The conspiracy minded folks will point out that this is an attempt to test the waters and introduce the intended future of computing.

TPTB want to reign in the free-for-all that is windows and even MAC-os computers. People can run anything and everything. With Android and the google store, the computer is limited to a controlled walled-garden of apps. Same for iOS.

So, if this form factor takes off (or, if it is MADE to take off, wink wink) you have Google, which is a CIA/NSA front, controlling all that the people are allowed to run on their computers.

Watch, next will be an android DESKTOP. Just you watch!

My latitude D520 was assembled from parts of many other dead Latitudes. I call it frankentop. Runs reliably. Take it everywhere. Ugly as sin. Dell latitudes are more rugged and parts are cheaper and more interchangable in my opinion. The cheap consumer Dells are more problematic.

I also have a nearly 5 year old quad core HP laptop, hasn't given me any problems other than a noisy fan that stopped being noisy after a while on it's own.

The best is a 13 year old IBM thinkpad, still going. This thing is so old it has USB 1.0. But, truly, no-one on Slashdot will be impressed by that - it isn't unusual.

Now, today, I would be a little hesitant to buy a new HP laptop. I would lean more towards a Lenovo or a Asus.

And what's with this stupid BEATS AUDIO crap? Just give me a decent sound chip that reproduces the sound and doesn't process it FOR me! I've had a beats audio HP laptop, to me it sounds like crap.

And get off my lawn.

What if you got the DSL and a good VPN like PIA?

Will they throttle it if they don't know what it is?

Up until a month or 2 ago I would have said go with Comcast and get internet only. But now that they are intending to cap at 300 GB per month.... meh.

What about a comcast business account? How much does that cost? Is it throttled?

The good thing about comcast is that at the end of the day, it IS fast.

Yeah, some day I could see it being a utility because ... I need to consume it every day to live and maintain sanitary conditions and shelter in the winter. Like the Telephone.

Oh, wait, Telephone isn't a utility. And the internet isn't either.

I don't want government providing me the internet, even local government. I don't think you do either??

Perhaps you should google "snowden nsa" or something.

It does on Comcast.

Comcast, not even once.

You're absolutely right - because inherently, ROBOTS are boring, because they're engineered.

Engineers design things to be BORING, because in the Engineer's world, generally, when things get EXCITING that's BAD.

Exciting is dangerous, and Engineers don't like dangerous because then people die, questions are asked, people get sued, people get fired, and that looks bad on the old resume, and that makes it hard to get another job.

So, boring robot cars are the fault of HR.

this is very insightful

And what brand is that then?

What hardware is NOT made in China? And what hardware do you know for sure is not backdoored at the hardware level OR firmware running on the hardware?

They have something better now. The conspiracy minded folks should be chiming in here and saying the same thing.

They have something better. My guess is that they are using quantum entanglement communication tech for long range covert comms.

Sorry to reply to my own post, I just googled "dazzle camo face paint" and apparently it CAN mess with facial recog.

If a person is living in an area where wearing a mask is illegal, perhaps some sort of face paint would work.

You've seen the bizarre paint schemes called "Dazzle camouflage" (it's on wikipedia) used on ships at sea?

What about Dazzle Camo face paint? Would that work to confuse the facial recognition algorithms?

My college taught us, Mechanical Engineering majors, Fortran. Specifically. It's the only language they intentionally decided we needed to know as part of the core curriculum. This was at least as recent as the mid 90s.

I later discovered that the native scripting language used by the FEA code ANSYS, was ..... FORTRAN.

there is amazon, there is netflix, there is hulu, and there is youtube. Also, there are many many many websites out there with nearly every episode of every tv show available for streaming. for free. Attach media pc to web enabled tv and there you go. Cord is cut. You won't miss a thing, trust me.

It's really $20,000 on a hammer, $30,000 on a toilet seat

It's a testament to the writing of Vince - he totally made it believable that the meth COULD have came out blue.