I see a problem with testing entries. The article mentions an engine that relies on WebGL, but when I use Firefox 25.0.1 on Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop to try to view the first Google result for WebGL test, all I get is "Hmm. While your browser seems to support WebGL, it is disabled or unavailable. If possible, please ensure that you are running the latest drivers for your video card." The error message persists after the daily sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade. What can be done besides buying a new computer?

How much of that is related to federal know-your-customer laws passed to slow down money laundering? A lot of those laws kick in for cash transactions over about $9,900.

With the recent rise in value of Bitcoin, the 0.0001 BTC fee may approach that of more traditional online payment methods such as Dwolla, which charges 0.25 USD.

Apart from jewelry, gold is useful for plating electrical connectors.

How much money should one have in the bank before moving from, say, northeast Indiana to greater Seattle?

Because they own specialist peripherals with no Windows 7 driver. These may include printers whose manufacturer is trying to pad revenue with repurchases to replace otherwise working hardware, or drivers whose hobbyist author can't afford to renew a kernel-mode code signing certificate. Or because they own copies of expensive specialist proprietary software that doesn't run properly under Windows 7, even in compatibility mode.

Price rises for a particular feature have happened in the past. In the early 1980s, home computers that could output composite video to an SDTV were cheap. By the 1990s, as VGA and other enhanced-definition formats took over, TV output became the province of obscure, expensive, external scan converters, and TV gaming largely shifted to locked-down consoles. Only with the rise of HDTV circa 2007 did TVs again become able to display home computers' video output as a standard feature. The same happened with PC parallel ports, which a lot of hobbyist hardware hacks used to abuse as an 8-bit GPIO before the rise of legacy-free PCs.

When a mouse is plugged in, a close box should appear. Even on Unity, a close box does appear.

I'm not ready to download, install, and configure half a GB of simulator just for this discussion. But I do have a Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.4, a Bluetooth keyboard, a USB mouse, and a USB OTG adapter. I connected the keyboard and mouse, and both were recognized. What specific activities should I try in apps that ship with Android?

First, the PC would detect the presence of a mouse. In several past versions of Windows, when the mouse is disconnected from a desktop PC, the mouse pointer disappears. And when I connect a USB mouse to an Android tablet, a mouse pointer appears. This means the machine can sense whether or not a mouse is present and make decisions on how to present the user interface based on that information. Or after having connected a monitor to the device's HDMI output, the user could choose to turn off the built-in display, which causes the device's touch screen to act like a trackpad and causes the mouse cursor to be shown on the connected monitor. My old Archos 43 does something close to this, though its resistive touch screen makes trackpad mode clunky than it would be on a nicer device with multitouch.

Second, the kernel would notify the widget toolkit that a mouse has become present so that applications can rerender their scrollable areas with scroll bars and other decorations that are more useful to mouse users than to touch users. Clicks on these controls would substitute for swiping gestures. In several past versions of Windows, when the user changes the font, size, or color of a system control using the Display Control Panel, applications have automatically updated their controls without needing to be restarted. Furthermore, "responsive" web sites tend to rearrange their controls to be friendlier to small screens when the user resizes the browser to a more narrow width. This all means that the machine can change how the user interface is presented once a relevant event has occurred.

What further information do you seek about how to implement control adaptation to mouse and touch paradigm? Are you looking for an exhaustive list of touch gestures that exist on a particular mobile platform, in addition to a list of mouse-based alternatives to each gesture that a UI toolkit would offer?

People put up with the inconvenience of a landline when cell phones were priced as a luxury. If supply and demand causes PCs to become priced as a luxury, people will have to put up with the inconvenience.

No, these problems would be created by supply and demand. As prices of new PCs to replace dead PCs rise, people will have to press their phones into service as PC replacements.

I'm aware of this. So after these "price rises", how can parents afford a PC on which their child can do homework for programming class?

Provided that a developer can find and afford a "good, modern C compiler" targeting a given platform. What's the state of the art in compilers for 6502-based* microcontrollers again? Last I checked, code produced by ca65 was fairly bloated compared to equivalent hand-written assembly language. And I'm told that for years, GCC severely lagged behind $6000-per-seat Green Hills compilers.

* Why 6502? Maybe I'm making an NES game for the competition. Or maybe I need to code a hash table for the storage controller in a Terminator.

The point of the featured article is that this has become no longer the case now that smaller processes are requiring far more complex fabrication.

Small PC shops didn't build laptops last time I checked, especially not 10" laptops, unless putting a tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard in a carrying case counts as "building".

I dropped Unity in favor of Xfce two years ago for performance, screen real estate, and auto-hide. I only use Windows 8 at work, and I stay in the desktop all the time thanks to Classic Shell, so I lack first-hand experience with the difficulties in using Windows Store apps with a mouse and keyboard. Other than that the launcher is full-screen (which Classic Shell fixes), what might they happen to be, so that I can suggest improvements?

That's why I tried to caution against a too-literal interpretation of touch paradigms. For one thing, it'd apply only to applications "designed for a tablet that lack specific support for a desktop", and for another, a GUI toolkit's standard controls would switch to more mouse-like behavior when a mouse is connected or when the internal display is turned off in favor of an external monitor.

That or just speakerphone.

So which mobile device doesn't A. heavily use Java or B. require the owner of a device to pay an annual fee to run his own code on the device?

Perhaps the point is that once you already own a tablet, "a bunch of crap to turn it into a desktop" is cheaper than a desktop.