Because it's not just an anonymous 911 call anymore. These days it could be 9/11 all over again. Everyone could be a terrorist at any moment and we should react accordingly. /sarcasm. ... but is it really sarcasm?

The average user still doesn't care.

On a side note though most of those things have had their functionality duplicated. Windows update still has a standard control panel page and the only thing that I so far have found forces you to a full screen mode is adding a bluetooth device.

But once it's paired you never need to visit that page again as you have access to it from the standard devices and printers page.

Speak for yourself. The type cover is light and does the job perfectly. It's no IBM model M but it's on par and a shitload better than some laptops out there. As for who wants to lug around a two pound tablet? I ask you a different question: Who wants to lug around a 2 pound laptop AND a 1 pound tablet.

I have a small light tablet and an older laptop. I've used neither and taken neither out of my house since getting a Surface. If you're buying a Surface to replace just the laptop, or just the tablet then you're doing it wrong.

If you mean $130 at a time when there's no discounts running (I've regularly seen them $30 off). Then sure.

Hardly the major calamity considering the device is a fully convertible tablet and the device it is being compared to is not even remotely similar.

Except it's not a question of green. CO2 emissions here aren't what's causing the problem, it's particulate matter and Nitrous Oxides.
From your own link your diesel produces double the NOx emissions.

Not wanting cancer trumps the minor differences in CO2 emissions between the models, and diesel is definitely no longer considered greener or healthier the way it used to be.

I had an OCZ SSD you insensitive clod.

I didn't mean to imply that audio processing was a zero hit on CPU, I implied that for the most part games aren't limited by CPU. Actually I've never owned a gaming system that was limited by CPU, though I guess at the very top of the line systems you may end up with that scenario and I may be speaking out of ignorance.

Also my opamps comment was more tongue in cheek. Audiophiles typically have an irrational hatred of opamps, and those that do understand the phenomenally high performance available in an integrated package will typically favour one of a hand full of "top the line" for audio opamps which run a whole $5ea from the manufacturer in quantities of less than 10. I was more taking a dig at how "cheap" a company must be that being able to swap out the core amplification component on the "high end" board is a feature. It's like saying a feature on my Ferrari is that I can replace the engine with something else. :-)

But that is my point. The only kind of idiot who would carry this stuff is the same idiot who would send it plain text from his home and get caught anyway. There's no point in the extra grief at the border.

Attics are on the whole very VERY poorly ventilated compared to a gap that is completely open on all sides. Compare any attic to sitting outside under a tree and you'll see what I mean.

You're assuming no one has thought of trying alternatives. If there were ones that worked then we'd be doing them already. Specifically:

You're combining two industries with two different economics. That works well at a point and then very quickly craps itself leaving both industries nonviable. Do you run the nitrogen plant to suit the power industry? Good luck getting funding to take on that economic risk. Do you run the plant to run flat-out? Good luck getting wide spread adoption without dramatically shifting the supply/demand curve and making the result nonviable.

The current problem with electric vehicles is range anxiety. Not having the vehicle charging at all times will not help adoption. Also there aren't that many electric vehicles to provide any meaningful storage capacity.

The economics of attaching together a wide variety of batteries in a common plant like that are against you. If the world was standardised on one type of battery, maybe. But batteries die exponentially only at the end of their life. A battery that is at 80% capacity after 4 years does not have a meaningful life left in it for any kind of storage system.

We already do, next question.

There's whole industries dedicated to doing just what you propose.

No. Logically thinking engineers do what you suggest, solar energy advocates do that too to some extent.

Solar energy activists will generally shout from the roof top that coal is evil and won't be happy until every last fossil fuel use is abolished.

Yes Microsoft is evil for the action not because of what they did, but because of the power they had at the time.

OSX is a minor player in a tightly closed ecosystem that people buy into. There's absolutely no way anyone can argue that OSX has a monopoly on anything, they can bundle what they want without major wide reaching influence.

Windows on the other hand was the only product available on any new computer. You could literally not buy a computer without Windows at the time. They didn't get in trouble for bundling ie with the OS, they got in trouble for bundling it with something that was in turn forced down the end-users throats in an anti-competitive way meaning that there was no way anyone could buy a PC at the time without getting ie despite the existence of other OSes at the time.

It's implying no such thing. The actions of a company can not be linked to coercive power without understand the needs or wants of the customer first. There is some benefit to both parties that Google's results are promoted to the top and many customers like getting consistent and understandable results. I.e. if I type "maps" into Google I would see it as a sign of a failing search algorithm to not promote Google Maps to the very top of the list. It is incredibly interesting that Bing will also list Google as the top result for maps, and only lists itself as number 4.

A monopoly in one field does not make an action in another against anti-trust laws. For instance Microsoft got done for bundling IE with Windows where it had a clear monopoly on the market. If instead they bundled IE with flight simulator it doesn't matter.

Likewise Google is manipulating search results to boost it's own services to end users. The end users are however free to do as they please. That doesn't make them necessarily against the anti-trust law for the monopoly they have on internet advertising.

And regardless of what experts think, what really matters in this case is exclusively what the judge thinks and that hasn't been tested as far as I know.

Why? People should be free to drive whatever they want and can afford. In many cases new cars have far better safety features than older shitboxes. I learnt to drive on a shitbox and owned a shitbox, but the one time I nearly had an accident I was driving my parent's convertible and lives were potentially saved by ABS, a feature which my car didn't have.

What people should NOT drive is a car beyond their means. I like the direction some states headded with the introduction of a 130kW/t power-to-weight restriction for provisional driver holders. Watching idiot teenagers behind the wheel of muscle cars, or hotted up cars without any increase in safety features (i.e. boosting the power output without boosting the suspension, breaks, or wheel size) just boggles the mind.