I have a very handy HP-12C RPN calculator on my Blackberry: http://lygea.com/ (They do a few HP models, for both BB and Windows Mobile).

The TI BA II Plus looks great and is very powerful, but unfortuantely it sucks, or at least the model I have does.

It has absolutely no key rollover. This causes it to miss keypresses that are made simultaneously!

For example, try pressing and holding the '1' key, then pressing and holding the '2' key, then releasing '1', then releasing '2'. It only registers the '1'. If you enter data quickly using two fingers, you're pretty much guaranteed to miss digits sooner or later.

Worse than that, it seems to miss keypresses if they follow each other too quickly. This is harder to demonstrate than rollover, but I'm pretty sure that it happens.

This is a hardware issue, and is totally unacceptable. The TI-86 gets this right (registers both keypresses) so it's not a TI design choice.

Every time I try to use the BA II Plus I end up missing numbers due to entering them too quickly or pressing two keys simultaneously.

I'll stick with my HP-12C which requires fewer keypresses (due to both RPN and the way the financial functions are designed) and which actually responds to _all_ of my keypresses.

So it's slow enough that it only flashes once- great :)

I meant that if you're looking for a page in a paper or manual, say you know it's the page with a particular table on, and is around page 100 to 110. I do this sort of stuff all the time with a PDF reader, just hit page down until I see the table that I recognise to fly past. Waiting for the display to flash and update for every page would be just painful.

I honestly loved the idea of e-ink until I tried out Sony's new reader over Christmas. I just knew instantly that I couldn't live with the slow screen updates and flashing.

Is it only me who just hates the way that e-ink displays flash black every time the whole image changes? Quickly paging through a document would be a slow, painful experience of flashing black and white text. Come back and let me know when the Kindle 5 display updates instantaneously without an ugly black flash and I'll consider it.

... GTA also taught him that you can drive through lampposts, notice that he avoided the trees.

Since when did /. (or indeed ./ ) have to stick to articles "related to IT"?

The stuff that passes for 'fruitcake' in the US/Canada is just sad, half the replies to this story are just stating how sucky that artificial insubstantial crap is.

This stuff was the ultimate fruit cake, German Stollen:

Stollen > British Fruitcake > North American Fruitcake

If they're watching movies all day long, just fire them. No need to re-orient their monitors.

Yes, and these 'friends' might be less reluctant than you think to screw you over to save themselves if the shit hits the fan.

Yes, IP over Flag Semaphore would have quickly become bogged down with people downloading mosaics over bittorrent.

I was always under the impression that "monopolies are bad", at least that's what we learned in 10th grade social studies, and yet here you are saying a monopoly is a good idea. I have to disagree. The U.S. Mail monopoly is a bad idea

The issue is a little more complicated than you were taught in '10th grade'. It would be slightly more accurate to say "unregulated monopolies are bad". Monopolies are very important in areas where the social good is best served by them, such as natural monopolies. Some industries, such as the delivery of utilities to your home, cannot support competition. Instead we tend to ensure that those industries are either owned or regulated by the government.