If you only want to make calls over WiFi, then the solution already exists. Sign up for a Google Voice number, then install the Google Hangouts Dialer, and you're all set.

The potential value-add here is not the voice or texting service, but access to the WiFi network.

Why did they not support 4K?

This is the same vertical resolution as 4K, but slightly lower horizontal resolution. Why not support both 4K and double HD? It just seems silly not to try to match the resolution that movies are being produced in.

Real gamers use paper, pencils, and dice.

That's the problem with becoming dependant on a behavior that you want to prevent.

The same issue comes up with self-driving cars. What do you do about all the lost ticket revenue when you stop having traffic violations? How do police react when they lose the ability to use a traffic stop as an excuse to find drugs in cars?

How do you fund roads with a gas tax when cars become more fuel efficient and eventually switch to electricity (often generated at home with solar panels)?

Changes happen. Policies will adapt to reflect them.

Assuming this is effective, should it be added to the required list of vaccines for attending school? Imagine if it were impossible for anyone to become addicted to nicotine in the first place. The smoking rate would drop to essentially zero.

What if China required it for everyone?

This has the possibility to completely destroy the tobacco industry.

I think Google only really cares about data. Perhaps the Google-branded service will be LTE-only, including voice over LTE. If so, then they don't really care about CDMA or GSM. They may even ignore voice and tell people to use the Google Hangouts dialer with Google Voice.

That would be a pretty reasonable strategy for Google, since they're certainly going to be mostly interested in the data side of things anyway.

They may be afraid of being made irrelevant by a deal like this, but they're much more afraid of being made irrelevant by a deal with their competitors. Imagine how different the market would be today if the original exclusive iPhone contract had been with someone other than AT&T.

Besides, one likely end scenario if this goes huge is that Google buys their partners.

That's going to kill the resale value of the existing Leafs, so if you want a short-range electric vehicle at a good price, there are going to be some great deals in the next two years.

I run a Tor relay, but I set it up to also allow exit for specific sites, such as Google.

I don't use Tor much myself, but I figure I'm a step ahead of the game by being in the habit of opening most links in a private browser (killing tracking unless I'm tethered to my phone--thanks Verizon).

I just set up a file server (NAS4Free), and it currently has tons of extra space. I would be more than happy to get something back for the extra space until I need it.

For security, I would hope they set up the file servers as Tor dark sites, so even if the encryption fails, there would be no easy way to track down where the storage is.

Remember the HTC EVO 3-D? It had a 3-D screen and took 3-D photos and movies. Remember how the revolutionary technology completely took over the market? No, it was pretty much ignored.

I had the HTC EVO 4G which preceded it, and it was a pretty good phone for the day (though Sprint's 4G coverage was horrible--I used it once in the years I had it; too bad they didn't start out with LTE).

3-D has always been a gimmick to attract consumers that has mostly failed. Hollywood is still trying it as a way to get people to have a different experience in the theater from home, but few people seem to care. TV manufacturers jumped on it, but they didn't sell. It's just not something people care about.

There's a big difference between making irrational choices and presenting a future world where the systems simply wouldn't work as described. From a writing standpoint, you want your readers immersed in the story, not distracted by inconsistencies that suggest the world as described was not given much thought.

Yup, this raise one of my big complaints about some SciFi stories: lack of economic plausibility.

Science Fiction is great for looking at how we might deal with various potential technologies. Readers are perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and accept whatever technology is proposed. What readers aren't willing to do is suspend disbelief and accept people behaving implausibly.

To write good science fiction, you need to accurately portray people. You can make up the technology, but you have to get humanity right. And that means you have to get the economics right.

This is exactly the problem I had with reading the Hunger Games. Everything worked, except why would a society with hover cars and other advanced technology have need of the services of the districts? Surely they didn't need coal, and yet they had a whole district dedicated to mining it. The lack of economic sense pulled me out of the book. Instead of thinking about the characters, I was thinking about why the society that was described didn't make any sense.

Thanks, that's good to know. So many people talk about gaming performance, and at one point the open source drivers were getting good at some 3D without the video acceleration piece.

As to the other question, I'm probably one of the few people with a HTPC who has a tube HDTV that is 1080i. It's really a great TV (36"), and I don't have to worry about the little one knocking it over. Or maybe the HTPC crowd has lots of early adopters, but the rest have moved on to bigger and thinner.

The OpenGL stuff is nice for gamers, but what about for the HTPC? How well do the drivers do on video playback acceleration? Can they do MPEG-2 and H264 in HD resolutions with minimal CPU?

I don't suppose they can play a 1080i video and get the fields consistently correct for letting the TV handle the deinterlacing (or keep it interlaced if the TV is an old tube HDTV)?