You start down an interesting thought about going to Alabama and shitting on a bible. You could absolutely do that! You might not like the response from a few of the yolkles but in a city like Birmingham you might get away with it as an art exhibition. The question is if you actively go to a site that is hosted in the United States of America are you right to demand that they follow a "law" in another country. Shouldn't your expectations be to accept the governing laws of the site host? I wouldn't be surprised to find something pro Iranian government hosted in Iran because the laws make it more likely. In the U.S.A. it's every mother fucker for them selves. Unless you have corporate sponsorship. Then it's a whole different set of "stay off my lawn" ideologies. If you want to see a comparable group of religious fundies that get their ideas ridiculed on a regular basis over here the just Google stuff about Scientology. They're a pretty violent group that gets ridiculed all the time.

So let's get one other thing out of the way while we're at it. As an a-theist, you should probably not be attaching PBUH to the end of some important philosophical guy who lived in the fourth century Ano Domini. Just because a bunch of people tell me I'm the Tooth Fairy does not mean I am. It's not like if I get enough votes on Reddit, Digg or Face Book, I'm going to sprout wings and fly around looking for children's teeth. In the same manner, just because some says a person is a prophet does not make them one. There's no such thing as God therefore there cannot be an emissary of God. Therefore drawing the guy is not going to make lightning strike you dead or disallow you into a fictional playground for the dead. If these people have a problem with Face Book then they should MAKE THEIR OWN or STFU and ignore the page about scribbling a guys face.

There's a point to the whole "just tap it" thing though. Even with an awesome mouse you still have to travel from point A to point D walking your way through a menu branch until you get to what you're looking for. Click and move, repeat as many times as you have branches in your menu. I work in VFX and use programs with huge menu branching systems like Maya. I've moved from using a mouse to a massive track ball to a twelve inch Cintiq to a 21 inch Cintiq. Every time was a step in the right direction until the 21 inch Cintiq. I've easily shaved hours off of my daily routines because I'm not hunting for where my mouse pointer is. If you have a lot of pixel space to traverse (4000+ horizontal) then you can only accelerate your mouse so fast before an accidental flinch leaves you looking for your mouse and hitting hot corners or other monitors completely. The accuracy I have over an ten hour day at the desk is better when I don't have to constantly track a little black or white mouse from point to point like a fucking Labrador Retriever.

If you do stuff like programing and databasing then I can understand the whole touch thing would be a waste. The biggest problem I have with using a Cintiq is that my keyboard either sits below my screen or off to the side. Both mean that I have to switch to a different body position. I would love an onscreen keyboard with multi touch so I could just keep drawing, editing and sculpting.

Something interesting that has happened because of the move to large touch screens is that I no longer use my desk the same way. Instead of having my monitor up away from me I now rest the bottom of it on my keyboard tray and have it 45 degrees just below shoulder height. This lets me keep my arms in a comfortable position and not slouch or stretch over my table to get to the screen. kinda like this... __/------ I have my Cinema Display sitting on a platform at the back of my desk so that I can see it over the top of the Cintiq. I think architects solved this problem a long time ago. I would be surprised if this is the new way to go from here on.

Obviously this is coming from a mouse jockey and not somebody who types all day but I think as more people do photo and home movie editing this will get more appropriate.

A couple of things come to mind when everyone starts saying that life out there is impossibly to hard to get to or that it's too far away. One is that based on our current understanding of the universe there are over ten dimensions to space and we have a grasp of four and a shortcut in a fifth to cover super fluidity. Only recently has a math been developed that can even cover the higher orders of energetic states let alone say definitively that there's nothing better. Hell, String theory itself is still being developed. The LHC is going to start to find out some serious answers about some hypothetical elements of our universe including event horizon theories and wether gravitons exists etc. Give them a freaking chance to work first.

The second is that everything we do now for communications works on radio waves. We've had those for what, 150 years or so? Give us another 50 and I think we'll be using quantum entangled particles to transmit data over long distances. Our radio usage would shrink to almost a zero state. So if WE are this close to not using radio waves anymore what makes everyone think that an "Advanced" society out there would have built their civilization around a tech that is for shit when it leaves the solar system. How much interference is there from things like pulsars and general radiation? Wouldn't you as an engineer want something with a little less static to compensate for? If we can produce quarks and other "esons" couldn't we use those near speed of light particles as transmitters of information instead?

It seems like all of these studies about extra terrestrial civilizations are being validated by 1950's cereal box science.

Hi! I thought I would chime in on that bit of advice. My first reaction was to say, "Stay away from my neck of the woods!" Grolaw does make a good point. If the poster does go into a specialty then I would say film is a good way to go. Hollywood pays better than most and the hours are usually nine or ten in the morning till six at night. Average pay for decent animation using AfterEffects, Finalcut, and a 3D package of your choice is about $65.00 per hour. Not the best pay in the world but good enough to get you out of loans and drunk on the weekends. Not to mention if you actually have a talent for doing this stuff, people will actually pay for you to come to them. The perks of being close to Hollywood are beyond listing and happen all the freakin time. A couple of things that happen on a daily basis are things like open bars for clients (and you) when they come into to pixel fuck the project and of coarse catered lunches most of the time.

I work in Minneapolis and pull down a full time jobs worth of freelance with biomedical companies and commercial houses without even really advertising myself. If you can read a manual to pick up new tricks, keep a deadline, and tell a joke while someone watches you work then it's a good gig to get into. I will say that you should stay away from Flash work and web stuff unless you want to specialize in that because no one is going to pay you the same rate for Flash work. Just doesn't look the same as real animation and film. Don't tell anyone what you're degree is in. They don't care and it can land you in the IT end of film which doesn't get the rockstar treatment and leaves you covered in dust from working in the dub room. All people care about is your portfolio. If you have cool projects under your belt and can bring that level of production to the client then they will throw the money at you. It's all an image thing. But in a good way. Your paid to make things look pretty and not a thing more. No APIs, Code revisions, compatibility checks etc.. Just make it look pretty and walk away. You would be amazed how much brain you have left without keeping up with what new code needs to be added. If you do have a knowledge of something like JAVA or Python and you can set up sophisticated animation that runs on code then you can get paid a hell of a lot more and can walk into a lot of high level production houses and pull five or six grand in a week without working half of the time some one else would.

So in closing I say don't do it. The less competition the better. Stay away from the mid west too! ;)

Strong with the troll force you are or the parent just explained your response. Totally agree with parent. Anger is the first response to a dangerous situation when you have perceived power over the outcome. Make some one turn off their reasoning and you'll get an answer that is two parts insult and one part restatement of the original point distorted.

"Think of the children!" is one of the classics of the internet for a reason I guess.

Well I think you might have the same thing going on as the correlation does not equal causation stance. Human beings recognize beauty in chaotic situations all the time. Hell, Jackson Pollock made a good living doing just that. Just because we can interpret a situation to have a seemingly organized function doesn't mean that it came about that way in the first place. I think reverse engineering can sometimes give us a false sense of preordained order. I'm not saying that there isn't a big old man in the sky but nothing has proven it on any level that would be considered physical that can not be explained in a natural way. It just so happens that to explain things we actually had to have an understanding of what we were looking at. Meaning that for most of human existence we had to stop explaining at "god must have done it"? Only in the last hundred years do we start to see things for what they really are. Complex...very complex. Ouch my brain hurts complex. Not magical man in the sky mystical though.