On Tuesday, October 29, 2002, at 07:11 AM, Trei, Peter wrote:
Item: At most Cypherpunks meetings someone is sitting with their laptop open, recording notes (or whatever). I usually wonder what they plan to do with the notes...not in any paranoid sense, just wondering if they'll ever look at the notes again, and why.A 6 hour fuel cell would alleviate this problem. What it would be even better for is conferences - at Usenix etal, people get very creative in trying to be usefully near the speaker *and* a socket (Hint: there are usually powerbars inside the bases of video monitors and speaker stacks).
Item: I notice that the note-takers aren't as involved in the give and take of discussion as others are. Partly this may be their nature (correlated with their note-taking in some way), partly this may be their focus on their notes, and partly this may be logistical (they're still typing, they will have to put down their laptop to stand or gesture or whatever it is that active participants do).
Item: At conferences, where companies may require detailed trip reports, note-taking can be very important. (Though, when I was attending conferences for Intel, it was more important to learn bits of scuttlebutt out in the lobby than it was to hear some boring presentation inside the auditorium. And tape-recording was usually better for capturing details anyway. Getting copies of the slides was a win, too. I assume that some conference speakers are now distributing slides _during_ the presentation, via 802.11, allowing those with laptops to follow along in real-time. And the slides are usually at a fixed site.)
Item: Note-taking can also be useful in maintaining alertness! Many times I have been bored to tears with speakers, and only the keeping of notes (pen and paper, or laptop) kept me awake.
Item: In difficult math or physics arguments, e.g., in college, I found that only by NOT taking notes could I "keep up." Watching every move, absorbing every point, was more important than writing down some notes which could be better found in the main course text and in supplemental texts covering the same subject.
Lastly, in the past several airline flights I have taken with my laptop, I have never opened it and used it. Granted, I didn't _need_ to. But I always have more reading to do than laptopping to do, so reading on a flight works for me. (I accept that business travelers may choose to do more laptopping than reading.)
Anyway, your mileage may vary.
--Tim May
"That the said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." --Samuel Adams
