I have two monitors too and moving tools to the second one doesn't work for a single reason - you have to reach your tools with your pointer. Now, as long as you don't mind waving your mouse-arm like a madman every two seconds it's ok. But as soon as you pick up your stylus you're faced with the hard choice of either squeezing your two monitors into your tablet's space, effectively dividing its useful surface area by a factor of about 2.5 to 4, or confining the cursor to one of the monitors, in which case you can't reach your tools with your stylus. It means that for any tablet-wielding professional multi-window mode is mostly useless. Effective UI hiding and workspace organization is vastly preferable.

The PS3 is a horrible choice for a HTPC replacement. It won't let you update your codecs, it won't play .mkv, it doesn't support subtitles, it doesn't let you record anything, the only way to get anything on it is via the slow-as-molasses USB2 connection or via lan (but it won't be much faster because the hard drive is a slow 2.5-incher) and you have to buy a remote seperately (which you can't replace with a universal one - bluetooth).

Of course there's going to be a lot of flat surfaces... After all the artists have been told to make them with a lot of flat surfaces so that they don't need too many polygons on the non-DX11 platforms.... If you want to see artwork that uses tessellation well, you have to tell artists to make some.

I wonder if NASA are using this tech in their SPHERES thingies.

Yes, because everybody else names their products simply and descriptively. Names like Windows, Linux, Firefox, Grub, Blender, Bullet, Ogre, Xbox, Google, Twitter, Python, Excel and Azure leave you with no doubt in your mind whatsoever about the function of the product.

But aren't the differences relatively minor? Is there really so much that MySQL can do that Oracle can't? Can't these differences be resolved just by tweaking the queries?

Actually, I wouldn't mind one. My current one barely does 8 with just browsing the web and probably less while playing games, which is why I never play them.

I don't know about the US but where I live there is such a thing as a periodic maintenance checkup. They could make sensor checks and software updates mandatory. And the software can always transmit its year/version along with the data so that our car can disregard any data from outdated systems. But it's all moot until there's law that says car makers are not responsible for any crashes the software causes - because they won't ever dare sell you an automated car otherwise.

International Law is only as good as the troops you're willing to send to uphold it.

When the panel is on but not connected there will usually be some kind of message on screen telling you to connect an input or some such so it doesn't matter. I'd much rather have true blacks.

Actually, I just don't watch movies on a monitor so I never thought of that. I use a projector (which supports 2.39:1 mode) for movies, or I just go to a proper cinema. I do watch the odd anime or TV show on a monitor, or connect a console sometimes and that's usually 16:9. I don't own an actual TV.

Call it OCD if you will, but it's just annoying getting black bands on the screen that constantly remind you that black levels on LCDs suck. Might be less of a problem on those fancy-shmancy LED-backlit LCDs or OLEDs or AMOLEDs or what-have-you, but for the rest of the people who have TN panels, (not really)black bands really suck.

On the other hand, it's twice as large as a microSD card which holds several orders of magnitude more data. If you take into account the housing and the circuitry needed to read the SIM card, it's no longer as ridiculous as you think.

But there is a good reason. Complex selections can take quite a while to set up. If you miss the transform widget in max, your selection is ruined. (At least that's the way it was around 2001 when I last saw it.) In Blender nothing in particular happens except moving your cursor.

As you have yourself pointed out, it's easily changed. But the default is kind of logical too - you do important, destructive stuff with your left button and less critical, non-destructive stuff with your right button. Just like in Windows, Gnome, KDE, etc.