No. I have to take one finger out of typing position. And being as the QWERTY keyboard only puts a few keys within reach of my index fingers - and not all of the most used ones - it is a far lesser drawback than taking my whole hand away to use the touchpad with decent accuracy.

But go ahead and tell us how awesome your touchpad is. I can't force you to acknowledge reality if you choose otherwise.

I have never had a problem with my trackpoint impeding my productivity. I have frequently found myself cursing that touchpads on other peoples' laptops. The Trackpoint allows me to move my cursor exactly as far as I want, without taking my fingers off the keyboard. No touchpad has ever been able to legitimately make that claim.

It seems that in the modern era of flight, with high tech radio and navigation equipment, and modern weather forecasting, that solo flight isn't quite the feat it used to be. Not to say that this is easy, but it doesn't seem like it is the risky endeavour it used to be, either.

The gay marriage matter was going to go that way sooner or later regardless. Look at younger voters of any party in the US (after all the overwhelming majority of slashdot readers are in the US) and you'll find increasing support for gay marriage even amongst those young voters who vote republican. I don't have the time to look through 1000+ comments in that article to see how many are viewing the matter through each possible prism but there is also a very heavy conservative-libertarian bend here, who will often be saying "let them do whatever as long as it doesn't increase my taxes" - and gay marriage certainly doesn't increase anyone's taxes.

The key part of that acronym is the letter A - for anthropogenic. There are occasionally posts here on climate change, but very exceptionally rarely do we see any that tie it directly to human activity. Furthermore if we look at the comment sections in any of those articles - anthropogenic or not - we see the true voice of slashdot readers bends heavily to the right.

And finally, notice that at least once a week we see an anti-Obama - or generally anti-democrat - article on the front page here. How often do we see an anti-GOP article? Almost never. And I challenge you to show me an article that ever made the front page that dared to challenge Ron Paul on anything, ever.

I'm curious to know what subject you think that would be. Certainly not politics, science, economics, constitutional liberty, crime, taxes, religion, birth control, or education.

You can opt to not use a cell phone. There are other communication options. Civilization got along just fine for thousands of years without them, and will continue to go on without them.

Your own link ends with the important bit:

Did you not bother reading to the bottom of the page?

How about this link, which is at the end of the article that is here on slashdot? It plainly states

...

...

It would appear the weak troll is you, who couldn't bother to follow the link that slashdot provided. The surprise here though is that slashdot is actually countering - rather than propagating - something from drudge report. The latter is far more the standard m.o. around here, especially when samzenpus is involved.

Indeed, touchpads suck - tremendously. Even the best of them have unintended problems. But you don't have to live in a touchpad-or-mouse world. ThinkPads still have trackpoint, and there are a few business-class laptops from other vendors (Dell and HP, I believe) that also have them available.

Sounds rightfully 80s to me. Really, though, the most important line - at least, if it is true - comes later in the article:

It is generally counter to the conservative majority narrative here on slashdot to dare to disprove a drudge report myth. And considering the conservative FUD that samzenpus has posted to the front page in the past, this is highly out of character for him to point out that the "Obamaphone" program is neither government sponsored nor was it started under Obama.

Samzenpus, are you OK? Were you recently hit in the head or something?

The moon has no atmosphere.

I remember, almost thirty years ago, running across a book with that title. It was the story of a girl (about fourteen, I think) whose family relocated to a lunar colony because her father got a good job up there. The title is a bit of a play on words, of course, but both meanings were appropriate and it wasn't a bad book.

A robot can only do what it's designed to do. It can only use the tools or probes you built into it unless you've added to the cost, weight and complexity of the device by giving it the ability to reconfigure itself, and even then, there are a limited number of configurations it can use. A human, with a tool kit can swap things around however needed, limited only by what's available and can stop in the middle of an experiment if needed to record some unexpected phenomenon. You can't do things like that with a robot because by the time the controllers back here see what's happening, it's too late.

What do we get from sending a meat robot to mars, other than the sort of daredevil glory?

We get something on the scene that's able to adapt to the situation, take advantage of the unexpected and do things on its own initiative. I don't know about you, but I find the Risk well worth the potential benefits.

You said what she doesn't want to do, but gave no indication of what she wants to do. There may be a not-terribly-difficult way to get from programming to what she wants to do, but without knowing what that is it is impossible to say.