Sales of a touch-only device vs a device that demands a pointer device for a bunch of stuff is not evidence?
Or how fast iPad sales exceeded the total sales of all windows-based "general purpose" tablets over about 10 years in only a few months?
Or sales of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1, which comes with a stylus, but doesn't require it's use, Samsung claims to have shipped 10 million over 9 months [likely actually sold less than half that].

Yet, you have no evidence of your assertion other than "I like using one".

Is a stylus useful for interacting with a tablet in certain specific use cases? Yes.
Do people want to use them as a primary input method? No.

I've never been in an interview where they asked for memorized framework and library facilities. As a web developer, I get questions about data normalization, graph theory, and complicated SQL JOINs.

"I am not a man, I am a free number!"

Well the Conservatives are trying to fix things with the "Fair Elections Act", a law so bad for Canada that even the Conservative Senators are against it.

Mostly like, but:

"2: Similar to Article 9 of the Mexican Constitution: Only US citizens can influence the politics of the nation."

Hmm, define "influence"? For example, Mexico's Article 2 forbids slavery. Would I, as an Australian citizen, be allowed to argue on American-hosted Slashdot that Americans should change the 13th Amendment to do the same? Would I be allowed to add my name to an American-hosted petition on that subject? Or would I subsequently have to worry about being arrested should I ever step foot on American soil?

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" Not any more, you're not!

...[fear computers would] use the power of tagging to harass specific organizations based on political leanings. What absurd notions those people of ancient times had!

To confuse computers with Democrats, how silly ;-)

Alex 7000 from the Bionic Woman. Hilarious. And what about Cylons?

Are you quite certain that that was the intent of the authors, and not a viable alternative to a standing army, or some other reason? The whole point of the Constitution with the establishment of elected representation and restrictions on the powers of the federal government was to have a functional government from which the populace would not need to defend itself. Were they expecting that one amendment to deter a government which ignored the rest of the text?

Yah totally. We was still in amazement of the printing press! Now computers!

And yet, everybody screams about America that emits only 15%, ignores Europe that emits about 16% (and climbing), and China at over 1/3 of all CO2.

That might be the case if all these security annoyances keep growing: it will be cheaper to do shit by hand than to clean up automation-assisted messes.

And yet, that is a joke. China emits more than 1/3 of the CO2 emissions in the world today. America is below 15%. And Europe-OECD is actually ABOVE America. The problem is, that IPCC normalizes in bizarre fashions. The idea that CO2 emissions are compared in a national way is a joke. Germany's emission are climbing fast and yet, total emissions are below America. Many nations in Europe are fairly low, and yet, in terms of CO2 / $GDP, they are monster high.

Hard to translate facetiousness in text, but trust me, I wasn't being serious :D if it were that simple I'd be slangin' that shit direct from China.

Unions are tricky things. Yes, they have fought for many improvements for workers, but there have also been problems with corruption and pursuing agendas either unrelated to the worker's interests or even against them. The automotive worker's unions had helped drive jobs out of Detroit and helped lead to the ruin of more than one institution. The public employee unions are an entire saga in themselves.

This part is hilarious, "95 percent report they feel they are 'one of the most valued employees at their organization" What that says to me is - those people's managers need a raise! Clearly they're making everyone feel like the unique special super outputting flower they aren't, keeping them with the organisation by feeding their ego, that's absolutely awesome - I need to learn their tricks of the trade to use on my wife!

One of the real problems with China is that few fully realize how bad of shape they are in. When OCO2 comes out and the numbers are measured for CO2 flows in and out of CHina, the world is in for a shock.

I think we're getting to the point where "drone" has become a generic buzzword for any kind of remotely piloted aircraft that can do any kind of visual surveillance, whether it's a $100 toy that can take pictures of my back yard or a multi-million dollar turbofan-powered military aircraft with explosive missiles.

I hate to sound like an apologist for the FBI, and I'm sure whatever they fly is probably more sophisticated than a lot of quadcopters, but I think some of the reaction to the FBI using drones seems misplaced. It's not like the FBI doesn't have access to Blackhawk helicopters and probably more than few equipped with military-grade FLIR & other surveillance gear. If they can accomplish whatever air surveillance they need without burning through $5k/hour or whatever it costs to operate a Blackhawk or the millions to buy another one, I'm OK with that.

I think sometimes the fuzzy definition of drone implies the FBI has this magic fleet of autonomous surveillance craft performing wireless intercepts, reading my mail and spying in my bedroom window. I'm just not sure that's what's really happening.

Of course the FBI's secrecy and [redacted] behavior doesn't help.

