Government solution: Mandate training wheels on all mountain bikes.

Mine is "iforgot".

Yeah, Microsoft is now going for portable business integration. You can manage them with Active Directory - I just added one.

We are looking to go more portable at work but we don't want to have a laptop and a tablet for every user. Picked up one of the new Surface 3 devices and while it looks like it will integrate nicely for our day-to-day use at work, I don't like it enough to have one at home for personal use. It's actually got some well thought out ideas in the device.

Given that an iPad can cost $1k now (256GB storage, same as this Surface Pro 3 I'm testing) It's not too far-fetched in price in my opinion, seeing as you can do more with it and aren't constrained to the App or Play store. Doesn't mean I'd buy one for personal use, though. Once the docks are released I can see potential for it replacing some of our old workstations.

What do you do about the aftertaste afterwards?

I dunno - when humans figure out interplanetary travel and efficient terraforming the human race will morph into a virus. Find new host, consume resources until host dies, then move on.

Well, sure - they need to confirm you got it from an authorized reseller. Most electronics on Amazon have no manufacturer warranty, for example.

When I drive a stick, if I'm starting on a hill I pull the parking brake with my hand, keeping the button held in so it didn't latch, and not release it till I had enough traction with the engine to support the car so it didn't roll backwards.

Doesn't anyone else do this?

I've driven a manual transmission for as long as I can remember and I don't do this. After a couple of hill-starts I've figured out the clutch and can start on a hill without rolling back. Heck, I don't even think about it anymore; it's a programmed response now.

The iPad mini is a good example. When Jobs frowned upon a smaller iPad a smaller device meant a lower resolution screen. Once pixel densities improved and a smaller device could have the same resolution as the original full sized device the circumstanced changed such that Jobs' original judgement no longer applied.

Really? I remember Jobs saying nobody wants a small tablet, period. I'd used a large one at work and decided it was too heavy to use, so when Google released their 7" tablet in July 2012, I bought one. It was pretty hard to get initially, they were selling quite fast in my area and as soon as stores got them in they sold. Then, in October 2012, Apple did a "me too!" and announced the iPad mini. I still think it was a reactionary move and I doubt the iPad mini would have surfaced at all if someone else hadn't released it first.

Not everybody has a 25-40 mbit connection for good quality video streaming.

For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded performance they can get, rather than more cores with lower performance per thread but far lower cost.

I do a lot of compiling, and I generally build myself a new PC every 8-10 years. Many people I know buy cheaper components only to have to replace them 3-4 times before I replace mine. I did get an EE processor back in 2008, and I'm still using it now and will for the forseeable future. For me, the compilation speed is still very acceptable 6 years in, and it's very possible I won't bother replacing my computer anytime soon - I'll probably get another 6 years out of it. Given my experience with my first EE processor, I'll probably spend the $ again and have it last another 12 years.

...and the common reply is "I like the sport but I suck at playing it."

Just render the ad screen unusable. Why the hell do appliances (especially a fridge) need a screen for? Oh, wait - they want us to buy a fridge every few years because of course the fridge won't work without an operative screen.

First thing I'd do is disable networking on these devices.

First in the sense that Apple made the first tablet. ;-)