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I have a feeling they're not talking literally, ie they're not presenting a UI for desktops that's touch based, or a UI for phones that's WIMP based. I'd assume it's more "If you have a feature available in one place, unless it's totally irrelevent, it'll appear in the other."

It frequently is but it doesn't have to be. Few would consider a proposal for eating Irish children "funny", but a document purportedly advocating such is considered the world over to be a lynchpin of satire.

It's so they can come out with a version that has 110Mb more memory, and call it the "Windows for Workgroups Edition".

The allegation against Clinton is that she used a third party email account, not that she didn't retain records.

I find it improbable to say the least that Clinton's email wasn't backed up by her own staff on a regular basis. It gets kinda important when the President of Hostilatia tells you that she's going to invade Allyastan because of a slight she perceived in an email you sent three years ago.

Not defending her, but both your excuse that the other lizards did it

Did you respond to the wrong post? Nothing I wrote can be read as "The other lizards did it" - not without cropping the entire post to remove all context.

The point I made (I'm not even "excusing" her) is that the law she's accused of breaking is an executive decree that was made TWO YEARS AFTER SHE LEFT OFFICE.

I believe the entire point of Kickstarter is to find funding for things that have never been done before. Banks are quite happy to loan money for tried and tested business ideas.

Back up a bit: what if she's right? What if the rules that applied during her tenure are not the current rules? What if Obama created the current rules two years after Clinton left the State Department?

http://thedailybanter.com/2015...

And what if she was doing the exact same thing as (to name a largely reputable figure on "the other side" that few people suspect of corruption) Colin Powell had done?

I'm pretty sure that my analogous hypothetical contract with my cleaning service doesn't include a clause about being allowed to deliver an unsolicited U2 CD, but nonetheless if they did it I wouldn't be upset in the way the other people on this thread are being.

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Reply to: Re:The idea was a good one, the execution poor </pre>

No, I'm not confusing the two, they're not the subject of this discussion which is ARM vs ix86. It's certainly correct that you also need the hardware to be open, but that's another entirely unrelated issue, and has nothing to do with ix86's legacy software compatibility.

Apple didn't break into a house though, they had an arrangement with you where they had the keys. It'd be more like the cleaning service (OK, I know, you don't have one, I don't either, but bear with me, the point is it's a commercial entity with permission to enter your home) coming into your home one day and leaving a U2 album, with a sticky on it saying "Thanks for being our customer - the maid", prominently on your CD shelf.

In order to receive the music, you had to already have an arrangement that newly bought music would be automatically downloaded and installed on your iDevice. If you didn't have that enabled, no U2 album. You'd already given permission to them to "put (other) music on your iDevice", what you hadn't necessarily done was given them permission to put this specific album on it. They had a key. You gave them the key.

Did it matter that they used it? They used it to give you a free gift. Why is this a major problem?

It's OK, due to Steam's DRM you will only be able to use one screen (left eye or right eye) at a time anyway...

Not being cruel but being open source and ARM a recompile away was supposed to be their big boon

Yeah, but you and I and the rest of the world knows that this isn't true in practice. Developers are familiar with x86, some ports don't simply recompile flawlessly (though 99% do), and there are benefits to having a single base of binaries that need maintaining - if there wasn't, we'd all be running Gentoo. There's also some binary-blob stuff out there, Flash plug-ins, "official" builds of Chrome et al, some video codecs, and, of course, Wine.

Pretty much the only person who can happily hope from CPU arch to CPU arch with merely a recompile is Richard Stallman, because he's really the only person in the world who actually doesn't run code unless he has the source code to it. But he's not going to be buying a 3G tablet anytime soon so...

I think terms like theft are a little over the top when we're talking about intentionally linking a device to a third party's download service, especially when that third party is delivering a service that barely impacts you in any negative way whatsoever.

Honestly, I'm still baffled so many people were upset about getting a few album from a popular, well respected, rock band, simply because it found its way directly onto people's devices. It's not as if it woke you up at 3am and started playing it!

There wasn't really a legacy software advantage for x86 in the Mac arena either. In fact, of the three major tablet OSes, one actually does have a bit of a legacy software advantage if run over x86. I'll go into that in a moment but first:

As far as performance goes, I got an HP Stream 8 a few months ago. It's running Windows 8.1 and has a recent Atom in it, but obviously not a top-of-the-line thing because it's a really cheap tablet, despite supporting 3G. And I have to say I have no complaints whatsoever about performance. It's running everything I throw at it at a decent speed.

Now I'd admit, mentally I'm comparing it to Android. The fastest Android device I've used was a Galaxy Nexus, and the Stream is easily smoother and more responsive than that. It may well be the difference is, in part, Windows and Metro - I get the impression Google really doesn't understand the importance of UI responsiveness. But the truth is with the Stream I really, really, have no complaints relating to speed.

Back on x86 legacy advantages: The other issue I'd raise is that there are quite a few "tablet operating systems" that are languishing in "Not Android" land that might well do well if more hardware comes out supporting x86. The stuff Ubuntu and GNOME are trying to make work might, for example, end up turning into something very, very, powerful if they can get the UIs fixed and if a surfeit of x86 tablets comes out.

Besides the geopolitical fantasy required in your fairy tale solution is the requirement to have unlimited availability of non existent superconducting transmission lines.

Big copper cables have electrical resistance which results in line losses. In the winter in much of the world peak power usage happens after sunset, which often is the calmest time of day too. That means power woulf have to be transmitted across the continent, or even from another continent. The line losses would be tremendous...most of the power would be lost to heat and RF emissions.

It is far more efficient to have highly distributed generation AND storage than to have an intercontinental power grid of supersized transmission lines. Skyscraper sized batteries ate stupid too, but to make solar and wind work you probably would need every household to have a refrigerator sized battery permanently plugged into the grid, and for all users connections to the grid to be bidirectional.