No no no, it has to be a large white cube, with "BASKETBALL" written in the middle of every side in all caps. Orange spheres are sooo win95.

didn't know EA middle management read /.

Otherwise known as portability, otherwise known as the reason why there are computing devices on the market that aren't desktop towers. There is a power vs portability vs cost tradeoff, and the Surface is somewhere between iPads and laptops. That's all. I personally don't have a need for something like that, but I can imagine users who would.

And how often do you need remote display support while using a machine?

Huh, that's actually pretty interesting. Thanks for the link.

Yeah, I mean, X forwarding is one of those things that you very rarely need, and when you do, it either doesn't work at all because [inexplicable reasons that can't be fixed without admin on a machine you don't own or having to restart a machine that's 200 miles away], or it sort of works but makes you wish it didn't because it's too slow/glitchy. Typically ssh does the trick, sometimes combined with forwarding gnome-open to view images/pdfs/whatever (which is terrible due to the aforementioned reasons), because scp'ing every time is even more painful. All my needs would be perfectly satisfied with something that combined ssh for some cli, and some kind of automated easy to set up and disable file updating utility (like dropbox without the third party server). Since I only ever need this stuff once in a blue moon ad hoc, setting up svn or something like that is just overkill. Example -- I want to run some code on a remote machine that plots a figure or pdflatex's some file and quickly view the output, without downloading a copy of all the code/data. I have yet to find a way to do this that isn't extremely awkward...

You're right. That's why nobody uses Windows or OSX.

1/9600 times: http://www.vabike.org/vehicle-...

What percent of drivers today do you think could respond to an "interesting" situation in non-catastrophic ways? If you're a professional driver who has undergone training in responding to extreme scenarios properly and without making things worse by overreacting, sure, keep driving manual. But most people, I think, are so far from that level of competence that the reduced number of "interesting" situations due to the conservatism and consistency of self-driving cars would far outweigh the potential slight increase in bad human handling of said situations.

Eh? Being able to operate a tool effectively has very little to do with being able to understand said tool. It's much easier to use an iPhone than the ENIAC 1, despite the former being billions of times more powerful and complex.

Cool, you keep giving her sacks of potatoes and understanding why she's angry. I'd rather give her a box of chocolates, and not understand why I got laid.

Judea Pearl and others have done a lot to work that out. It's the science of answering "what if". It's not impossible.

When is the last time a large population of Jews had their belongings confiscated, were required to register with the government, and were confined to special neighborhoods?

Considering all that old housing, I'd say probably.

It's kind of funny that you can be walking around here in a normal neighborhood, turn a corner, and suddenly see a house or row of houses that you're sure must cost a million $$ or more. And most of them are so breathtakingly beautiful....