I am not a subject matter expert; but the swift divergence of typical resolutions on small-screen devices with typical resolutions on larger monitors makes me suspect that manufacturing technique has improved substantially at fabricating very small pixels; but less dramatically at avoiding flawed pixels cropping up often enough to hurt yields of large and high resolution screens.

I mean no disrespect to the (likely substantial) engineering effort and cleverness that goes into cramming 2560x1440 into some teeny little phone screen; but it does have the advantage that, if the glass is being cut into a large number of small screens you can limit your defect-related losses to a relatively small percentage of the total area, even if an unacceptable defect or two shows up in every sheet produced. With larger screens, you need much larger areas of zero unacceptable defects or you'll be scrapping substantial amounts of material.

Less important; but still an issue in a few cases(eg. 'retina' iMacs) is that external display interconnects have to hew quite closely to standards because they'll otherwise not work at all(or work erratically depending on sheer luck and generate a huge number of returns), or have to be sold as (wildly expensive) specialist-vendor-validated-and-guaranteed card/monitor pairs(I assume that the absurdly high resolution zillions-of-greys monitors used for reviewing radiology data have already gone down this road at least at the high end). With an embedded display, doing something nonstandard costs more than doing something supported by every cheapo SoC vendor on the pacific rim; but you otherwise have total freedom to do whatever you want, as long as you can deliver a product that works when the customer pokes it. They will never know, and never care, exactly what you did between the logic board and the LCD panel.

You will pay for the privilege(and your ears won't thank you); but is the scaling of SLI/Crossfire good enough to save you? A quick look shows that you can get motherboards with up to 7 GPU slots without recourse to any terribly specialist vendors(they aren't cheap; but they are perfectly normal motherboard brands that you could have from Newegg by Monday, not some specialist display wall vendor who might get you a quote in the same amount of time), so you can throw a lot of GPUs at the problem; but that only helps if performance actually improves at something vaguely approaching a reasonable multiple of how many cards you add.

Arguably, that depends on how large the display is. In the tablets and smartphones market(and, at least to an extent, smaller TVs and monitors) higher resolutions are mostly about aesthetic improvements. Between the limits of human dexterity on input devices and the limits of human vision you can't use the extra pixels to actually make UI elements smaller(it still has to be a certain minimum size for the user to see it, click it, or touch it, regardless of how many pixels fit in that physical area); but you can use them to make things look buttery smooth and more or less eliminate visible jaggies.

In larger panels, there is still a good deal of room(at least for users with decent eyes) to use additional pixels to add additional effective 'space' into a monitor of the same size. No longer being able to see the nasty huge pixels that result when some terrible person smears 1920x1080 over a 27 inch screen is nice(seriously, guys, WTF is up with the increasing sizes of 1920x1080 monitors? Used to be you could get 19.5/20-inch ones quite easily, now the market is rotten with 22 inch and higher); but it's the increase in work room that really makes the difference.

I wonder if it would become natural/intuitive enough to be essentially unnoticeable after a week or two of practice to have a knob or something mapped to adjust mouse sensitivity on-the-fly? If it didn't become intuitive, such an arrangement would really be no better than just using the usual OS adjustment dialogs; but if a little practice caused you to stop even having to think about the fact that you are using it such an arrangement(doesn't need to be that specific peripheral, it's just sort of the iconic USB-attached-knob) it could actually be pretty handy to be able to smoothly move between sweeping-but-imprecise zooming around your giant screen(s) and then upping the sensitivity as you approach the target and need to get some precise clicking done.

Wow "Lack of VESA mount" on something that isn't a sub $100 pack-in piece of shit? What the hell were they thinking?

Perhaps if you are buying your LCDs just to watch TV the 'content' argument is a serious problem; but c'mon, essentially all modern 'TV's are just big monitors with built in ATSC/DVT-B tuners and severely questionable EDID data.

Especially when the resolution is an integer multiple of what the existing 'content' was designed for, and a PC with suitably punchy GPU (which actually isn't much punch these days unless you are gaming, where things can admittedly get damned expensive at high resolutions, this isn't the bad old days when you had to buy some freaky Matrox unit to get a VGA out that didn't turn into blurryvision when it met a real monitor) can drive a seriously enormous screen, who cares?.

Quit carping about how Sony hasn't yet graced us with Premium Ultra HD Content on Blu-Ray 2.0 and embrace the fact that you can buy a terrifying pixel-battery of your very own at surprisingly attractive prices. Still a few kinks to work out at very high resolutions that currently available displayport or HDMI standards can't drive properly; but that's really the remaining issue.

There are way better places to hide C4 if you have access to it that they won't be able to detect.

Sounds like you got burned...

I confess to being a bit baffled at how these power cord defects keep happening. Your basic AC power cord is ancient by the standards of electronic gizmos and by far the simplest thing going into a modern laptop. Does that simplicity attract a tendency to live dangerously with the low bidder? Is strain relief just ugly enough that people who don't know better keep trying to cut it out of the design?

That and the invidious notion that 'consumers' really don't need or deserve control over their devices is fairly alarmingly entrenched. Even when the system in question isn't one that you 'licensed and not sold' to the sucker, you can have your merry way with them in ways that you'd never get away with in the context of real property.

If infiltration and covert execution of a rootkit were treated even as seriously as, say, physical trespass, Sony would have had a problem. As it was, the response was along the lines of "Well, yes, you have a trespasser; but we can hardly make a case out of it unless you can prove that he is otherwise making a nuisance of himself or something."

True; but shareholders tend to have...finite...patience for using the proceeds of an actually profitable division to engage in an open ended clusterfuck somewhere else in the company.

If you can make a strategic case for it, or it promises to be temporary, they can usually be made to suck it up; but it's not a blank check, even if the other division is all kinds of healthy.

Perhaps more importantly, even if that were true how would it be relevant?

It is, in fact, the case that (aside from one or two idiot jurisdictions that tried to ban 'hacker tools', an attempt that either bans absolutely nothing or bans all security research and every security and diagnostic utility right down to 'ping') possession of some fairly potent dual-use tools is downright white-hat, and even shameless sale of ready-weaponized exploits is done without legal risk(looking at you, Vulpen).

However, the second amendment usually doesn't come into it, the fact that it's all just software (which just isn't something most people get viscerally worked up about) and so much of it is at least as useful for playing defense as for playing offense does.

Even if, in some weird fringe corner of survivalist grey hats or something, it was treated as a second amendment issue, so what? The Second Amendment protects your right to keep and bear arms, not your right to use them on anyone who pisses you off without any legal niceties. If you are dishing out the vigilante justice, it doesn't much matter what basis you found your right to possess the weapons you are using; you still have a fairly serious legal problem. Even among its most enthusiastic proponents, the 2nd only protects possession, it doesn't magically make all uses lawful.

To get the Keurig Genuine Advantage, obviously.

Does Displayport 1.2 do '4k' without multi-stream-transport hacks? I've been given the impression that that...sometimes...works as expected and is largely untrustworthy. At least it's possible.

I can't really disagree with you(and this is why I bought some VGA/DVI to LVDS converters and rescued some old 1400x1050 laptop panels); but the one somewhat mitigating factor is how absurdly cheap the things have gotten.

If I had an unlimited budget then and an unlimited budget now I'd probably be bemoaning the industry; but without an unlimited budget I find it hard to deny that, while I don't much like this 16:9 nonsense, I've never owned more pixels in my life.