This is how liberty dies ... with thunderous applause.

This will be abused. This will be used to shut down protests and stifle dissent. This will get hacked.

There's no way this toy ends up in the hands of anybody without eventually becoming a Really Bad Thing.

We had a decade of high inflation in the 1970s that contribute almost half of the dollar depreciation since my birth. I think my 'birth million" would feel like a real million, i.e. a decent retirement at any age. A millionaire in all those silly 1960s sitcoms was a real millionaire! conversely my fathers coworkers felt OK if they retired with a $100K or two.

I once had a Server 2003 install go bananas and completely fuck up an Exchange message store. "Never again!" I cried, and within a few hours was installing from a day old backup.

Most of the previous tablet GUIs tried to cram the complexity of multiwindow destop on to a small tablet screen. Apple mainly enlarged the simpler, single-window phone GUI. Samsung is hawking side-by-side Android screens this year. But you really dont want to get all that much more complex than that.

Touchscreens were not really around at that time. "pen computing" was VC rage then. Apple had their own entry a fe years later called the Newton. MicroSoft unsuccessfully hawked is Pen-Windows for years.

It has an annual safe return of $40k to $50K. For younger developers who may not retire until 2050, that is not much after several decades of inflation.

When you look at the Second Amendment within the context of how the US was formed as an outgrowth of revolution against what was viewed as a tyrannical regime. Many of the underlying concepts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are essentially answers to the reasons for revolt and secession against Great Britain laid out in the Declaration of Independence. The Second Amendment was clearly intended to preserve liberties against future tyrants.

same endurance as ARM-based tablets with similar battery capacities while running a full-fat desktop OS rather than a phone OS with delusions of competency.

I don't know about you, but the last thing I want on a tablet is a "full-fat desktop OS".

It's not a freaking desktop. I don't use it like a desktop. I don't need the bloat and overhead of a desktop or a desktop OS.

If you want a full-fat desktop OS, get a Windows tablet or a laptop. Because until I can get a tablet with 1TB of storage, I'm not wasting several hundred megs of it on a piece of software which has been steadily growing bigger for the last decade.

The average app I download on Android is well under 30M. And, for me, that's a selling point.

And, really Android is essentially Linux. Are you suggesting Linux is lacking competency? Because Linux has been running efficiently on smaller systems for 20 years now.

Never have I seen a more apt typo

What makes you think it was a typo?

I assumed it was humor.

They may be power-hungry (although not that much anymore), but from my experience in doing ports, the best ARM SoCs barely have the performance of 12-year-old x86 processors.

Meh, one of the things I like about tablets is that it finally forced people to scale back the bloat and make leaner software.

A full featured piece of software in 25MB? Count me in. Your 4GB bloated install, not so much.

And, really, my now 1.5 year old Android tablet is a dual core CPU with enough juice for what I need it to do.

The last thing I want is Intel ushering in the new era of going back to bloated software which demands absurd resources. Microsoft is already doing that.

Seriously, design something new and interesting. Don't just keep shoe-horning the x86 architecture into everything because you don't have anything else.

No need to run x86. So why push x86 into the portable space?

Kinda what I was thinking. x86 is now ancient, and unless things have changed a lot in the last few years, tend to be pretty power hungry.

So, I guess if I want to run Windows on it, or legacy software, or have no real battery life this could be a good thing. And, really, who expects to run legacy software on a tablet?

Or, Intel could actually try to make a lightweight/low power chip meant specifically for tablets and not try to further saddle us with an architecture which is already long in the tooth. But, apparently they've grown beyond the 'innovating' phase of a company, and are well and truly into the 'flogging a dead horse' phase.

If you're going after Chinese white-box tablets, you're not aiming very high.

Me, if I saw a tablet which said "Intel Inside", the tablet would still be inside the store when I left. Because, right or wrong, my perception is it's going to suck power, and it's probably going to be geared to people who want to install Windows applications.

No thanks.

I have absolutely no problem with a sane, sober individual possessing a weapon. I myself am a Canadian, but I remember camping trips with my grandparents out in the backcountry of British Columbia, and he always kept his hunting rifle loaded (that would get him arrested in Canada these days), not because he even really hunted by that point, but because of the risk from bears and other predators with young kids around. I learned to shoot when I was pretty young, and while I have no more adoration for guns than I do for hammers or screwdrivers, I respect their power and believe firmly that whether anyone owns a gun or not, they should know how one works, both for gun safety and in the hopefully unlikely event they actually need to use one.

The fact of the matter is that if someone is out to kill lots of people, guns, while perhaps the most convenient method, are hardly the only one. Some college kid just stabbed five people to death at a house party, apparently with a knife that was in the house where the party was being held. If someone goes nuts and decides it's time to kill lots of people, there's damned little anyone can do about it. Maybe, if we're lucky, we find out about their dastardly plan in advance, but bad luck can take anyone out; whether it be a maniac with a weapon, a car accident, or hell, falling off a ladder.

I thought Windows 8.1 was the defecto standard.

CTRL-S is your friend.