If Microsoft want to make a home media device for use in people's main living rooms, that's fine. It's actually quite a good idea. But such a device cannot be principally viewed as a games console.

I don't know about the rest of you, but aside from the occasional multiplayer split screen session, I play console games on a dedicated screen, either in a bedroom or computer room. I cannot play a game in a main living room, on a screen which in in demand by others for watching TV, films, or even browsing the internet. It's nice that this device can do so much, but flipping "channels" to whatever everyone else wants to watch is not conducive to the 4-6 hour gaming sessions I would like to have.

Maybe they're going for the complete casual gaming market here, people who will flick over to Angry Birds or whatever. But even the most passé of run-of-the-mill gamers is going to spend an hour or so playing shooters online, and are not going to be inclined to flip over to daytime TV, or browse the web in the middle of their frag session. I just cannot see this working en masse.

Some may call it anti-social, but to me playing video games is closer to reading a book than watching TV; it's principally an individual experience, and the living room is not the place to have it unless you are specifically playing co-op. I don't think Microsoft are serious about the Xbox One as a gaming console. It appears to be principally oriented around completely orthogonal capabilities.

"In your face from outer space" - Motto of the USAF Space Warfare Center, Falcon AFB.

That's from 1996. SWC never really quite lived up to that motto, and their successor, the Space Innovation & Development Center, is more of an R&D operation. It's becoming closer to reality, though.

We'll know it's real the first time some space-based weapon zaps an individual on the ground.

It's not really that tough a job. The thing is about 4 lanes wide, and not excessively tall. There's less than 20 miles of road movement at each end of the trip. So it's going to be a routine big move with brief road closures. Probably late at night.

The rest of the trip is by barge, down the East Coast, around Florida, and up the Mississippi, Illinois, and DesPlanes rivers to Chicago. There are standard barges which can easily handle something of that size. The locks on that route have 110 foot width.

Most of the articles about this are rehashes of the press release. They even use the same language. OK, there are 8 CPUs. But what kind?.

The new Kinect supposedly is a real per-pixel time-of-flight device. Any more info on that?

They've been using 3D printed objects as patterns for investment casting of metal for over 20 years, since the advent of 3D printing. The problem is cast metals are often not the best solution for the end use of the part. For example, no cast metal is yet suitable for making molds or dies for high volume plastic injection molding, where it has to be extremely hard and shock resistant - P-type tool steel is the right material for molds, but I don't believe it can yet be precisely formed by casting.

However, an investment cast metal mold makes a great temporary mold or die if your production mold breaks. A company can print up and cast a mold and get their factory back on line within just a few days. The temporary mold may only last for a thousand parts, but that will often be enough to keep them on-line for the two months it takes to have a production mold made. If not, they print another and keep going.

Somebody didn't get the memo that vampires are over.

You can track this at a Barnes and Noble store by noting how many bookcases in the teen section are devoted to a subject. At peak, there were four cases of "Teen Paranormal Romance" and two of "New Teen Paranormal Romance". That dropped to three cases total, then two. "Survival" books are big now - there are two cases of Hunger Games imitations, not including the table of Hunger Games merch.

We already have "knowledge bases", "community support", and support outsourced to Far, Far Away. Microsoft did some work with Bayesian statistics to find out which questions a support tech should ask first. Much software already "phones home" to send trouble reports and crash dumps. There's been some good work on automated crash dump classification, to group similar crash dumps together and send them all to the same maintenance programmer.

One word. "Apps."

I can tell you're European. You realize the popular vote means almost nothing?

I have a firearm. It serves exactly two purposes:

1. Sporting enjoyment. I like marksmanship.
2. Hunting. I've not done it, yet, but I plan to.
3. The mechanics of it interest me. If I had foundry equipment, I would be smithing.

I don't have it for any force multiplication or defensive reasons. I hope I don't fall into your generalization as well.

Not everyone who owns a gun is an idiot. In fact, I'd say it's only the minority that makes themselves known.

So out of 3 million people signed up with Coursera, only 900 have completed 10 or more courses, comparable to roughly a year of full-time schooling. Only 100 have completed 20 or more. That's a 99.97% dropout rate after one year.

This isn't going to replace other forms of education with stats like that.

Of course they are!

I'll try to be respectful here, but I do have a question: A felon has, by definition, disobeyed the law. What makes you believe they would respect the laws in regards to firearm possession?

Sure, he can just pull out the hot-air rework station he was hiding under his cot, so he can remove the microcontroller from the board without breaking it.

A 30k$ roadside bribe? That's a pretty stupid policeman. That's "shoot me" territory. He should be happy he got away with not getting what he wanted.