Just a nit, but clarinet is more like chording input -- multiple fingers change position at once. I assume that any sort of chording keyboard that recognizes particular combinations as entire words is illegal for typing competitions. Basic certification as a stenotype operator requires that you be able to do on the order of 180 words per minute. There's considerable dispute about the world record for stenotypes, but it's clearly in the 350-375 words per minute range, much higher than the record for character-at-a-time typists.

How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises? It's like they took all the money they saved by leveraging their synergies and went looking for ways to piss it away?

Not stupidity, perhaps, but rather difficulties with making the mental transition from "we're a start-up and everything depends on the share price increasing by leaps and bounds every year" to "we're a mature company." The only way to drive the share price is by growing revenues, hence the need to buy companies with existing products and customer bases. And to pump money into projects where there's demonstrated potential for high revenues (eg, MS could see how much money there was in game consoles, if only they could take the market share away from Sony and Nintendo). And God forbid that we share the profits with the shareholders by consistently paying a reasonable dividend -- we don't share profits, they'll have to make their money off the capital gains.

It's not free, but a student license isn't much more than the high-end calculators (at least at local bookstore prices) and it will do just about anything you can imagine needing up through at least calculus. Even the mobile or browser front ends that use a Wolfram server are damned good, so long as you have network connectivity.

It will make a cleaner signal path.

This is related to what I was thinking. At some speed on the external interconnect, things like parasitic capacitance have to become a factor. Some individual parts of the overall capacitance budget are approaching the single pF range; given a pin and socket, it may not be possible to meet that.

Also the Trexa platform.

Or take ebook readers (certainly personal devices): that book you just downloaded to your Kindle is DRMed and stuck there!

TTBOMK, all of the DRM schemes in common use for e-books have been broken. Of course, you have to get the files onto a normal sort of PC in order to decrypt them.

I work for a semiconductor company and we also stopped doing business with Apple... that they constantly break contracts in order to demand lower prices. We were losing money on every part sold to Apple.

With what results? Have you found other customers who will buy comparable amounts (in aggregate) and pay higher prices? Or did your company's product volume simply decrease?

Given the moon's 28.5 day rotation, wouldn't a single antenna on the far side of the moon be blocked from any particular deep-space target for significant periods of time? On the order of two weeks out of every month? So you'd need at least a couple of these in order to avoid the problem.

Or state the full value of the contents and be prepared to pay higher shipping rates. Standard contracts, at least for shipping domestically in the US, limit the shippers' liability to a few dollars per pound.

Good story about Murphy's Law. Many years ago I was shipping a complete lab from Georgia to New Jersey. Everything in custom crates, properly secured and padded. Somewhere in Virginia a tank truck making deliveries to gas stations hit the truck carrying my stuff, and everything got burned to a crisp. Had to pay well beyond standard shipping rates because I declared the full value of the gear, but the shipping company cut me the check for the stated value in a day or two.

Isn't it astounding how many of the "problems" involving health care financing that show up at Slashdot would be solved with single-payer, or regulation of medical insurance companies so that the system is functionally single-payer? And that 33 of 34 OECD countries have figured that out? And just coincidentally, that those 33 all have substantially lower spending for similar (and in several cases superior) health outcomes than the US?

Not to mention that a single-payer system that brought health-care spending into line with the rest of the world would free up substantial amounts to support research in areas such as fusion, space, etc?

Slackware on Floppies (Oh so many floppies)

Manchester Computer Center Interim Linux, on remarkably few floppies.

but the point of most "intro to computers" courses at this point is to prepare people to use basic productivity software to complete the rest of their coursework.

This. If you have to write, the profs will expect real Word files (and while things have improved, .doc files exported from Libre Office or other word processors still manage to screw up the formatting sometimes). If you have to submit supporting calculations, the profs will expect real Excel files (possibly including VBA macros that they provide). If you have to do presentations, the profs will expect real Powerpoint files. I'm somewhat surprised that there's no way to test out, but the real purpose of the class is to try to make sure that everyone has some basic competency with the tools that are required by the school.

There appear to be a couple of extraneous decimal points in the post. If there's someplace that I can buy hard disks for 0.23 cents per gigabyte (a bit over $1.00 for a 500-gig drive), I haven't seen it.

You do raise the (to me) interesting question of whether or not this could have been made on a multi-axis CNC milling machine. I'm not sure how much of the interior of an object contemporary machines can remove through openings from the outside.

Additive processes can work stainless steel and titanium with relatively little loss in overall strength compared to castings, so there's little question that 3D printing can make teeth or a beak that are strong enough. Metal-based printing is, as I understand it, much more expensive to do than polymer printing.