I think you've nailed it - the lack of any sort of quality control will cause this thing to flame out pretty quickly. The hardware also strikes me as ridiculously anemic.

However, I could see both Apple and Amazon releasing similar devices, based on Apple's iOS and Amazon's customized version of Android respectively, and tied to their existing online stores. They could sign deals with top developers to produce software - software that could also run on their tablets in theory - and act as a filter to keep their game stores from overflowing with crap.

Their gadgets would have to sport more advanced hardware than the Ouya, but both Apple and Amazon should be capable of convincing enough people to shell out, say, $200-$300 on a console / media center to make such a platform viable.

If Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo aren't very nervous, they should be. The barriers to entry in the console business have clearly gotten a lot lower in the past five years, and there are at least a couple of large players now in a position to challenge them quite effectively without investing the billions MS, Sony and Nintendo have spent establishing their current position.

Come to think of it, Samsung is another potential threat. They don't have the online distribution power of an Apple or Amazon, but they could churn out the hardware cheaper than anyone, and they know Android inside and out.

I thought these Republican idiots were supposed to be great businessmen and job creators. So how is it the Kenyan socialist communist fascist Marxist Muslim empty chair community organizer ran a campaign that outfoxed and outplayed them at every turn, even without having an entire media empire (Rupert Murdoch) spewing favorable propaganda 24/7 for free?

You'd almost think these Republican business geniuses were really a bunch of incompetent, thieving rich idiots who couldn't run a successful taco stand without help from their daddy's buddies and generous taxpayer subsidies coming from people who, you know, actually work for a living.

>This puts this 2.5% victory as the 6th smallest out of 14 elections

In other words, it's in the middle of the pack.

Whoops, got that EC count totally wrong. Obama's the first Dem since Roosevelt to be re-elected with more than 50% of the popular vote. All of the Dems who got re-elected won more than 300 votes in the EC (although Carter got elected on just 297).

>2.4% *is* a small difference.

By the standards of modern Presidential elections it's not that small. Bush won in 2004 with only a 2.46% margin - lower than Obama's 2.5% now being reported - and had the audacity to call his re-election a "mandate". Of course, this is the same guy who "won" with a -0.51% margin in 2000.

Carter only won with a 2.06% margin. Nixon came into his first term on a 0.70% margin. Kennedy bagged a 0.17% margin.

At the other extreme, Nixon blew away McGovern with a 23.15% margin, although that second term didn't exactly turn out the way the Republicans expected...

>That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney
>neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin.

Uh, I'm sorry, but "all" the polls did not have Obama & Romney "neck and neck". Gallup and Rasmussen had them neck and neck in the national polls, but we don't elect Presidents via national polls, we elect them via the Electoral College on a state-by-state basis. And virtually all of the polls in most of the swing states showed Obama leading by comfortable margins greater than 2% throughout the past few months. It was only truly close in Florida (where Obama managed to squeak out a win) and North Carolina (where Obama remained behind though close in the polls in the weeks leading up to the election). There was a dip in the swing state polls after the first debate, but that quickly evaporated and by the time of the election Obama was about back to his polling peak on average.

Obama won the Electoral College by an enormous margin. The popular vote he only won by about 2%, which is a respectable margin but not as impressive as the roughly 60/40 split of votes in the Electoral College. That having been said, I believe he's the first Democrat since FDR to be re-elected with more than 300 votes in the Electoral College, and likely a harbinger of things to come for the Democratic Party, especially since the Republicans seem to be doubling down on the stupid.

>It is really telling how close to lunacy the Republican party leadership is.

It's really FRIGHTENING how close to lunacy the Republican Party leadership is. They clearly believed their own B.S. These clowns aren't just liars, they're delusional. Like, Baghdad Bob delusional.

I guess this is what happens when a major political party is comprised of fundamentalist religious fanatics with an average IQ of about 80, the senile, and a small crust of wealthy inbred fools who've never worked an honest day in their lives and couldn't run a successful taco stand without daddy's money and connections.

Something's gotta be wrong with your car. I have a 2008, and get 25mph and higher in city driving. And I floor it from stoplights and seldom gradually coast to a stop. The 2011 got better mileage than the 2008 IIRC.

Maybe its your tires?

I'd try taking it to another dealer and have them check it out.

Do you drive it with the A/C running a lot of the time, either for cooling or defogging? I've found the A/C in mine isn't terribly effective, although I haven't noticed it being a huge gas suck.

>Yeah, get back to us when tablets have more than 64GBs of storage, and don't need to be tethered to a wifi to get things done.

