Churchill also said: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

True, but infrastructure(there wasn't any) and populations were a lot more flexible then. Right now, with the concepts of property, cities, countries the impact of a 4 m rise in sea level would be catastrophic.

Or don't see that this course of action actually will fix the problem, for a variety of reasons - even though they recognize that the evidence of AGW is overwhelming.

Speaking of evidence - it's always seemed rather odd to me that the ones most opposed to AGW, "because of lack of evidence", are the same people that are most likely to be passionately religious. These two positions are at the complete opposite ends of the "proven" scale.

Actually, while they often selected the best move, they also often selected a lower ranked possibility - e.g. 3 - 4. A computer won't do that. However, a computer won't blunder the way they did either. You can come quite far in chess if you never do a move that is shown to be a huge mistake in e.g. 5 moves for each side...

The new world champion is an interesting deviation here. The previous world champions have relied on extensive preparation - a main part of which is going through existing opening theory and finding weaknesses of the opponent, plus "new theory" - new ideas or moves from previously played opening positions. In some cases, these variations can go on for many moves - and a surprise there can topple an opponent. This requires extensive preparation and a requires a lot of memorisation.

Magnus Carlsen's trademark is to avoid most of these if possible - and get "out of the book" and into a position where the opponent must play, rather than base the game on memory, as early as possible. Of course, against a computer "the book" is so large - and keeps growing - that this will never happen. Eventually, you'll be playing against "the book" all of the time - the computer will follow successful games, and avoid blunders where they happened. Winning there, as a human, will be impossible.

Not likely an attractive option:

• Sweden is a rather expensive country - the standard of living, cost level etc. are higher than in the US
• Sweden focuses on treatment to avoid relapse into crime, rather than punishment for its own sake. Thus, the prisoners would be treated far too well for US' tastes.
• I'm sure Sweden would like to avoid any chance of US criminals ending up living in Sweden afterwards...

Or I don't play the same games you do - I don't play many FPSes, and the games used in benchmarks because they are the most demanding ones probably aren't available on the Mac. This is (Mac Pro excepted) the most powerful Mac ever released, so the "let's see what we can do with 2 780 GTX in SLI"-kind of games aren't what you'd be running here. They probably aren't even available.

The games I ran were Civ 5 (with all expansions) and XCom: Enemy Unknown. The latter stopped working after the Mavericks upgrade, as it now believes the computer doesn't satisfy the minimum requirements and needs a patch.

Windows 8.1 is just an update. The upgrade would be from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and for that you have to pay. Given their different business models - Apple has a comfortable margin on their hardware allowing this pricing model, while Microsoft lives from software sales - that's understandable. But the cost of this should be taken into consideration, just as virus scanners - Microsoft recommends not using the free security essentials. This decreases the cost difference over the life of a system.

First - this was not a review. This was list of impressions. For a review, I would need to compare it to something, go into technical details, measurements etc. This wasn't a review - and for what it was worth, I don't think the one in the original article was a good one either. I think this is a better example of a review, but it is of a different model. As of my use of "surprising", I used it twice. Once for the weight. Since I had just moved my old 27 inch iMac, I had a good comparison - and this was 1/3rd lighter for what is still basically a computer attached to a screen. Only the optical unit is really missing. This felt slightly surprising to my muscle memory. The second time was describing the sound, and my surprise there is that it is even coming close to "passable for some light use" given the speakers. This is hardly what Apple's marketing would aspire to ;) I would not consider using this without additional speakers.

As for "quantify" that time machine being fast - it was a couple of clicks. After that, it took an hour or two - it was about a terrabyte of data (mostly RAW images and music files). I didn't hang around to find out, but the involvement for me was "fast". As for "noiseless", it means I have a really hard time hearing that it's one - I have to put my ear to the screen.

As for "what you're getting at", you're wrong. I don't buy retail (there aren't even any Apple stores around here), and of course lower price is better. I just happen to look at what I get for my money rather than always choosing the lowest price, and previous experience (my own and people I trust) will have an influence on my decisions.

Indeed. Apple competes well in the segments they are, but they don't cover every segment. Cheap laptops, servers, gaming machines are just three of the segments they just aren't targeting.

In '98, it wasn't as much spending 2-3 days for display drivers as spending that (and more) time upfront researching and buying the right components. Of course, afterwards you spent far more than that tweaking the configuration, compiling your own kernels etc. to eek out as much of the performance as possible. It was both fun and educational :) That said, there is something to be said for "unwrap, plug in, turn on - done"-Macs.

An OS update is free with Windows, but an OS upgrade will cost you. On Mac, both kinds are free now.

The previous version - this one only changes the internal hardware - offered a VESA mount, so this might be made available again. As for USB on the keyboard, you'll get that if you select the wired keyboard rather than the wireless one.

I bought one - 27 inch, with all available upgrades except for the max memory. Memory is user replaceable, and it's cheaper to buy it elsewhere. Here are my impressions

• Unpacking it and setting it up is, as always, a breeze. Take off the top lid, lift the surprisingly light computer to a desk, put in the power chord. Done. Initial setup of the computer is then done in a minute.
• Restoring my user profile from a time machine hard drive, to get applications, user data etc. was fast and smooth
• The high res screen is gorgeous. It's also very well calibrated out of the box - my calibration hardware hardly changed anything this time around. Compared to earlier iMacs -and most other screens today - there are no reflections, even though it is glossy.
• Fusion drive - Apple's automated tiering solution - works very well. For most practical purposes, it worked just as well as my last SSD-based iMac - but this time, I don't have to do manual file management of SSD vs. HD.
• The computer is noiseless
• Performance is good (photo and movie editing), but that's obviously to be expected. My Linux VMs are very happy too.
• The games I tried work well on high settings, but the Witcher 1 doesn't work at all - first, a bug causes it to believe that the system doesn't meet minimum requirements (the older, slower one did). Some editing of config files later, it starts - but videos don't display (sound only) and the 3D display have all objects except text rendered black.
• While the sound coming out of the chassis sound surprisingly good, you really want separate speakers or good headphones if you are listening to music while you work.

That depends. If you are able to sell a unique skill - yourself - you can do that well. If you are more of a commodity, you'll be nickel and dimed. Often with a salary so low you need public support on top of it, and also forego healthcare. These could really need a union.

That said, where I live I think unions are too strong. But they are a needed balance.