This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the shift of the world using the USD as the primary means of exchange to something else, like Keynes' Bancor or something similar. China has been calling for this for nearly a decade.

https://www.bis.org/review/r09...

At the end of the day, the problem is Congress. They have known for nearly 10 years China was going to pull the plug. This is the price we pay.

As well, I'm always amazed at people who say trade imbalances don't matter. Don't you study history? This is what World War II was about! What did they discuss when the UN was founded? Trade imbalances! They discussed nothing else of significance.

You're a sysadmin. You have no idea what "productivity" applications are. iOS and Android are useless for anyone who makes money writing complex analytical documents.

You clearly do not understand anything about Windows 10. The Windows 10 S lockdown is welcome, as the singular problem with Windows is its legacy support. For a student - using Office and Edge are more than sufficient. All of that said, turning off the S mode is simple.

I'm mystified people who praise the iPad pro. What kind of work can be done on it?

I'm a professional who writes technical, financial reports for a living. For better or worse, my world is Microsoft Office, and while the iOS apps are some of the best available (Really, most suck as badly as the Windows Store apps), they are insufficient. When this device gets LTE, I'll be the first one to buy it. Just being able to use full outlook on the road and make edits to documents, even if a bit more slowly, is real work. The only real work I can do on an iPad is review PDFs or photos in Lightroom CC.

Here's hoping Adobe steps up an makes a Windows Store version of Lightroom that is lightweight like the iPad version.

There are two distinct models. The higher end model has an SSD with 8gb of ram.

The real niche for a product like this is for those of us who, for better or worse, use Microsoft products for work. Outlook for iOS just isn't robust enough. I have a top of the line Surface Book 2, so this device - when an LTE model becomes available - will be far more useful than an iPad. I can run Office 365, full outlook, word and excel and most importantly my firm's custom plugins. I don't plan on getting a huge amount of work done, but it is great for reviewing work and email on the go and light editing of documents. I also am a pretty heavy Evernote user, and that also works without difficulty. You combine that with the Edge browser, which works well on low-end hardware, and it does pretty much everything I need.

I've had an iPad for a while, and I almost never use it. I'm not even sure why people buy the things, they seem almost totally useless to me.

The one thing that is annoying is I would like to run Lightroom CC on the device, but I have a feeling Adobe is not going to free up a license for this thing, or create a scaled down Windows Store app like the iPad has. That's pretty much all I do with my iPad - review Lightroom CC photos and read PDFs and read emails. Outlook sucks for responding, and Word and Excel don't work with my documents due to the custom templates and myriad formatting issues.

Overall you're looking at this like an iPad - it is not for media consumption, which I presume is what many people use their iPads for. It allows you to get real work done, which is pretty much impossible on an iPad.

Microsoft just realized 5 years earlier than Apple that X86 won. There were solid DEC Alpha machines, but then that was abandoned. And Sparc. And PowerPC was already failing to deliver.

It's different now. Intel can't make low power processors. Some of us want a small, portable device that runs the main Windows applications, has great battery life, and always on functionality like an ipad.

You're just not in the business world.

The only thing I need is MS Office, OneNote, Edge, Bing Maps, Wunderlist, and Spotify. I'd like to have Adobe Lightroom CC, but I'm sure they will make an ARM Binary in time.

I've long been in the Surface camp, and I've tried to use an Ipad. But frankly, they suck. I have a top spec Surface Book 2, and it's great. I'd love it if MS made a 10" Surface tablet with an ARM processor that is actually good (i.e. 3:2 screen, high resolution - not the 1080p crap that was the RT model).

There is a market for these devices, mostly because Apple has simply ceased innovating.

This is the correct answer. A simple tax on every call, even just 1 cent, is enough to end this.

Can you name any VOIP providers who engage in this public annoyance?

Perhaps a good tarring and feathering is in order.

No one can be a power user running Windows XP. Come on, get a grip.

I've really been quite happy with Edge. It still remains far better than Chrome while on battery. I use a VPN for ad blocking, and only need lastpass and evernote extensions. Maybe that's not enough for some, but it's fine for me.

I still have to use Chrome for work as a number of applications don't work with Edge (box.com is a big one), but on my personal surface - Edge is far superior.

1) Warp Drive
2) Human spaceflight beyond the outer atmosphere
3) Curing HIV/AIDS
4) Curing Cancer
5) Making genetically inferior people smart

NO. We will never cure HIV.

I'm not quite sure "Florida man" is accurate for someone with his surname.

There are still libertarians today? Yes, we don't need laws. We need headshots. Then you can tell us about your "freedom" and "inaliable rights".

The only funny coincidence is that both of them are famous for simply being famous, and really contributed nothing at all of significance to modern technology as we know it. Einstein is credited with many things that he either stole (relativity) or had a small part in (nuclear weapons). Hawking is credited with propagating bullshit that is totally unscientific and has no impact on anything but Science Fiction.

I've never understood why people believe anything Steven Hawking says. Seriously. Everything he has written and predicted has been total bullshit. At best, it has been a guide for scifi storylines.

The death of Hawking is the death of the stupidity of Physics over the past century, which has literally accomplished nothing but mental masturbation.

Good riddance.