USB trackballs aren't super-hard to find (I'm using a Kensington trackball as my pointing device right now), though the classic "big ball" for your whole hand is much less popular than the little marbles for thumb-only.

My concern is on how they read the movement--accelerating movement vs. constant velocity vs. direct positioning. I don't know what Centipede did, but I do know that playing in MAME with a mouse was never the right feel.

Centipede is why my preferred input device is a full-size trackball--you can fly across a multi-monitor setup quickly and still precisely position the cursor when you need to.

I will be very disappointed if this doesn't support the trackball properly.

Yes! Dany has barely controlled the impulse to violence since season 1. When Drogo "crowned" her brother, her response was "he was unworthy". When the Khals of Dothrak pissed her off, she burned them all. Over and over she chooses violence to "further her cause." The only person she listened to reliably was Jorah, and he's gone.

I have 3 swipe keyboards for my iPhone. The problem isn't with the input device...

When I entered protein crystallography in the late 80's, the standard of the day was the E&S PS330 (vector graphics, how I miss you!) with split-screen stereo. A few people could make their eyes separate well enough to see the 3-D unaided, but most of us strapped on "the box." The box had a pair of adjustable mirrors in front of each eye--you twiddled their angles and your position until you only saw the one 3-D image. The system worked great, until the neck strain kicked in from the extra weight on your face, or until you tried to look away and take notes.

I also wonder if anyone quoting the "3 laws" has actually read Asmiov. He explicitly states in several stories that the actual 3 Laws are mathematical formulae encoded in the paths of the robots positronic brains. The oft-quoted English versions are handy paraphrases at best.

Every time I read "Shockwave Rider" (finally available for Kindle!), I'm more convinced awed by Brunner. Most recently I was struck by the parallels between what happens to San Francisco in his world and how close we came to losing New Orleans. And I find his "plug-in lifestyle" to be even more prophetic than his pervasive computer tech--though like everyone else, he completely missed mobile/wireless.

Those two requirements are mutually exclusive. Unless they think there is an audit trail of everyone who has ever seen Windows source code (and given that there is an enterprise source license, that is going to be one heck of an audit).

If I had mod points, you'd get them. FG is a great example of how bad it can be.

In the 4 months since I was issued my T420s, I've re-imaged twice, replaced *every* part, and still get a random shutdown/reboot/bluescreen at least once per week. The W500 it replaced crashed about twice in 3 years.

I'm glad I'm not alone in hearing "The Sound of His Wings" in Santorum's campaign speeches. If Santorum gets nominated, or God forbid wins, I will consider it proof positive that Heinlein was in fact a time traveler.

I always opt out, and under *no* circumstances will I let them grope me in a private area. You want to violate me, you do it where grandmothers and children can watch. If I'm going to be degraded to do my job (my travel is mostly work), so are you.

Not entirely accurate--one of the things I like best about ebooks from Amazon is that I can (and do) read them on the Kindle, my phones, and my computers. The Kindle app is available for just about everything, and syncs between devices so I can pick up on one where I left off on another.

I miss us too.

One of my first hard lessons in UNIX system administration came the day I typed "rm -rf *" as root in /etc. The second one came about 1 minute later when I asked the other admin where we kept the backups, only be greeted with "what backups?"