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We all had that moment in school when a teacher would pose an "impossible" problem, thought to ourselves "Well, they've never faced ME before!", spent a few minutes toying with it and finally giving up. This kid...did not.
Nor did George Dantzig at UC Berkeley in 1939. Without him, Good Will Hunting would be a movie about buying a suit at a thrift store.
Maybe with direct communication, sci-fi fans can rest easy and not have to worry about their favorite shows being cancelled like FireFly.
That would work only if the writer actually owns the copyright in the show's setting. If the publisher owns it, and the publisher wants it canceled, no amount of crowd funding is going to bring it back.
You can't type at 100+ WPM on a touchscreen.
I can't type at 100+ WPM period. Last time I was tested, I was around 85 WPM, but I think I could maintain that speed on a Bluetooth keyboard paired to an iPad or on the keyboard dock that connects to the Transformer.
You can't display both a large area for your content and as much area again for menus, toolbars, command pallettes, script windows and whatever else you need, if you're starting with a screen that has about a 10" diagonal.
A tablet shares these drawbacks with the netbook into which I'm typing this comment. Some of those limitations can be worked around on both tablets and netbooks with clever user interface design, unlike the artificial cryptographic limitation of code signing verification with no owner override. A Transformer or virtually any other Android-powered device has owner override; an iPad does not without paying $650 for a Mac plus $99 per year for the certificate allowing owner override.
Some people offering these products/services will hold out and try to lock people into their platform, whether that's by trying to lock down the hardware or the network or the data itself, but in the long run they are fighting a losing battle.
Then explain how locked-down game consoles still beat PCs in several genres despite the obvious disadvantage of not having mods or locally developed games.
But it's still a laptop -- a large one, with a big, high-res screen -- that I want when I go to a meeting with my clients. The difference is that today, I can use the right tool for each job, because now someone actually makes both tools.
The scenario I want to avoid involves a tablet owner not being able to afford a PC once he realizes that a task that he wants to perform needs one. If locked-down tablets become so ubiquitous that people decide they don't need PCs, this scenario will become more and more likely, and people will become discouraged from performing such tasks in the first place outside of a paying job. Such discouragement would serve only to cement a "creator"/"consumer" divide as opposed to a "participant" culture.
Move into the store with a smartphone
Which could require someone to first pay a couple hundred for a prepaid smartphone and a month of service.
The only problem I have with this is the statement that "Intel graphics downright stink." For gaming? Mostly.
Agreed. Gaming is important, however, to those who want to save money by plugging the laptop's HDMI out into a TV instead of having to buy a $300 game console.
The HD3000 that came with SandyBridge (and the new IvyBridge GPU... HD4000?) is good enough to play Diablo 3 pretty well
Ivy Bridge runs Skyrim, a PS3-class game, at playable framerates.
most people outside of work are primarily content consumers not content creators
The distinction between a "consumer" and a "creator", as opposed to a participant in culture, is the whole problem that locked-down tablets perpetuate.
"Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods." -- Albert Einstein