Ah too bad I don't have mod points. This is what I came to suggest here. It's truly the best of both worlds. I used to have one (received one as a gift), but as it turns out I had never up to that point taken notes in class, and having one such pen didn't change matters much. I did try it for its geek factor, and it was just fantastic. The software wasn't great (and it was windows-only), but maybe things have changed since then.

But if OP's wife is hellbent on getting a tablet (I'm starting to believe it's just one of those solutions in search of a poblem), what I had before the livescribe was an old-school tablet PC (with a wacom tablet and pen as the input mechanism) with Linux on it. There was a pretty straightforward program from the repos that was pretty great as well, it saved all the notes in an xml file, and was exportable to PDF. I bet it still exists... Yup, it's called Xournal, and it's in the Ubuntu 11.10 repos still.

I still don't get the tablet craze, I must say; that tablet was pretty damn cool (and an actual computer at that), and still I ended up selling it on account of me never really using it as much as I thought I would when I bought it.

Do you any sources to back these claims up? I'm genuinely interested...

And in doing so it could be argued that you inadvertently helped the taboo to get even stronger. What's wrong with saying what was actually going on (patient was engaged in sexual activity)? It's unnecessary from a medical PoV, sure, but I find it odd that in your anecdote about the ridiculousness of the taboo surrounding a "normal physiological activity", you had to hide or mask what he was doing from his family doctor.

Simple: You get a contract where they only charge you for what you call. I think those may not be available in the US though, and your only option might be prepaid.

It the percentage of users is THAT ridiculously small, then surely it makes no sense to go and actively develop locks so that users won't be able to access the bootloader, don't you think?

This isn't a winnable debate by the manufacturers, and HTC seems to finally have figured that out.

Thanks for the tip, will check it out!

What I'm really looking forward about this is that the current (to my knowledge) most battery efficient app on the market today (Sipdroid) absolutely DEVOURS my battery, making it impossible for me to leave it running in the background. I'd really love a completely "virtual" phone in the sense that I could use it as a full time SIP phone, but so far, it's either take a charger everywhere I go or just use it for outgoing calls. Hopefully (probably?) Google will make an awesome app that doesn't use a lot of battery, making it usable.

Google providing a SIP account would be great too. One less thing to configure.

And yes, I'm in Europe, and yes I pay less than 15 Euro/month for my calls + internet. It's even a prepaid "plan", so I didn't sign anything. /bragging (I DID however have to pay 150 Euro for my free {as in freedom} HTC Magic {yay eBay!}.)

*affect

Seriously: the difference between those 2 words is abysmal. And about 80% of the times I see one of them written online they really meant the other one. This cannot be explained by simple ignorance/randomness! The other pair of similar words that are written wrong about 85% of the time are to/too.

Some insight into the phenomenon would be greatly appreciated.

Let's see:

- Name calling
- "they did it first"
- Feeling superior to the vast majority of the population
- Misquoting

Did I miss anything? Oh right. You failed to point out a single counter-argument AND you turned this even further into the debate that it is not. You couldn't be more of a cliché for your typical radical "ultra-scientific" person. And I quote it, of course, because true scientists and rational-thinking people would facepalm at seeing such an ignorant, pointless, empty, off-topic and hateful comment.

Congratulations, you've turned into everything you hate about what you seemingly perceive "religious people" to be.

Oh how I love a good anonymous response.

1) Oh cool, I didn't know about that one. Except it's not a therapy yet. I read it, and am at least mildly curious as to what they mean by "phase 1 clinical trials" (since, if you know anything about those, are done on HEALTHY people to establish safe dosages, pharmacokinetics, that sort of thing... In therapies that are not ethically acceptable to use healthy people for them, they'll jump directly to phase 2 trials). I'm sure it's just a journalistic error, though, so nevermind. It also doesn't say how they're planning to handle the rejection thing. I don't want to seem like i'm crapping on this to defend "my point" (which is on the side of science, mind you), but it still has a long way to go to see if it'll even work. As a cheap-shot comparison, bear in mind that the most horrifying forms of cancer have also been cured on rats (and AIDS in monkeys, IIRC).
Hope it works (I really do), but even if it did not much would change in terms of the validity of my points. AND whatever they do, could very PROBABLY be done 1000x better with adult stem cells, if it weren't a company so hellbent on working the political angle, and following on Chris Reeve's "footsteps".

2) Oh, I think what you're referring to is actually ADULT STEM CELLS then. That is indeed one way to de-differentiate adult cells. It doesn't work very well, though. It does make more sense to research THIS path, now, doesn't it?

