OT: Dream keyboard

Soft keycaps - make every keycap a small (64x64?) display. Rearrangeable layout - some kind of mechanical setup such that keys can be moved around. (I can imagine something like a 1mm sawtooth on the edge of each key, so that with a surround the key positions are frozen, but if the surround is removed they can be rearranged.) Getting the rearrangeable layout and still arranging the necessary signals to each key would be interesting, but I believe it could be solved. Perhaps there could be power carried along the sides of every key, with some kind of optical free-space communication (Ethernet over light through air, anyone?) between the keys and the keyboard controller. Soft-keycaps has a number of benefits. Push the shift key and most of the keys on the keyboard switch to their shifted versions. Load a Dvorak keybaord layout and the letters all move around. Help yourself learn to touchtype by making all the keycaps go blank. Run a typing tutor and it could make the key you want to type next flash. Gospodin Sokolov could switch between Cyrillic keycaps and ASCII keycaps. (They'd need software help, of course, but that's a SMOP. Given the hardware, the software can be created.) It would be a bit expensive, but flexibility is. *shiver* As long as you can disable bluetooth in hardware. I do _not_ want any radio capability! It's a security disaster waiting to happen. Indeed, especially since many of those are incompatible in fairly fundamental electrical senses. (Suns use RS232 timing with TTL signal levels. Macs use ADB. Peecees use...well, I don't really know _what_ peecees use (for the PS/2 style), as I've (thankfully!) never had occasion to care, but I'm pretty sure it's electrically incompatible with Suns, ADB, and USB.) /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B