Agreed. Automotive and aircraft designers realized this and proved it with testing long, long ago. Touchscreens are lousy interfaces in any vehicle, but especially one that maneuvers as violently as a fighter plane.

Buttons have to be big enough (or, a control must be usable, whether it's a button or not) in the dark, when blinded, when the vehicle's upside down or spinning rapidly while falling at the same time. By hands that might need to be gloved, right? So, fat fingers.

And you absolutely need to be able to feel whether or not you successfully operated the control. You need to be able to feel the throttle's position along the length of its slot, and you need to feel the switch change when you lower landing gear, or whatever.

Touchscreens take your eyes off of the primary task. No choice; you have to divert your attention to the touchscreen.

Dropbox should quit trying to develop new products. We're not interested in hearing ads and begs from our storage provider.

The thrust of your argument seems to be that stealing is hard work, and therefore we should respect the thieves?

Anyway, the issue with Huawei chips is not really that they copy someone else's work. The issue is that they can build backdoors into the chips that you cannot discover till its too late. They know other countries have done it (USA for sure), and since the USA knows how it can be done, some of its government who are still patriots would prefer not to make it easy on an adversary and literally install their spy hardware in their own data closets.

Hurting American business is part of the WSJ's mission though. WSJ is owned by Murdoch, right? So, not sure I trust anything it publishes. Wait, I *am* sure I can't trust anything they publish. If there's a story in the WSJ, there's an agenda behind it that involves organized crime & political subterfuge. The old WSJ is long dead.

"The pickups are attached to a plate that can be easily swapped."

Why? Here's why: "The pickups are attached to a plate that can be easily swapped."

That's 1 example, probably the single thing that would attract more players than anything else, and there are plenty of good ideas in your guitar plans to go along with that. I like the idea of swapping out necks, too.

I'd want fingerboard options like: zero fret, 24 frets, scalloped, fretless, a fat vintage C profile and some other profiles.... If I had to lathe and mill my own necks, though, I wouldn't. I'd feel great about buying truly interchangeable parts, one or two at a time, from builders/sellers, as I could afford them and whenever I am in the mood to change something up.

I'd want to see more space on the frame for larger bridges, esp. Kahler, Floyd Rose, and other vibrato/"tremelo"/whammy bar bridges, and I'd need to be able to place a pickup closer to the briddge than 9 mm (to fit my Roland GK pickups). Those would be required before the modular axe could be useful to me.

I'd also want modular parts that let me make a solid, reliable headless guitar. Those things are really wonderful.

These are major and invasive changes to POSIX. No reasonable person would expect to be able to do things like change PID semantics or shared memory. Yes, it might solve the problem that they sought to solve. But I would be very surprised to see this meet with any large-scale deployment. It's better to work with the system than to just arbitrarily decide Unix is wrong and rewrite it.

The stick is ideal for games where you need the ability to move both quickly and precisely (say, to whip to the left and shoot the damn torpedo coming at you) with both hands, but not so much on platformers, for instance, where you want to move precisely before jumping to the next spinning, fiery climbable wall while some demonic dream-dad is throwing knives at you.

I played it on PC, with WSAD for movement, and it was still a pain.

-:sigma.SB

P.S. You forgot to mention that the knives were on fire, too.

"Reality isn't fun. If it was we wouldn't play games."

I'll second this and say that those people who want realistic games are a stupid minority who don't understand game design.

I'm a game designer/programmer who still spends a lot of time playing the original Ghost Recon with his friends. Often with respawn time set as long as 60 seconds, or respawns disabled entirely (and ALWAYS limited in quantity). This is a game where at least 70% of all bullet wounds are instantly fatal (and the rest are no joke), and where aiming usually requires you to hold still and aim carefully.

I also play games like Worms 3D, Spaceward Ho!, Harvest Moon, Starcraft, Tetris Attack... pretty wildly varying levels of realism there.

I'll have to say that people who relegate entire other groups of people to "stupid minorities" are stupid minorities who are sure not understanding something, not least of which that other people might have different tastes than them.

-:sigma.SB

When using Xinerama (which you really ought to be if you want control over your multi-screen setup), many tiling window managers can do all sorts of neat things. I personally use Awesome, although I'm told that xmonad is also good at this.

Complaining about WGA is as stupid as people complaining about having to put the cd / dvd in to play a game. It's a very minor form of copy protection that causes no inconvenience to users - well, users that don't like to bitch about the massive effort of having to put a disc in to play a game.

The only reason I have a working optical drive between the three computers that I A) use regularly and B) have a monitor for is that a replacement for my most recently deceased one arrived today.

All the effort in the world won't cram my Brood War CD into the empty space that used to hold my G5's DVD drive and make it work.

I'm pretty much the biggest anti-DRM person that there is.

I think the fallacy in this statement is so blatantly obvious that I don't even need to point it out. (Which I did anyway. Go figure.)

-:sigma.SB

Boo. Bad idea. I don't want the ribbon.

There have been widespread worms that did this sort of thing before (phpBB comes to mind). Does this one do anything novel that makes it deserve the adjective "clever?"

-:sigma.SB

I have a Rage 128. I'm still hoping, but somehow doubting, that KMS will get ported to my card...

-:sigma.SB