Yup, that's pretty much the nature of crowd-sourcing. Sure, there'll be a certain segment that will remain dedicated to the project/task, but a lot of others will fall away when the novelty wears off or it's perceived as becoming too much work.

You're still only ever using one of them at a time.

Your context shift involves moving your eyes from one display to the other, and possibly moving the mouse and clicking a window on the other display to activate it.

My context switch, on the other hand, is to hit Win+M, then drop the mouse down to the taskbar and pull up the window I wanted to switch to. It's a bit more trouble than yours, but not excessively so.

Slim apps that I want to glance at every now and then get slid to one side or the other, as do most of the desktop icons, so that the window I'm using doesn't obscure them. I almost never maximize the window unless I'm watching a movie or slideshow in fullscreen. The only time I have more than one non-minimized window is when I'm using both of them, and then they are generally arranged so that they mostly overlap, but there is enough "active" window area / taskbar that I can click from one to the other or drag-and-drop between the two of them. E.g. when dropping files into an Explorer window, it will usually be slid far to the left, partly off the physical display, with the files frame showing on the far left of my display so that I can drag things onto it.

And when you don't buy what they are offering they'll run to their government lackeys crying "Our sales are dropping! It must be those awful Internet Pirates! Please pass this new law which will give us massively increased powers of control over regular users' lives or we might just stop producing such fine works as Pointless Sequel 7 or Brainless Action Movie 12.

that a request for materials to educate is met with the usual array of "Swtich to x OS", "Lock down the system", and "Deal with it". I'm sure somewhere out there is the answer to this man's question of attempting to improve the basic computer literacy of his family, but it's apparently not on Slashdot.

This is Montgomery County, Maryland, we're talking about -- tax-cut/reduce-government fanatics NEVER come into power here.

The shoppers also make Rockville Pike a particularly frustrating road to travel on weekends this time of year. Given that the control system will not be repaired until at least the middle of next week, this weekend is probably going to make for some horrendous driving in that area.

Yeah, yeah, the big nasty government has been waiting for the day when it could piss you off by putting information you don't want on your fruit. They just couldn't find a way to put that information there until now.

We were counting on them never hearing of adhesive labels, but now they have lasers! Damn you to hell, lasers!

While I don't necessarily disagree with your conclusions - I will say from experience that you certainly can feel real effects of an MRI without any special metal in you. If you move your head through the bore of a system you will very likely get very dizzy pretty fast. They tell me its from the iron in your inner ear being affected.by the strong field. And it affects some more than others.

Maybe its time we stop using SSL and just use GNUPG Auth. Let the user generate their own key and be responsible for their own security, or lets just use smart card readers. We make impossible to secure our machines due to our institutional insecurity. This way we can use it as an excuse to blame terrorists and get the feds involved.

Why aren't smart cards the norm? Why are we using passwords at all?

Burning the skin of a grapefruit with a laser may be ok, but here are some questions:

1) With the laser burns, it may be possible to cover up blemishes or signs of mold or rot on the skin of a fruit.

2) What happens with apples, potatoes, carrots, pears, and other fruits and vegetables where its good to eat the skin? I don't want some artificial chemical imprinted into the skins that I would normally eat.

I always know a label is there, I know to take it off. For fruits and vegetables with skins that are supposed to removed, the label is not a problem because I peel off the skin.

So this technology does not really solve anything, and it becomes an inconvenience.