3D tv, 4K tv...it's all diminishing returns. Yes it's a better picture but it's not THAT much better. Certainly not worth the steep premium. It's the same reason that I'm still rocking my 5 year old MacBook Pro. Sure the new ones are faster but I'm happy with mine.

This is the challenge that all hardware makers face. Whether it's refrigerators, stereos, cars, cellphones. Nearly every category is really good - good enough for most everyone. There will always be the early adopters but many people - like me - are perfectly happy with what they have.

"I can't see the point of touch, unless you're walking around with it" - Bingo. If you need a device on the shop room floor or a warehouse then maybe the Surface is a good choice. Or perhaps you work in a hospital and need something to record patient notes.

But that's a pretty limited market. The fact of the matter is that the laptop is already the best form factor for productivity type work. Keyboard, mouse, good sized screen. Tablets are for goofing around on for the most part. Let's keep the two form factors separate.

and so too is Surface. It's trying to do too much and ends up not doing anything very well. Who wants a 12 inch tablet? Nobody. How about a 12 inch laptop? Could be ok for some tasks but it's a crappy keyboard - and it runs Windows 8.

The Macbook Air, which it's being compared to, is a far superior productivity device than the Surface. It has a real keyboard included (and a good one too).

Sorry but I just don't see Surface as best of breed. I can see people buying them hoping to have some sort of magical all in one device and ending up bringing another tablet along anyway. Because the Surface doesn't cut it as a tablet.

7 inch tablets are the way to go if you're going to have one and MS made a huge strategic miss by not offering one. Larger tablets are dying off in popularity now so who is this thing marketed to?

In principle it's supposed to stop telemarketers from bugging you. But in reality you still get calls because companies that you are currently doing business with are allowed to solicit you. Companies lobbied Congress for a loophole and got it.

As long as Do Not Track is voluntary it will be ineffective.

Actually Windows Phone is pretty good. But their market penetration is miniscule. The problem at MS is that they don't know how to market anything. They have made lots of good products (Zune comes to mind) that have failed in the marketplace. Lots. This new Surface just smells like another one to me.

it's a question of who is in power vs. who is not in power. When Obama was a Senator he was against mass surveillance (and Guantanamo for that matter) but when he gets in power he sees things differently. Same thing would have happened if Romney or McCain got elected.

The problem is that to ascend to those levels you have to make so many deals with big business and assorted money men. Then when you get in power they are all knocking at your door looking for favors.

The American government has brainwashed it's citizens into believing that there is an actual "terrorist" threat (whatever the hell that means) and that the only way to contain it is to collect information on everyone. Bullshit. You want "terrorists" to leave us alone? Then stop taking sides in the Middle East conflict. The US has, and will always be, strongly Pro-Israel. At the same time, they present themselves as mediators. How can a country be a mediator when it is so clearly in favor of one side over the other?

The United Nations has looked into it and passed numerous sanctions against Israel, mainly concerning the occupied territories and the continuing settlement building. All of them are ignored.

then Google can start collecting information on how often I open my fridge and then cross reference that with information from the supermarket (captured on those "loyalty" cards) that tells them the types of food I buy. From that they will determine that my diet is too high in trans fats and immediately notify every insurance company on earth to NOT sell me an insurance policy because of my poor dietary habits.

Do no evil my ass. I don't trust any of those Google pricks with my information. Same goes for Facebook.

Nothing - provided I'm right and they actually sell a lot in the enterprise market. That remains to be seen as the other two Surface tables haven't exactly set the world on fire.

I don't see this thing as a laptop replacement. I see it as a big tablet trying to be a laptop. A laptop with an optional keyboard. A flimsy rubber keyboard. All of the best tablet apps are either android or iOS and Surface won't run any of them.

Maybe I'm wrong here but I think it's going to be a flop. They have already lost hundreds of millions of dollars on the Surface line. Not only that but tablet sales in general are in decline. So even the good ones are not getting sold at the same pace.

Sure, the hardware specs look good. Nice processor, screen, etc. Light weight. Promises of great battery life.

But here's the problem...it's still running Windows 8 which nearly everyone seems to hate. Same thing with the phone. Nice Nokia hardware but shitty OS.

MS continues to make the mistake of comparing their hardware to the Mac hardware by only examining the hardware specs. They fail to look at it holistically. What's cool about Macs is that they run so smoothly. It's not about horsepower, it's about design. Something that is sorely lacking in Windows 8.

I predict that MS will sell quite a few of these in the enterprise market and almost none in the consumer space (well, almost none compared to the number of android and iPads that get sold).