3) Well, that's just argumentative. I don't know exactly how many cell lines where available, but they WERE available (how many different do you think you'd need?), and besides that's completely ignoring that little tidbit of information that this nonsense only happened in the US. The rest of the world kept on spinning, and losing interest in hESC.

Adult SC have NOT been around that long, what were known as adult stem cells up until very recently were somewhat more differentiated cells. Which was the reason for wanting to research with TRULY omnipotent cells (hESC). Since a few years ago a number of methods have been popping up about creating these sorts of absolutely primitive cells from adult tissues (like TFA). And that's when hESC stopped being relevant in my book.

The embryonic stem cells ban didn't apply to the rest of the world, and still no therapies have derived from embryonic stem cells (wan't there a site devoted to reporting in these?). There are, however, a couple of therapies derived from adult stem cells, both from the US and from other countries.
Restricting science is short-sighted and all, but I never really cared for research coming from embryonic stem cells (it just seemed the WRONG approach altogether, when any resulting therapy would need to have the patient placed on lifelong immunosupression, like any transplant patient; but feel free to call me shortsighted).
You also need to consider that Bush's ban allowed for research to continue on EXISTING cell lines, and those were pretty plentiful (you know, being stem cells and as such immortal).

I just feel the level of outrage on this particular issue has been very disproportionate; and that it has turned more into an anti-religious argument than a pro-science one.

Ah I agree wholeheartedly.
As a 24 y/o without any kids, I can't say that I know what I'm talking about regarding kids, but what I CAN tell you is that at my house we bought our first computer when I was TWELVE. That's right. In a few months I was better at it than anyone in my family, even starting to dabble into simple scripting and programming. It goes without saying that I'm much more proficient at using a computer than anyone of my peers (who had earlier access to computers), and certainly more so than these new generations of kids that were born with computers and the internet... In fact I think those of us who still had to search in books to get information from at school will prove to have an advantage over the young ones. But that's beside the point.
The point is that starting "late" into computing doesn't mean you're going to be 'bad' at it, nor is the contrary true.
And as parent said, if computers have shown to be DETRIMENTAL to the development of a toddler/infant (and I can totally picture the reasons for it), why would you put him through it? Building blocks and those things you need to match the shape of the object to insert it, and all those kinds of games are what his brain needs at this moment. He has just barely realised that his body has limits and is not part of the rest of the world; now he needs to better understand how it is that that physical world actually works. Gravity, momentum, impenetrability, the law of conservation of matter (and energy, but that's harder to grasp), aerodynamics, hidrodynamics, elasticity, thermodynamics, simple machines; all are concepts that one needs to internalise and have experienced to achieve an intuitive knowledge of physics. And no matter what you say or think, a computer CANNOT provide that. And by being more "flashy" and "soundy" and ADD-inducing than real-life objects, it WILL hurt his curiosity towards the physical realm.

That's called meditation, and I believe I've read some place or another that it MIGHT actually make you feel more rested than an actual nap.
I've done it on and off for years... In the end the line between sleeping and that meditative state becomes really blurry, to the point where I've had dreams while simultaneously being listening (and understanding, and being able to repeat afterwards) to something someone was saying...

OK, OK, so I was in class at those times... what's the worst that could happen? (even tho it seems like a joke this post is 100% serious)

Too bad in reality what you're describing is VERY VERY rare (and much more so if you also wish it to be cheap). That's why statisticians have created measurements that help when taking clinical decisions. For instance, for a screening test (which seems like this is what it's planed to be) it's perfectly acceptable to have a high sensibility even if it has a low specificity. This way you'll "catch" almost all of the sick people for further study (with more specific, and most likely more expensive/time consuming/invasive/etc tests) even if in the process you "catch" a few healthy people too (which will later be declared so).

That's why when doing actual hard medicine (and taking important decisions regarding implementing certain test and whatnot) these claims do not bode. "100% accuracy" (or any percentage, really) means squat to a statistics-trained professional. There are precise measurements of the effectiveness and potency of a particular test, these mainly been sensibility and specificity. So a particular test may be very sensible yet not very specific (like the mammography, for detecting breast cancer), which means it can have many false positives (but not many false negatives), or the contrary, very specific but not very sensible...
There are related concepts like positive predictive value and such, but the important thing is, these things need to be measured before this test can make it's way into everyday clinical practice. If they weren't rated, medicine would be a very obscure art.