Text selection/copy/paste is unpleasant, but then, the TI doesn't even have text selection.

A Raspberry Pi, a $70 monitor, a mouse, and a keyboard. Bam. Ten thousand times better than a TI, for the same price.

Seriously... I wrote a few simple programs on my TI-83, and I was one of maybe three people in my year who did. The difficulty didn't make it more compelling, it made it a huge waste of time. Digging through multi-level menus to find a min function instead of typing the min function on a real keyboard is a waste of time. I made a cube rotate slowly, then went home to play with cellular automata in Metal Basic, where I could write ten lines of code in the amount of time it took me to find the 'for' function on my TI. I think it was like a three-key combination to type quotation marks. It's agonizing just to remember it.

You know what they SHOULD do to get kids into programming? Bring HyperCard the fuck back. It's a simple interface, intuitive structure, easy English-like syntax... My nephews are being taught with Scratch, and they find its limitations unbearable. HyperCard is a playground for the mind. We should launch a new petition now that Jobs is gone.

Occupy Wall Street was the Brownian Ratchet of political movements.

Jobs was fully on-board with the walled garden. Even the Mac App Sore, the nail in the coffin, was announced a year before he retired.

This all seems to assume that a birth rate below replacement ends inevitably with extinction, which is stupid, nonsensical gibbledypoop. The fact that we aren't currently keeping up doesn't mean we wouldn't pick up the pace if the planet started to get a little sparse. There are seven billion people, and I see nothing wrong with having a few less, as long as we're doing everything we can to keep the current batch alive. Letting people die is unethical, but not cranking out new ones isn't even on the scale.

This is you: http://www.xkcd.com/605/

"Do you want to see my papers?"
"No need, sir."
"But, I could be anyone!"
"No, you couldn't, sir."

Fookin' Steam. If I buy a modern game on release day, it takes a day and a half to download on my crappy connection. And it's only going to get worse.

That's more like the plot of The Last Sarfight, where the game operates as a talent search, but the players do no useful work while playing. I would suggest, as an alternative, Toys (with Robin Williams), in which the villain plan to fill arcades with machines that are secretly relaying video from (and control signals to) attack drones overseas, putting the natural killing skills of gamers to use without risking their lives or their mental well being (through the tsss of danger, or the stress of killing).

It's most compelling feature is that I can't install anything else on the Pi.

Or needs to play Pokemon Heart Gold online.

Not to mention our noted inability to call anything torture. I'm pretty sure the government's official stance is that water boarding is "enhanced interrogation," not torture. We "won't do it," because something-something-hope-city-on-a-hill... But we -could- do it, and we could do it in secret, and if anyone told the American people, they'd have to flee to Russia to avoid the same.

Long-term trending increases in third-party votes, especially for parties with narrow and identifiable issues, can alert the major parties to changes in public thinking, even if the third-party candidates aren't elected. Voting for a major party tells one party to stay the course, and the second party to be more like the first party. That's the last thing we need.

I only call fallOffCliff() after my walkingOnSolidGround Boolean becomes true after lazy evaluation.

If the federal government wanted to use drones for science and fire control, they shouldn't have broken trust with the American people vigorously and repeatedly, to the point that no one believes anything they say about their own motives or operations. I mentally append "and spying" to every described use they offer. "On intermodal" is a childish straw man.