Videoconferencing from any device on the planet without installing any special software is bloat?

YES, in the same way that every user on the planet would probably want a calculator once in a while but that doesn't mean the browser needs to add one!

A 14" (or better yet, 13.5") 4:3 ratio screen would work great for an e-reader: it would be big enough to display a whole sheet of paper (either A4 or letter, I think) and still have room for menus and whatnot along the edges.

Having the ability to touch any word on the screen and have definitions, translations, and wikipedia entries pop up as you read (which is great for many of the older books) is a fantastic benefit...

Why, are you illiterate or something?

No, seriously -- if you have to go look up stuff often enough for that to be a big deal, then (a) the book is too hard for you and (b) you're missing the point of reading. You'd lose sense of how the story flows if you keep starting and stopping like that. When you run across the occasional unfamiliar word, it provides a better experience just to figure it out from context and move on.

Capacity begets usage. It's so true it's even been a meme ("if you build it, they will come") from before the Internet made "memes" a meme! Building a pipeline to ship the oil faster will cause more oil to be shipped in a shorter period of time.

If you don't like having the oil shipped by rail, then fix that problem instead! (Make the rail cars safer, prohibit shipping oil by rail -- whatever.)

In what way is Chicago landlocked? The entire point of its existence is the fact that it's a good port to ship things from the interior of the US out the St. Lawrence Seaway to the rest of the world.

But, the most crappy, inefficient code in the world can be covered up by hardware

Well, until it gets the answer wrong in a way that fucks up the business...

...But by then, the management fucks who made the bad decision have gotten their golden parachutes and shed their liability, so nobody gives a shit, apparently.

I really want to see what you can do with $30K in Atlanta.

Before I graduated and started working, my wife and I lived comfortably on her $30K artist's salary. We even bought a three-bedroom house in a decent neighborhood close to downtown. Of course, this was in 2009.... our house would cost about twice that much now.

(We still live comfortably spending less than $30K, although I now make a lot more.)

And btw, why aren't there americans willing to work for $60K?

There are! They just aren't willing to relocate to a fucking cardboard box in Silicon Valley.

“machines that learn to represent the world.” That’s eight words.

methinks seven :-)

It is hard to imagine the developed world will willingly give up the one technology that could end terrorism in failed nation states. The potential is here to vastly reduce civilian casualties while taking out terrorist commanders. Imagine a small drone with only a few conventional small arms rounds. It sits unattended in some unobserved location charging its batteries with solar cells, and constantly monitoring conversations and scanning faces. When a baddie is found it pops up, a kill shot to the head and flies off or self-destructs. We’ll make these things by the tens of thousands and individually they will be cheap.

Maybe there will be a human in the loop – maybe not – depends on how good the face recognition and voice recognition software is and how much political heat our leaders are willing to take. But if the kill ratios are good and civilian causalities are down autonomous operation will become the norm.

Perhaps this all seems dystopian, and in many ways it will be. Eventually the technology may be used for political assassination in first world countries as well. War could well become a thing that only leaders fear as their will be no foot soldiers to kill enmass (they’ll be replaced with robots). Military leaders and politicians will be the only high value targets and perhaps command and control bunkers.

These are not weapons that non-state actors will be able to develop (to any sophisticated degree). There is no chance we will take a pass on them.

The company I work for is currently code-naming their projects after cartoon characters.

Many of them don't even understand how computers actually work.

Given that understanding how (modern) computers actually work requires a working knowledge of quantum mechanics (not in any CS curriculum I've ever seen), not surprising.

Of the day? Howabout "de rigueur" required.

Given the hardware advances in the 6 years since the 1000HE was released, I find it hard to believe Asus can't put out a computer that serves the same purpose for the same amount of money. Or less money.

I bought an Asus X200CA (12" touchscreen, slow CPU, 4 GB RAM) for about $260 back in October. They do make computers that serve the same purpose for the same amount of money (or less money); it's just that the computer in TFA isn't it.