This could cause issues with any controls that perform different functions when dragged or clicked.

There are a number of controls that do respond on a simple mousedown event (such as menus), so it's would be just a matter of redefining which controls are necessary to wait for a mouseup, which would then necessitate users remembering which is which.

That's solved fairly trivially by requiring the card to be removed from the machine before the requested cash is dispensed.
Thats how many ATMs in Australia do it.

I'm fine with that as long as we can call real kittens 'land-fish' (a la Stephen Colbert)

Sean Williams.

(Then of course, there's Peter Hamilton, Vernor Vinge, Stephen Baxter, Iain M. Banks...)

I seem to remember reading in the book that the decision for recreating Neanderthals actually started from the idea of using them for medical testing, as the Neanderthals are pretty close to human in regards to physiology...

Ah, here is the relevant passage:

'The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled "medical test vessels", living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success - and failure. The Neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin but not human, physiologically almost identical - and legally with less rights than a dormouse. But sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthals was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.'

Gerhard VON SQUID - Neanderthals Back after a Short Absence

From "Something Rotten" by Jasper Fforde. (Goliath being the megacorp that cloned the 'thals).

Also highly recommended is the "Neanderthal Parallax" trilogy by Robert J Sawyer (although it's pretty much straight scifi, not comedic like Fforde's books).

Well, when i asked my colleague if he ever walked into a wall using the system, he said he had - he was trying to pick up some ammo, but it was about a meter off (in the game, compared to where it was displayed on his HUD). He said its not perfect but that it was enough to 'fool' the user into being able to interact (to the extent of shooting the monsters, and seeing them duck behind buildings etc) When standing on a point, you can loko around and it mapped well - the headgear had position/orientation type things (didnt go into too much detail) Oh - he also said that they were using differential GPS, but that was the year that they turned off the scrambling (not the right word, i know) - and DGPS isnt much better than the unscrambled GPS (something about propogation time and atmospherics - been a while since we talked about GPS) Wyzfen note: see my earlier post for more info