"back in the day" the main selling point of a "good" soundcard, was compatibility. Under Dr, each and every game had to reinvent the wheel and communicate directly with the soundcard. Unless you had one of major 'good' cards (Soundblaster, Gravis ultrasound, and one or two others) old games wouldn't have sound at all. When Windows became the norm, the hardware communication was abstracted hough the windows driver - as long as Windows support the card, a game could use it. Combined with dirt-cheap integrated cards in most motherboards, there's very little need for discrete audio for non-professional use anymore. We've reached "good enough" 15+ years ago.

So use Firefox or Chrome. No big deal.

Even if you never consciously launch IE, it doesn't mean you're safe: the IE rendering engine is used behind the scenes by a ton of other Microsoft and 3rd party applications as well, each of which is a possible attack vector as long as the IE vulnerability exists on the system.

Unfortunately, IE 8 is the last version of Internet Explorer that's compatible with Windows XP.... Meaning there are hundreds of millions of computers out there that are vulnerable to this exploit, which can't 'just' upgrade to a newer IE version without paying a hundred bucks to upgrade their entire OS first. Annoyingly, this bug was reported to MS when XP still had 6-7 months of extended support for XP left on their count-down clock. Today, XP is no longer supported and unless this bug starts getting heavily exploited in the wild a fix will probably never come.

Combined with a USB MCE remote, the Ouya makes a fantastic XBMC media player -- there's a free 'official' XBMC release in the Ouya store which supports hardware video decoding, and plays back 1080p video without a hitch.

Whenever you see "in the CLOUD!", mentally replace it with "using someone else's server" -- all of a sudden it looks a whole lot less appealing. Yes, you gain some flexibility, but you lose a LOT of control. Case in point: gamespy's recent announcement that they're closing up shop, and all of a sudden hundreds of major games from big-name software houses will lose their online multiplayer abilities. How's 'the cloud' working out for them?

So today the universe apparently is 99.99999% matter / 0.000001% antimatter -- What about the possibility that when the universe started it began as 50.00000000001% matter / 49.99999999999% anti-matter, and the observable universe today is 'simply' made up of the remaining 0.000000000002% that didn't annihilate itself billions of years ago? Even if matter/antimatter each have an equal chance of getting created, randomness is not perfectly distributed. If you roll a set of dice an infinite amount of times, you WILL from time to time end up with weirdly skewed results that may appear non-random, even though they are. Since we happen to live inside this universe and have no way of observing any potential failed precursor universes, we have an observation bias to our particular outcome -- there could be a near-infinite amount of alternate universes with matter and antimatter perfectly distributed which completely annihilated themselves before the universe as we know it today ever came info being.

Unlike their initial announcements, the Pebble doesn't actually use an actual e-ink display -- it's a 1.26 inch Sharp Memory LCD, also used by several other devices. http://www.sharpmemorylcd.com/...

Provide tools to migrate Android data to iOS. For example, allow an Android user iCloud access, and be able to load that data (including app-specific data) from iPad/iPhone. Make the bar to convert to iOS as low as possible.

Except doing so also lowers the bar leaving the Apple ecosystem behind... Given that Apple has a significantly smaller market share than Android does in most countries these days, it seems like it would be a losing strategy for them.

it's a sales problem. Customers don't grasp the differences between letter versions (a/b/g/n) so they purchase the one with the most letters, perpetuating the filling of the limited bandwidth available.

Not just sales -- if you've been bit by this a few times, you tend to buy the hardware that supports the most frequencies even if you may think you don't need them. For example, the Nintendo wii has a built-in 802.11b/g wifi adapter, but it has some bugs that prevent it from working on plain 'g' for many people. From the Nintendo support site: "Ensure that the router is set to broadcast in "mixed" or "b/g" mode. Routers set to "g only" may not be able to allow a successful connection from the Wii console."

....should find a way to let some wireless gear leave those versions behind

So... similar to how pretty much most/all modern routers give you the option to switch between 'a/b/g/n' mode, or enable just 'n', or just 'ac'? And like how they let you choose to use the 2.4GHz band or 5GHz or both, or...? It seems to me that there really isn't a technical problem here, just a user education issue of TELLING them that there may be a speed benefit to turning off standards they aren't using anyway.

/.
and no way to turn it off.

Eh?

You do have the option to switch between the mobile and the full site on a mobile device

Microsoft Wheelmouse Optical -- the only virtually flawless product Microsoft ever made, so of course they discontinued them.

But if any group of people out there will be able to predict the success of a product offering and be able to voice the opinions of the market, it's this group right here.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.

(i.e., you don't have to squeeze your way out of your vehicle while trying not to bang the next car's door)

That brilliant plan has two massive shortcomings:
1) You still need to squeeze back into the car when you're ready to leave (assuming there is no "unpark" feature)
2) What are the odds that the driver of the car parked NEXT to your in your overly narrow space will ding your passenger side door trying to get into HIS car?

Federal laws prohibit discrimination not just on race, but also "national origin" -- which would include "from china", regardless of what race a person happens to be.