Not true. It depends on the library. Take a look at SFML for example. Opening up a hardware accelerated window takes one single function call. It has never been easier to program than nowadays. Most of the time you don't even need to worry about different hardware setups.

This sounds like an anti-pattern in programming. I wonder if the pattern/anti-pattern based design approach would work for politics.

What, precisely, is the difference?

And anyway, what's the benefit of going metal over just tweaking the carbon to our liking? Think about it. If we go metal we throw away a vast life support system. If we stay squishy, we get to keep relying on an ecosystem that:

• Gathers and converts the most abundant energy in the solar system into a portable, stable, compact form.
• Produces the catalyst needed to unlock said chemical energy.
• Mines Carbon and other elements we rely on from the environment, putting it in easily absorbed forms right next to the energy molecules that we already spend time harvesting.
• Has built-in mechanisms for automatically concentrating said energy and nutrients into even more concentrated (if sometimes hard to catch) forms.
• Is easily manipulated into convenient arrangements.
• Recycles our waste products.
• Self-repairs.
• Self-replicates.
• Tunes itself to the environment, even if the environment changes.
• Does its own design and QA.
• Builds its own redundancy against design faults.
• Actually fixes its own design faults.
• Won't go Skylab on us.

Recreating all of that out of silicon and metal is...nontrivial. Delving into our genetic code to fix the stuff we don't like seems like a far more productive use of our time.

And why would they look for the 1 illegal German immigrant and not the 500,000 illegal Mexican ones?
Read that again, 500,000.
German immigrants aren't the problem.

It's not racism, it's reality.

Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun. I can see adding consequences to killing someone (or even taking it out of some games), but to say it should NEVER happen in any game is silly.

"Loom" did it like that.

Might be true for apps but not yet for games. But yeah, he should try it at least.

Don't worry. Human population would probably double within less than one century.

And how could that suit possibly find out about the velocity of his car? However, don't let us forget that this seems to be an absolutely new technology. Give it twenty years and it will be usable.

Raytracing!

That's so stupid. We have so much energy out there. Why should we use less? We need to advance our technologies to gain more energy out of the sources we already have.

Me too. Because I get sick each time I see someone using the device for at least 5 minutes.

It's not about that we'll do it, it's about the fact that we'd like to be able to do it.

Hehe nice! But this would also give me the perfect excuse. I would reverse engineer my GPS device and let it send bogus data!

Fine, then please check Google Maps if you don't believe me!

Slashdot censored in 3.... 2.... 1....