nothing wrong with making cool looking tech with fancy graphics with whizzy outlines and beeping noises

i still wish my keyboard beeped futuristically every time i press a button and when proccessing complex tasks lots of lights would flash and more beeping

im sad i missed the late 80's early 90's :(

touch screen devices I wonder if they can be activated by contact other than that of a finger.

It raises the question... If I sneeze on my tactical missile launch screen spraying it with saliva could I accidentally nuke another country?

If my war bunker pals are shooting each other with rubber bands and one hits my screen...

Are touch screens contact or capacitance activated? Yes I could Scroogle an answer, if I cared enough.

There's something called the General Atomics Avenger??? I don't know what it does, how much it costs or even what colour it is. I WANT ONE!!!

Take your pick. You can get Capacitive, Resistive, Surface Acoustic Wave, Infra-Red and Video-based touchscreens.

The biggest touchscreens are often done with a video camera - point the camera at the table and do some fancy jiggery-pokery to work out when contact is made and map it to the screen. This one is probably the least discriminatory as you don't actually have to touch the surface, just get close enough for the camera to think you did.

Capacitive and SAW are probably the best ones, with Infra Red and Resistive competing for cheapest (depending on size)

This general sort of point-to-select interface has been around for a suprisingly long time, but it used to be light pens.

Now it looks more like a bad Star Trek clone.

Time to buy shares in screen-cleaner producers.

As an incompetent musician I like the idea of surface acoustic waves, Could I play Zappa in the presence of one? And who is the more likely to start a nuclear war, proper musicians or the Sugarbabes?