I gave my nephew his first Technic set for his 4th birthday. He looked and the box and it said "8+", and he said "You know, I'm only four!" He wasn't long figuring out how to build with it though.

I'd like to see a vid made using the same legacy style and feel to explain the Heartbleed bug.

"No, Heartbleed-related viruses will not attack your physical heart nor your body. However, your devices may not fare so well if you don't take the following precautions..."

It doesn't work that way. Developers especially of big applications need a consistent default fault and default look to design their applications. Applications like Microsoft Office or Photoshop rely on the defaults in order to properly design the look. They can't however design for people who change their fonts. They certainly won't feel responsible if it doesn't look good. That's why there is a fixed way of having fonts. If the fonts don't look good as a default we should fix the fonts, or fixed the rendering engine, or the display server, wherever the problem is. You can still change your fonts in GNU/Linux, but it doesn't need to be in the main GUI. Now, if we are not fixing the fonts in a timely manner or something then yeah, you should have the power to change them.

Some was like that I agree, but a lot of others ways to cover up bad behavior. I've been kicking around Unix as a whole since 1985. I sent my first email in 1984. I have worked with Unix systems since I was 19 years old. I went through all the cool stuff. I've been part of the GNOME project since 1997. It's great that you can customize your environment, it's what makes using GNU/Linux great because you have that choice. I know the attitude, the computer is a creative extension of yourself. I did a lot of that. But these days, I tend to just focus on the stuff I really want to do. Not mess around too much with the desktop. You shouldn't be touching it either once you've locked in your workflow. But you always end up doing so because something doesn't *quite* work the way you want, or some new feature come in and you want to play around some. I've spent more time on .Xresources than I care to recall. Let me ask, did you ever think about changing your font in OSX or in Windows?

To sum up, things are different when you're working on something as a product, a consumer level product. Before, GNU/Linux desktops were just a collection of components put together without any relationship between them. You slap some changeable theme and then call it good. There is no attempt to make consistency. We never took something that wasn't some rehash of Windows XP and make it our own, with a consistent user interface. While you might focus on your use model, GNOME methodology is very healthy for the Linux eco-system because we try to fix these problems up and down to stack. If you want to have reliable bluetooth connections, you go to the Linux bluetooth matainer to work out good user space tools that interact with his or her kernel drivers. I'm working with the powertop guys to come up with a great way to tune a system so that it doesn't use as much power. If you have that attitude, you understand what's really important and the chaanges you make affect everything like ripples in the water. It was GNOME that pioneered the fact that you can put in a cd into a cdrom and have something pop up. Why? Because we felt that it needs to be 'just work'. That's why there is a /sys for devices and udev because userspace wanted them. Demanding that things just work puts pressure on everyone to make things better.

If it was just about having a panel, icons, and a bunch of other stuff, hell we were done 18 years ago with fvwm2 or fvwm95. It was all there. One thing you should realize that you're trying to force GNOME into status quo, there are so many projects that act similiarly and look similarly. It's not healthy. GNOME needs to do what motivates it. It might leave some behind, but others will join as well.

If I were to have some criticism, we spend too much time working up and down the stack and not enough on our developer experience. KDE is light years ahead with a nice SDK kit. We need to do what KDE does there. It's easy to write a KDE or QT app. We need to do the same. This round, that is going to be a focus because there is no point having a beautiful desktop for normal folks if we can't give them the apps they want. For that we need a lot of app developers.

You are wrong. The Vanguard S&P 500 Index Fund, for example, which is a very basic fund that does nothing but track the S&P 500 index, has had an average return of 11% since its inception in 1976.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Why on earth should I really care what kind of CPU is in my laptop, *especially* if the OS runs on either x86 or ARM?

I think the whole point of the discussion here is that both hardware architectures and OS choices are becoming increasingly fungible, and that trend may only accelerate...

I'm with you on the quality digitizer/touchscreen, though...

state militia can definitely defeat u.s. military, if they are willing to use nukes.

So, no? I didn't think so.

Nice try with "sales" though, I'm sure that'll sucker in the bottom 0.5%. I'll let you work out why everyone else knows it's laughably absurd.

Moving on, what's your problem with the stylus? It's very useful and greatly enhances the utility of tablets. Think of all the things you could do with your tablet that you cannot reasonably do now.

Now, you might not find it terribly useful. That's okay. The rest of us want to do more with our tablets than just play video games.

He uses an iPhone?! I'm sorry to hear that, I didn't realize he had brain damage.

Yeah, tell that to the OpenSSL team, it will cheer them up.

Ah the good ole days before the IRS collected and data mined all our credit card transactions.