What everyone seemed to want was a 7 inch Surface not a 12 inch Surface. Once again, MS fails to give consumers what they are asking for. Even Apple swallowed it's pride and came out with a 7 inch iPad. Why? Because it was obvious that consumers wanted it and tons of android tables with that form factor were flying off the shelves. So Apple was late to that market but at least they had enough sense to realize that they had made a mistake.

MS still has that monopolistic mindset. They don't seem to want to listen to what people want. They send out product after product to the marketplace only to lose millions of dollars on it and abandon it shortly thereafter.

What MS desperately wants to stop is the notion that you can get everything done without using any MS software or hardware. And that day is rapidly approaching if it's not already here. This new Surface will do nothing to slow that down.

BB is done. Some of their new products are interesting but BB has been irrelevant for too long. At one time they made the best smartphone on the market, certainly the most secure. Then they got fat and lazy and Apple and Android sped past them.

I had one of the older BB phones with the small screen and physical keyboard. Loved it. Great battery life, good call quality, secure. But no apps to speak of. Poor quality handsets (I know a lot of people that had to return them due to hardware failures). Then I got an iPhone and never looked back. Well, never looked back at BB. I did look at (and own) Android phones.

Now it's a two horse race. To me, BB is kind of like Windows phones. Yeah, some nice features but I'm not about to buy one. So long BB...we hardly knew ya.

Spot on. A short tale from my recent past...

There was this guy that used to live up the street from me. He had a sports car, a trailer, an SUV, a boat...basically every toy you can imagine. One day I'm driving by and I notice a sign on his front door. The bank foreclosed on his house. What an idiot. He surrounds himself with these stupid toys and neglects to pay his mortgage.

Sadly, the world is full of people like this. More concerned with trying to look rich than making the sacrifices to actually be rich. Short term gains. The guy riding the junk car with $3000 worth of tires and rims.

I look down my street and see all of these expensive cars and I just know that 8 out of 10 people can't afford them. Yet they sign up for leases and drive the things and get another one 2 years down the road. Great way to stay in debt forever.

Yeah, this GM internet thing is just going to take off for people like that.

yet another in car distraction, courteous of GM. Looks to me like a solution trying to find a problem. What, exactly, would one do with in-car internet? Catch up on the latest House of Cards episode while barrelling down the freeway at 70 mph? Fill in your fantasy football picks? While driving....in a car....possibly at high speed...certainly with a lot of distractions.

Do you think that maybe, just maybe, we could leave the internet behind until we're done driving? It's one thing to be surfing the web over a hot latte and another thing entirely to be doing it while piloting a 3000 lb. missile down the road. If you make a mistake at Starbuck's you spill your coffee. If you make a mistake in your car then maybe someone dies as a result of it.

Back in the day, unions were established to stop worker exploitation. One of the most visible of the exploited workers was the coal mine workers. They were forced to work in unsafe conditions and endure very long work hours. All so that greedy business owners could make more money off the backs of their employees.

Fast forward to today and it's a similar condition for today's tech workers. Many of them are forced to work very long hours without any overtime pay. All so that greedy business owners could make more money off the backs of their employees.

Although unions have become somewhat of a dirty word these days I can see the case for having unions for tech workers.

Off street parking - now there's a quaint notion. I remember hearing real estate agents gush about off street parking as if it were some huge benefit. Turns out that it was a huge benefit. Where I live now, everyone has off street parking. And on street parking. Heck, you just park wherever the heck you want to. No lines, no waiting.

There are a few things I miss about Boston (not many but a few) but parking is definitely not one of them.

I have no doubt that the results of this poll are accurate. It just stands to reason. Even if you happened to actually enjoy all the content of those 200 channels how could you possibly watch it all? There are just not enough hours in the day.

For me, about the only thing I watch live on cable is sporting events. Or the local news. Rarely movies because of all the commercials. Same with weekly TV series. The commercials just ruin the flow of it for me. The rest of it I will DVR and watch later - while skipping over the commercials. Almost all the movies and weekly series that I watch now come from Netflix.

The TV Cartels...oops, Cable Providers - know full well that most people only watch a small fraction of the available TV channels. They will continue to fight a la carte programming tooth and nail. Why? Because the current model makes them more money. As always, the bottom line is the bottom line.

As the technology improves it becomes easier to cut the cord. Personally the only reason I even have cable is that my wife likes to watch some programming that's not available anywhere else. So I keep it to keep her happy. Happy wife, happy life :-)

Were it only me in the household, I could easily see going to Netflix only. I might miss the sports for a while but eventually I'd find something better to do with my time and probably wonder why I even watched sports in the first place.

Meanwhile, the TV cartels sit by and watch as the technology makes it easier and easier to escape from their filthy grip.