Another Slashdot reader since 1998 here. Not for much longer, presumably: if Beta stays I will most certainly leave, as may others will, no doubt. Appalling.

The reason why talking to your computer is somewhat creepy is that we do perceive our computer as an extension of ourselves: the mouse pointer is "us" pointing, Google is an extension of our memory recall power, and so on. The interface is designed to be non-intrusive. Now, talking to your computer would become like talking to yourself. It's mildly creepy since it involves in the best case a split personality, or alternatively the feeling that you are the one who doesn't know squat, and has to ask to someone else. Not nice.
The approach is conceivably different when you ask "Earl Grey, hot". In that case you just give a command in order to receive an item, and who wouldn't want that?

As a further alternative, there is always the Gumstix. But, overall, the Pandaboard looks like a much sweeter deal: for $174 you get a dual-core ARM A9 board with 1GB, DVI output, Bluetooth, and all the goodies. I think I'll get one really soon now.

Well, Token-Ring did have one interesting feature, which was on the other hand poorly implemented as all the rest: an hermaphroditic (or gender-neutral) connector. Each connector would mate with another connector of the exact same shape, rotated in the opposite direction. That would make cable extensions trivial, never having to worry whether you needed a male-male, female-female, or male-female cable: they were all identical! The nice concept was, sure enough, poorly executed; the connectors required additional plastic inserts to keep the thing together, as the two connectors would easily unfasten otherwise. But at least the basic concept was interesting, I used to think at the time. For an example of the way it worked see Wikipedia.

Notably, Token-Ring was not much worse, on a mechanical level, than Ethernet at the time: the latter required either a thick coaxial network cable with a clumsy external transceiver box and a further thick cable (AUI drop cable) before reaching the actual network card, or a thinner coaxial cable, again with a similar external box and a drop cable. Later, the spread of 10BaseT and the disappearance of the external transceiver box rapidly made networking a much simpler affair, and Ethernet quickly became ubiquitous.

And, for the record, Apple briefly had a Token-Ring option as well at the time, a special (incredibly large and expensive) NuBus Token-Ring card was produced by Apple: the TokenTalk NB.