Both ASUS and Acer build very good desktop replacement notebooks with powerful discrete graphics, and at a reasonable price.

Oh please. What Intel did to AMD is anti-competitive and horrible, but please don't tell us the fairy tale that all benchmarks have been rigged. There exist dozens of benchmarks, as well as game and application based benches. They all show that AMD CPUs gets slaughtered when it comes to single core IPC, while also being pretty poor in the power consumption department.

Intel did nasty things to AMD, but AMD dug its own grave when it designed the current Bulldozer-based architectures with the goal of maximizing the number of cores they have, instead of per-core performance. AMD also ignored the laptop market, as well as other low power applications, and hasn't delivered anything interesting for laptops in ages.

People may want a lot of things. I want to drive a 3 ton SUV with an 8 liter V10 diesel engine, but I also want to breathe clean air. As long as such negative externalizes exist, (air pollution, global warming, etc), the market will not lead to efficient outcomes without government intervention.

The simplest way to get people to change their gas guzzling, air polluting preference is simply to gas tax. If the price of a gallon of gas was always at least 5 bucks, you would see a lot less of 4,000 pound SUVs being used as a single person commute vehicle and a grocery getter.

Of course, in the USA, adding any significant tax is a third rail of the politics, so it's pretty much impossible. So instead we got these CAFE fuel efficiency standards that require the car manufacturers to police themselves and not produce too much gas guzzling vehicles. We do know by now, the whole CAFE thing was a big fail. All it did, is completely kill the wagons, nearly completely killed large sedans, and shrunk the minivan sales, while the SUVs exploded.

Car based SUVs can still be horrible for fuel economy. For example, consider Honda Pilot. It's based on Accord. Accord (the 4-cylinder model with CVT) gets 30mpg average in the real life driving. The Pilot, even in FWD trim gets 22mpg on a highway on a good day.

The problem with CAFE's SUV loophole is that it allows the car manufacturers to sell lots and lots of very large gas guzzling vehicles, but they don't call them "cars". They start with a car based platform (e.g. Honda Accord, Ford Fusion, etc), make a large body, raise it a little bit, and lo and behold, this is no longer a car but classified as a "light truck" and therefore the car manufacturer does not get penalized for churning these gas guzzling luxo-barges because they "trucks", and have to meet much slower fuel efficiency standards.

This is like saying "sure the SATA drives are cheap, but a RAID boxes are quite expensive"

No one buys a tape drive or library for work with just one tape.

People who use tape, often have a lot more to backup that what fits on a 3TB USB drive. They probably use tape libraries connected to a storage area network, with tapes shipped to an off-site storage location.

Modern tape drives can be really fast, with transfer rates of above 100MB/s. The real bottleneck when restoring large amounts of data is often not the tape drive speed but the write performance of the storage array, specially if you're restoring lots of small files, or the networking, etc. Anyone who has moved things like user home directories between machines knows that. Remember than when you're backing up many machines, you don't always have the luxury of having the tape drive connected to each machine directly.

For consumer yes, but who is talking about consumers anywhere in the article?

We're talking about back ups, not making archives. The reliability doesn't seem that relevant for backup purposes. A typical organization probably wouldn't want to keep backups older than say a year.

OnePlus One is significant because it is now the go-to unlocked smartphone for the geeks. The OS story is mildly interesting. Another Android mod released...

I am not quite sure what you're talking about. The tracks and their skylines are beautiful, and there is always some close, often wheel to wheel, racing for the lead right until the end. The drivers are very accomplished open wheel racers. You can't compare them to the F1 top five or so, but overall they're just as good or better than a median F1 racers. In fact, many of them had a considerable amount of F1 seat time, either as a race or test driver.

And I am sorry, and I personally don't know the product is crap because of blah blah blah. Sounds like you have created a strawman argument to defend your elitist viewpoint here.

That's totally fine. You should realize that among the racing fans there are far more fans of pure racing than the nerds. This is why Formula 1 is far FAR more more popular than WEC will ever be, even though arguably WEC is more advanced tech-wise.

And so as a fan if racing, rather of the technological dick waving, I see a lot of potential in FE racing. The skylines are beautiful, the racers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, many with quite a bit of time in Formula 1 and GP2 seats, and there is always some good competition and wheel to wheel racing up to the end of race. The races are about one hour short which is perfect for our world of living a busy life and having a short attention span.

Clearly, you haven't watched any of Formula E races and in fact you have a very superficial understanding of F1 or other motorsports.

In the FE races I have seen so far, the skylines are beautiful, the drivers are the cream of crop open wheel racers, the cars go fast, and there was plenty of close wheel racing in the first five races so far. What else do you want?

On a really good year of Formula 1 racing, F1 may be more fun to watch than the first season of FE. But every other season, F1 is a major snooze fest that only die hard fans will watch. Case in point, the five years of Schumacher's continuous domination, and then four years of continuous RedBull Vettel domination, and specially years 2011 and 2013.

... , because the language has so many features that nobody but language experts understand all of them.

And I think that's fine. C++ is not an every day go-to programming language. Its use should be reserved for writing heavyweight applications (like the desktop environments, productivity apps, etc), servers, and numerical code. Considering the complexity of a typical c++ app codebase as well as the language itself, only the experts should touch it.

There are a lot of people who are still undecided, the swing voters. I think the use of private email will come up right in the middle of election campaign again.