few times, regardless.

So will videos on Google Video need to be re-encoded to play on YouTube?

A lot of the content on Google Video is already postage-stamp sized and blurry. A further encoding could make them unviewable but all but the most dedicated fans.