Many of the comments are of the "I need a real machine to do..." kind.

However, there are roughly 2,900,000 Slashdot IDs out there, and, even if 100% of them required the "heavy lifting" of a "real" machine (which they don't...), then the sales figures (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2623415) show that, in computing terms, Slashdotters are part of the 1%, and hence, despite the vociferous arguments, you (we) are a tiny minority.

Worldwide smartphone sales to end users reached 250.2 million units, up 45.8 percent from the third quarter of 2012

Nearly 90 times the /. list (which took years to build up) created in the last 3 months?

Face it, the PC is dying, not because it's not being used (in the areas that always used to use it), but because it's being overtaken by the "not a PC" uses

(should be +5 insightful right there)
There have been many companies *cough* Microsoft *cough* whose stock answer since the early 1990s has been "throw more hardware at the problem" (because of the implicit "our new software soaks up so much more system resources than the old stuff, that you'll need it").
It's only in the last few years that the hardware has overtaken the software so much that people forget how bad the "new stuff isn't any faster than the old stuff" had got.

A previous boss of mine (company director) stated "the needs of the business dictate the IT required. Not the other way round" Unfortunately, there are so many instances of the IT tail wagging the business dog that it really isn't funny any more (as if it ever was). Sharepoint, I'm looking at you, here (amongst many others on the wall of shame)

Reminds me of when PCs were first being introduced in Government offices back in the early 1990s.

Back then, they "didn't appear to be solving anything, or improving productivity" for many offices. For some, though, there was someone who either could see the potential, or could make something out of it all.

So, it was a long term goal that (ultimately) paid off

Cracking tales there!

I never thought of guising as being "tradition" - it was just something you did. And getting sparklers for Bonfire Night too!

When the sun rises about 8am, and sets around 4pm, then I suppose that makes for a lot of winter festivals to pass the time...

...but not "trick or treat"

(Hey, you gotta earn your treats!)

Seems like a pretty drastic way to break the budget deadlock.

Since paying DoD civilian employees was given a big thumbs up, it shows that there can be some agreement. Provided it is in a few, well defined, areas.

The next thing looming is the debt ceiling on the 17th. What better way to get it raised than "we urgently need to spend some $ on a quick military action". Bingo. Support given wholeheartedly "to retain the US military superiority" or somesuch, the debt ceiling is also raised. Job done.

I think Douglas Adams worked this one out a while back:

http://hitchhikers.wikia.com/wiki/Bistromathics

You'd have thought that Google, of all people, would have checked to see whether there was an app for that already...
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=restaurant+bill+app

And Douglas Adams did it before Google even existed:

(grabbed from http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329)

The art community went for the "hipsterish" Apple years ago.

As IBM worked out, "IBM" is a "Business" brand, and non-business purchasers don't want that stigma. Lenovo was (IIRC) initially IBM owned, before it was sold off, and was beginning to attract the non-business users.

What MS need to do is juggle the "Microsoft" name for the Surface Pro (the "business" one) with a new name (in the same way that enough people forget that X-Box is a Microsoft brand) that will attract the "non-business". Of course, to do serious graphic work means the Surface Pro, so somehow there needs to be a "Microsoft Surface Pro" and a "Wizzygraphic tablet" (which is a Surface Pro in all but name) - which doesn't just confuse the market even more than the current Surface / Surface Pro - WinRT / Win mish-mash does.

I probably did mean "their" church.

And yes, the dozens of "official" interpretations of any Bible passage means that, as the GP pointed out, the uber-creationist view stems from "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. They are attempting to invalidate my whole belief system", rather than "Someone interpreted one aspect differently from my interpretation. Interesting. While they maybe aren't right, maybe my view has been a bit too rigid."

That sums it up pretty well. And doesn't even touch upon the inherent contradictions in different parts of the Bible (particularly in different chapters of Genesis), which anyone could spot if they had actually read it, rather than going on the "edited highlights" of a preacher from one particular part of the established church.

In theory, yes. However, the Microsoft marketing department could still drop the ball in a big way, if they overprice it, or force people to use the MS Store, or leave out key features that business wants or...

Given the recent hoo-ha with the NSA listening in, and then also admitting that (along with GCHQ) they have "broken" most commonly used encryption, it looks as though the "don't use anything that we can't either backdoor or crack" is, if not NSA itself, certainly from one of their supporters.

Tim Berners-Lee created the web specifically so that you could link back to the original document/image/whatever

By your reasoning, outright stealing of images is somehow "better" than linking to them.

So, with "I could care less", are you being "ironic" or "careless"?

(If you could care less, then why don't you? On the other hand, if you couldn't care less, then the amount of care has reached a pretty low limit)