You just described my computer. I've been doing heaving lifting, and very happy with it for the last few years...

... and has a good folder based management GUI. That makes the Sennheisers sing and puts a smile on my face.

I remember hearing of a Dell tech support request, where an old woman could not figure out why her computer was not working. She had it plugged in, the monitor was attached, but no matter how hard she pushed on the foot pedal, it wouldn't come on. She was expecting it to work like a sewing machine, and was stepping on the mouse to make it go.

Several years ago I was interested to see how feet could be used for coding. I got a ps2 DDR pad and ps2 to USB adaptor. It showed up as a joystick. With joy2mouse in X I could control the mouse with a foot... left, right, up, down, left stamp, right stamp, double stamp, etc. It worked, but wasn't too useful. The center of the pad was in the wrong place due to the chair, and moving the chair caused a misalignment with the buttons.

It might have also been possible to map from joystick to keyboard events too. The pressure sensitivity of the posted device probably makes it more useful.

Optical is still in the spec, but probably only to be used for long spans.

This is a required, and worthy, step on the road to driver-less (or driver-assisted, perhaps) auto navigation for heavy traffic and interstates. As demo'd on mythbusters, fuel economy goes way up (70% saving) if the cars can drive close enough to each other. As this tech evolves, intercommunication will allow for close car travel and hands-free interstate cruising. With distance sensors, infra-red far distance detectors, traffic line sensors, traffic sign readers, gps and mapping, it's almost there already. Bring it on.

There are many other incidentals: excluding devs due to high hardware and software entry fee, relying on external enforcement of own practice, the hypocritical practice of denying copying while themselves doing, the built-in adversion to fully networked and colaborative environments, and the fallback to physical distribution over a network solution, to name a few. I think people don't like to be told what to do, especially when it coincides with what they rightly want to do. Repression is not a long term solution. They must help to develop a positive environment for gamers, developers and themselves. Right now, it's not as beneficial as it might be. There are many uses for the mod outside of purchase circumvention. This would make the PS3 (which I already own) more interesting as it could be used as an entry level development platform... more developers is certainly going to benefit the platform. I (and others) would still purchase games to support the studios and out of convenience, and the smaller homebrew market might push studios to become even better.

Any image that stimulates brain activity not close to the surface is unclassifiable?

Yup, early opterons were very fast in comparison to what else was out at the time. The on-die memory controller. I have a dual opteron rig which has been upgraded over the years, and is still going strong.

there's a script for that.

comdel video.mpeg; mencoder -edl comdel.edl -o trim.mpeg video.mpeg does.

all those who can change the law raise your hand. If there was enough attention given to this issue, if people demanded change from congresspeople, if congresspeople heard and acted, if lobbying/payola was not enough to shut up congress people, if public negative campaings were not enough to sway opinion, and if it were not veto'd out as it approached law, it might get changed... in 10 years time. It's ridiculous... the 'idiocy' is tame in comparison.

Somehow, forcing people to participate in an unresponsive system out of their control is the answer. Such nonsense. The useless will atrophy.

... works great for tobacco. Especially pipe tobacco, nutty, vanilla, etc.

Bullshit legalized extortion. Ridiculous judgment, loaded juries and complicit judges. Money talks, rationals suffer. Quite the greeting for nascent technology. Greet rationality and vestigilize the RIAA.