With the Surface Pro, you don't have to worry about apps, because you can run full windows programs. You aren't just limited to what can run in the app store. You could even run a VM with Linux on it if you wanted. Run a web server, a database, Photoshop, or Solidworks. You can completely ignore the Windows App store if you want to. Personally I think it is a mistake asking extra for the keyboard though. They should make it included, and maybe add $50-$70 to accomodate the price of the keyboard. But adding $120 onto the price of an already expensive device is probably hurting adoption quite a bit.

What's interesting is that GPS works much in the same way. You aren't measuring angles to known stars, but rather distances from known satellites, and it all works because there are atomic clocks on the satellites so you know exactly when the message left the satellite. It's a much more high tech way of doing almost the exact same thing.

This is my biggest problem with Android. I don't want to go with iOS, because although the updates come right from the supplier, the only way to load software on it is through the app store. I'm due for a new phone in a few months and I really don't like any of the choices. Going with Android means I probably won't get updates. Going with Apple means that I'm locked into Apple. Going with Windows Phone means that my phone is severely lacking in apps. I'm seriously thinking about getting the cheapest phone I can get that does tethering, and spending the remaining money on a Windows 8 Tablet like the Dell Venue 8 so I can run whatever I want, and get software updates straight from the source. My phone would basically be a cellular radio so my portable devices can have internet access, but wouldn't need to be much good for things other than checking email, or looking up a quick map.

Every app can access the files/folders after I've selected it with the file selection interface. They can't just go and start reading and writing to all parts of the disk. Basically the same feature that this article is talking about, except that on Windows RT (all all Wndows Store apps), it also allows you to grant access to OneDrive or network shares.

I've had this on my Surface 2 with Windows RT, and I wonder why it took so long for Android to do the same. I can also mount network drives and do the same thing. Every app can access files on my network shares, OneDrive (aka SkyDrive), and my SD Card without the developer having to do any special coding.

Might work for games because they have evolved so much in the last 28 years that stuff from 28 years ago doesn't really act as much of a threat to those trying to sell new games. Think about how this would work with books, movies, and music though. Imagine if everything made 1986 or earlier was in the public domain. That's a huge catalog. And since things like CDs existed in 1986, there would be perfect copies of this stuff available for free. It would be a lot harder for people to sell stuff if you could get more content than you could ever consume in your life for free. Sure there's a lot of content out there in the public domain, but a lot of it is so old that the language seems almost foreign to a lot of us. I agree that copyright needs to be shorter, but it also blows my mind to think of the amount of content that would be available as public domain if copyright only lasted 28 years.

Go try Alone in the Dark, or even worse, Hugo's House or Horrors. I remember spending countless hours playing those two games. Went back and played them a little while ago and they just don't hold up.Granted I never really thought of them as "realistic", but I remember them being a lot more fun than they are.

I don't know the exact numbers, but I would guess that the number of warehouse employees vastly outnumbers the technical employees. Facebook only has 8,300 employees, while Amazon has 132,000.

I do get changed in my room. For returning to my room, I just lounge by the pool until I'm sufficiently dry. It doesn't take that long to dry off.

I could be less convenient in many ways though. For one thing, this means that I have to bring my phone with me when I go to the pool or the gym. Also, I don't think that the current cards are that expensive to replace. If they were, they could just charge the client for unreturned or lost cards, same as if other things in the room go missing.

The only reason there's no such thing as carbon free energy sources is because so many human activities depend on sources of energy that aren't carbon free. Technically we need carbon based energy sources to make wind turbines, but if we switched over to 100% wind generation (assuming it was possible), then we could make wind turbines and produce wind energy in a carbon free way. Obviously nothing can be carbon free right now, because even if the maintenance guy drives a diesel truck to fix it, it's not absolutely carbon free. But as long as the technology itself doesn't require the use of carbon generated energy, then we should be able to refer to it as carbon free.

As far as other environmental impacts go, such as the environmental aspects of hydroelectric dams, those should also be taken into consideration, but those impacts have nothing to do with whether or not something is carbon free.

Exactly. Although I'm sure that Amazon has a lot of technical people that work for them, as do Google and Facebook, there's also a lot of non-technical employees, such as those who work in the warehouses, which you would likely not find at Google and Facebook. People like to compare them just because their main services are offered through a website, but other than that, they are about as unrelated as you can get.

The problem is that many places have laws that prevent electric bikes from going too fast. I'm in Ontario, and it's 32 km/h (20 mph) here. In some places in Europe and Australia it's 28km/h. I agree that it's a little slow, but you have to set the limit somewhere. Set it too high and you might have some problems. Some cheap e-bikes are quite heavy and could cause damage if they were going 50 km/h. Since bikes don't require insurance, there could be a few problems if they are travelling too fast.

Possibly. But in 5 years, I fully expect a phone that does everything I want a phone to do to cost $100 or less. $300 isn't that cheap for a phone. Sure it's cheaper than a $700 iPhone, but it's still quite high. I don't see the Apple being able to ask $700 for the latest iPhone in 5 years and maintain the level of sales they are used to. There's only so much you can do on a 5 inch phone, especially when they try to make it so thin. If there's a 5 inch device selling for $700 in 5 years, it had better have a full desktop operating system, with HDMI/Displayport out, and USB 3(or whatever version they are up to by then. Then I can carry around an entire computer in my pocket, put it in a doc, and use it like a desktop or laptop.

I think the problem is that because this is so much different from the other phones on the market, the price will end up being high. So the people with real concerns about the cost of upgrades won't be able to afford it. The people who will be able to afford it are the people who will go out and buy the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy every year. They have they money to get the newest phone all the time, and upgrading isn't an issue. This isn't going to help the person who buys a Moto G for $180 and uses that for 2-3 years, and then buys a whole new phone. For that person, it will still be cheaper to buy a whole new phone every time they want an upgrade.

What would really be awesome is getting phones with better support for upgrading the software. Google should figure out a way for people to keep using the same hardware drivers that came with their phone and upgrade the rest of the OS so that people aren't left with 2 year old bugs because they chose the wrong phone and the manufacturer decided not to issue an update. The updates should come straight from Google, and the manufacturer or carrier shouldn't be able to have anything to do with the upgrade process. If they are looking at the advantages of desktops over phones, this is what they should really be striving for.