On the upside they will all become really good at playing tennis!

If your angle is that of the guy in China who produces these things, you should be OK. The drones will not be serviceable at a reasonable cost by anyone in developed countries. The drones will be replaced rather than repaired, just like what happens with so many other gadgets.
The drivers' jobs will be lost all over the world and the manufacturing jobs will be created in China. If we can all live comfortably without having to have jobs, it's all fine.

I am Tiger Woods.

auto-felch? hmmm, this thread is getting very technical. I'll check in the dictionary what felching means.

erm... OK... no chance I'll be buying this car!

yes, but do they run linux?

I'd go for a mix of 2, 3 and fear of being hit in the head with bombs.

The Peugeot 3008 hybrid powers the front wheels with a 2.0 HDI (diesel) engine and the rear wheels with an electric motor. The diesel engine powers the battery as well so it can work all EV for a limited range.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdqjuYMqtvI

This HDI engine is used by Peugeot, Citroen, Ford and Mini (BMW).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSA_HDi_engine

It's not a truck but shows that it can be done and sold by Ford.

You know, the total cost of ownership may make a lot of sense but there are differences in terms of affording a better car, be it EV or not.

If I take the starting price of the EV car and compare with he starting price of my used Peugeot + fuel, they break even after a few years. The difference is that if I lose my job or if there is any other significant change, I can just stop paying for more fuel for the Peugeot, keep it off the road and stop the insurance until I'm back on my feet. The Nissan Leaf I compared with still has a monthly price for the battery rental and/or for financing the initial purchase.

I can't make considerations about the compared maintenance costs, other than there's plenty of mechanics out there who deal with Peugeot 206, while the alleged low maintenance costs of the EVs are based on the reduction of the number of moving parts. Who can maintain them and at what price when something does go wrong?

As of 2013 I think that the EVs are like many other high tech devices, good for those who have enough money to be early adopters. For me, maybe my next car will be a used hybrid. It will take me more than 1 car lifetime (mine are 5 because I buy old cars for £2500) before I can take the plunge and go a bit more upmarket.

that's not an equation.

Hi,

When you say that it is not properly sandboxed and using admin user permissions, does that apply to people using IE11 (Windows 8)? I thought the defaults on Windows 8 were not as careless as back in the day of XP pre-SP.

All those are relevant considerations that nobody seems to have when producing and selling more and better weapons. There's nothing you said that would be wrong in the context of rifles, cannons or fighter aircraft.

That's two different things, IMHO:
1) RT needs to be different from Windows Phone because MS needs Office to run on tablets. They cannot have underpowered hardware for tablets messing up that selling point. Even though Intel is releasing x86 mobile chips, it is expected that ARM and other mobile CPU specialists will carry on building really good products with a much lower power consumption than that of the high end phone and tablet market segments. Windows Mobile OS needs to exist so that Windows OS and devices can compete in a small device market (watches, hats, motorcyclist suits, whatever..).

2) Windows RT needs to be different from Windows x86 because of what that article says about giving the OS away with hardware. Unifying Windows around x86 compatibility would make it hard to sell Windows x86 bundled with hardware at a price MS likes; while unifying Windows around RT and bundling it with hardware would lead to lawsuits for anti-competitive behaviour.

Must be that fragmentation that they talk about in the news...

wired has an article that could clarify this for you: in a world where hardware companies are pushing their own brand of OS and app store, selling the OS is becoming very hard. rather than accepting this without a struggle, MS may give away RT with surface and sell x86 Windows as usual for as long as possible.

"Part of whatâ(TM)s going on here is that the low-cost mobile ecosystem has changed the way people think about operating system software. Smartphones and tablets have left traditional computers in the dust, and their operating systems and apps are overwhelmingly free. Upgrades to Appleâ(TM)s iOS platform â" which powers the companyâ(TM)s iPads tablets and iPhones â" have long been free, as have new versions of Googleâ(TM)s Android mobile OS. Like Microsoft, Google supplies operating systems to outside hardware makers, but unlike Microsoft, it doesnâ(TM)t charge them for the software. Phone and tablet makers can load Android on their devices for free."

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/apple-ends-paid-oses/

I can't speak for "everyone" who is not using Windows 8, but I'll tell you about my experience this weekend after upgrading from 8 to 8.1: I am wishing more applications are re-written for Metro. That's how I see that "personality disorder" conversation going away. The UI needs to be experienced for people to accept or reject it on its own merits. First of all, the thing feels faster than before the upgrade. Applications launch faster and switching back and forth does not slow things down, no matter if there's desktop or Metro apps involved.

IE looks great and loads really fast. I'm so used to Firefox that it is a hard sale. If the guys at Mozilla move Firefox to Metro while retaining the extension foundation, I'll be happy. The first beta (or was it alpha?) of Firefox Metro didn't bring anything new to the table in exchange for losing all extensions, so things are not looking good. With IE you can pin sites to the Start screen, I am hoping to do the same with RSS feeds. So far, the "read it later" application that is included is much faster than what I'm getting with Pocket (the original readitlater.com).

The Music app is probably the most elegant I've seen working "out of the box". It is worth trying. The 10 hours of free access to the Zune music collection (per month) sounds like a really nice thing to have. I have yet to try if the stereo mix input is still working ;)

The way I see it, when Microsoft puts out 95, XP, Vista or Windows 8, there is no shortage of people saying that the product feels unfinished and therefore the whole of Microsoft is DoOoOoOoMED. In this day and age, if we judged all companies and web-based services like that, nobody would be good enough.

To the OP who said that nobody wants Windows 8 - that sounds true: Nobody asked for a new version. However, since Microsoft needs to compete and sell more, at some point you'd be facing an upgrade. There are plenty alternatives out there but if you are using Windows this one is more worthwhile than the effort to keep XP running on 2014's PCS.

bankrupt, I presume?