You have a position you're trying to defend and logic and rational thinking might be the last thing on your mind. I get it. However, for your own benefit you might want to re-evaluate the latest crop of notebooks. I'm sure there are some crap ones, always are. There are also some very good ones. Not everyone plays the non-sense games such as Dell wherein you have to bust your wallet to get away from certain junk components, or certain unreasonably low specs. Asus' G751 series is such an example. It can run for hours under full CPU + GPU load with little demonstration of the fact. The case is as cool as at idle, a quiet, warm stream of air flows out the back. Performance is as I said peer with my development workstation.

This is also for a student, in case you missed it. Portable and inexpensive is key. What makes you think this student is willing/able to tether their notebook to a "big iron" back at home. Campus IT doesn't always take kindly to nor facilitate personal servers. You're also advocating two purchases which kind of defeats the point of inexpensive.

PC components are getting small enough, efficient enough and often equivalent/identical between laptop and desktop such that that advise is becoming somewhat dated. In most respects the $1800 Asus gaming notebook I recently bought is equal to the $2000, development workstation I built a year ago but with one key difference. I can take my notebook with me.

Link to entry level. You can choose an upgraded version with SSD, or save some money and add your own. Either way, it's a solid system, ample power, excellent cooling. Web browsing and basic office software will get about 4 hours on the battery, under full (gaming, presumably physics sim) load you'll get just under two hours.

Except there aren't. There are incentive for NOT hiring them. Nobody wants the liability, it doesn't matter what the profession. Nobody wants to be in the same room with a criminal. They want them locked up and never exposed to such elements.

It makes people feel good. Who cares if it or other job training programs work. If we actually gave a sh*t then criminal record consideration for employment would illegal. The reality is that there are only a handful of states with such laws, many that do only apply to public employment. Given this environment, recidivism is all but guaranteed. We just want to keep these people locked up, out of site, out of mind. Sure it's expensive, but it's also a great way to manage minority populations. After all not everyone can be deported.

Consoles were perpetuated by the game industry's want of money. They decided that the only way they'd get cash from tweens, teens and twenty-somethings was to lock down the hardware. To bait them, they offered kit that rivaled mid-spec PCs (at least in some metrics) at a price that meant they be taking a loss on each sale. They figured they could play Lexmark's game--cheap kit, absurdly expensive ink--and make up for it selling games. Evidently their plan worked.

Console owners of course are now realizing the true nature of the trap which has been laid for them. The hardware actually isn't all that great--it is just a low-spec PC that happens to have a decent GPU after all. The ink costs a fortune. Hardware refreshes don't happen very that often, and when they do the old titles often won't run on them.

For PC gamers who didn't drink the Kool-aid, we've gotten a mixed bag from it all. The big game houses treat us the wayward step-child. They cater to the consoles, and occasionally throw us a few console ports complete with all the compromises necessitated by its heritage. This however opened a vacuum that indie dev-houses are filling reasonably well. The graphics generally aren't meriting the high-spec card(s) in our rigs, but we get to reclaim notions like novelty, plots, sophisticated play, user-created features and content, and most importantly the price-value proposition.

Well given the nature of the conference... Perhaps someone was wandering around sniffing for radio emissions, or, the fellow took his car to the shop for maintenance.

I'm certain Minecraft will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. The implied idea behind a v2.0 (a reinterpretation of v1.x) however, is unlikely to happen. It doesn't seem compatible with Minecraft culture. The stereotypical, bigger, better doesn't exactly apply to Minecraft. It's blocky, low-res on purpose and that's a huge component of its charm.

Minecraft, the Java version at least, is for all practical purposes open-source. The plethora of mods out there are all built off of decompiled bytecode.

If you're playing with heuristics then, you're probably not playing with the toys that'll make the classic self-aware AI.

Actually it does develop strategy. In BreakOut it doesn't merely bounce the ball with good reaction time. It learned to tunnel up to the back side of the wall. RTFA

I think that was rhetorical... just saying.

Don't be a ditto head, think for your self man. The oil is being pumped, the oil is being transported, and the oil is being burned regardless of how it gets from point A to point B. If anything the pipeline would have the "environmental" scale pan tipping towards it. Pipes don't necessarily have to be powered by fossil fuel and piles don't derail. This is Canadian interests trying to hijack American politics and you're party to the Kool-aid chugging.

Um, how would allowing Canada to bypass the US and put the oil instead on ships bound for elsewhere increase US oil exports? The US isn't exporting that oil, Canada is exporting that oil. Right now, Canada is incentivized to sell the oil for cheap to the US since access to more lucrative markets come with higher costs. Letting Canada extend their pipeline might help Canada and China, but it will do precious little for the US and quite probably hurt it.

Why would I as an American want to make it easy for Canada to get their oil out of our country. By not extending the pipeline, it incentivizes Canada to keep it in the U.S. and thus our prices low.