Wireless connectivity is almost ubiquitous at this point. I have high-speed connectivity at home and at the office. The era of the desktop computer is rapidly drawing to a close. The cloud is obviously supplanting it. I wouldn't be surprised to see the desktop PC completely replaced within 5 years by a tiny Apple TV-sized box you plug into your monitor. It'll communicate with whatever other devices and interface gadgets (keyboards, mice, motion control, voice) you happen to have on hand, and with your cell phone and tablets. It'll sport advanced voice control, like Siri but far more capable, all powered by the cloud. It'll do games too, via a service like OnLive, and media, and if you want to run high-end software like Photoshop that'll be available to subscribe to for $20 a month if you're a professional or maybe $5 for a one day one-off use. It'll all be running on incredibly powerful virtual machines out in the cloud, so folks won't need to blow $1,500 every few years upgrading their computers to run the latest & greatest software. You'll buy a $200 Apple TV like box, a phone and a tablet or whatever and subscribe to whatever level of service you require beyond that.

Ubiquitous connectivity changes everything. It's essentially headed toward Star Trek technology, where you say "Computer" and tell it what you want it to do and it does it. "Computer, book me a flight to Boston on August 23rd. I can't spend more than $350." "OK, do you want an exit row seat like you usually request? And I won't search United because you hate them."

Also, shifting processing to the cloud offloads a lot of battery burden from these increasingly tiny mobile devices, saving power for their wireless radios. In the business world, it gets companies out of having to pay the Microsoft tax every three years and deal with the hassle of swapping out expensive machines. If everything lives in the cloud, managing the dumb terminals becomes a lot easier.

Intel has the best fabrication facilities on earth, bar none. If they can't make it selling x86 chips, they could always open the floodgates to manufacturing ARM-based chips for Apple. There's more than enough demand there to soak up all of Intel's excess manufacturing capacity. It would dent their margins, but they'd still be enormously profitable.

If PC sales continue their recent tailspin, Intel may be left with no choice. They're counting on Atom-derived low-power x86 chips running Windows to save their platform's bacon. We'll see if Microsoft can deliver with Win 8 everywhere. My guess is it'll be a fiasco, but then Microsoft convinced plenty of idiots to buy that terd Vista, so who knows...

I'm loving the new Apple maps, at least here in the US. Seems to have no problem finding addresses, and features spoken, turn by turn instructions. Used them extensively this weekend. Huge upgrade over the old Google maps.

Now, apparently the default maps app sucks - at least for the moment - in many countries overseas. China oddly enough not being one of them. The Chinese are apparently marveling at how much better Apple's map app is than Google's. Go figure.

Seems to depend a lot on the quality of the map database Apple bought in each country. In the US they bought their data from Tom Tom, which is pretty high quality (for driving, anyhow). Overseas looks like it's a crap shoot.

I think a lot of users are going to read the hysteria surrounding Apple's maps, then have an experience similar to mine and wonder what the Fandroids are all smoking. Apple's critics keep doing this ("Antennagate" being the best example), and come off looking like idiots as a result.

>Everyone they left back home will be dead and buried

Not if they've found an effective way to extend lifespans, or just back up consciousness and plop it into a fresh body as needed. Technology could make virtual immortality possible.

After a few millennia of immortality, you might want to hop into a starship traveling at 80-90% the speed of light and head off into the universe just to get away from your relatives and your ex...

Downtown LA is positively jumping after hours now compared to about a decade ago.

I lived in downtown LA in 2003-2004, and it was d-e-a-d dead after about 7:00PM every night. But I stayed there last summer for a week and its changed dramatically. A bunch of new apartment complexes have gone up on the edge of downtown, and a bunch of old office buildings have been converted into trendy (and surprisingly affordable, post real-estate meltdown) lofts. There are now pedestrians out wandering the sidewalks after 9:00PM and a slew of busy (in fact packed) restaurants like the vast Bottega Louie and Mas Malo draw in patrons from the entire metro area.

New bars, restaurants and clubs are opening all the time. At this pace within a decade Downtown LA could become the next Sunset Strip. All Los Angeles really needs to do now is attract a few hot tech firms to downtown. I wouldn't have thought that possible in 2004, but I could certainly see it happening now.

Yeah, I stuck with my Mega ST 2 until *1995*, finally replacing it with a Dell when Win '95 came out. The funny thing is, up until the last couple of years I didn't feel terribly limited, although the STs never got a decent word processor.

Of course, once Word 6 came out the best word processor on the PC went to crap, so moving to the PC and Offal 95 wasn't as much as an upgrade as it could have been.

One of the reasons why I was able to deal with having an ST as my primary machine for so long was a great little program called DC Desktop. It pretty much replaced the stock GEM desktop with a much sweeter interface, including a slew of custom icons, plus it sped the interface greatly. I was always surprised Atari didn't buy the company and incorporate the product into TOS...but I think we were all surprised by pretty much every boneheaded move the Tramiels made at Atari. I could never figure out how they could have gotten a machine that decent and that cheap out the door that quickly, and then bungle pretty much every single subsequent move.

I still miss my ST from time to time. Simpler but in many ways more productive interface than Windows 7, especially with all of the pointless, confusing changes Microsoft made in an attempt to "simplify" the user experience. To this day I haven't figured out the stupid "Libraries". Seems like they just invented another way to lose shit in the vast wastelands of your terabyte hard drive...