Yes, I can't imagine anyone who'd rather be able to nap, read a book, or do anything other than staring at the bumper in front of them during a regular weekday commute.

Yup, I can agree with this. I think the major hesitation right now is that automated cars are an essentially unproven technology. Give it 10 years and if all the bugs are worked out, and we have some numbers that can show they really are safer than humans at the wheel*, it will get adopted.

Of course, there's still a bit of an if there. They do actually have to turn out to work in most conditions and be safer. But I think that's more of a "how long till we can do that for a reasonable cost" than "if". Hopefully less than decades in any case.

*I mean with really large sample sizes too, not the current pilot programs, we need huge numbers of these cars on the road.

If battery life is really important to you the Pro probably isn't your best bet. About 5 hours is pretty accurate. Maybe after the hardware refresh, whenever that is, but the battery life pays for the form factor and power of the processor inside.

As for Windows 8, I don't think I'd like my Pro if it didn't have 8... the desktop side is just really poor at touch. When I'm at a desk and have a mouse? Awesome, I can go into full desktop mode, but anywhere else I'd prefer a Metro app. Hell, I went back to using IE instead of Chrome (when I'm not using a mouse, anyway) because Chrome's metro UI is absolutely abhorrent (it's just a copy of the desktop UI, which hates my fingers).

Can't say I've used it in sunlight so I don't have much to add there.

Microsoft ran the original Xbox division at a loss for the entire life of the console. They really did spend a lot of money building momentum for the 360 where they finally started to turn a profit.

I was always under the impression the GPL was meant to protect user rights, not creator rights, hence copy"left".

But if they wanted to shoot their own project in the foot by prohibiting an iOS distribution, I suppose they do have that right. I just retain my right to call it sour grapes.

It was one of the VLC developers that complained about how the GPL and iOS TOS were incompatible and ordered it to be taken down.

Basically, sour grapes.

It would potentially be possible, but there would still likely be avenues to leak credentials outside of the most obvious OS ones. For example if you have a web browser (or any other app) that stores passwords and its data gets backed up into the cloud, is it an information leak if "also include credentials" is unchecked?

Probably better to have no granularity than a false sense of granularity.

It's a TinyUrl for map coordinates, but more human memorable?

What happens when you get to a gas station in Nowheresville and they've run out of gas?

Also, you trade batteries, they never "run out". Though potentially you'd end up getting batteries that have less than a full charge (and all they have to do to fix that is to have more batteries spare for swapping as demand increases).

Tesla already has prototypes for swapping batteries out in less than 2 minutes.

Still too long for a pit stop, but they already use specialized equipment there to refuel quickly (compared to gas stations) so something similar for electric cars isn't unfathomable if the actually catch on in this type of environment.

Unless I'm missing something, Google's ads also say "ad related to" inside the same tan square. You'd be able to see that even if your screen is bad at rendering colors.

Killing it has a pretty nice feature of making stealing phones much less desirable reducing the chances your phone will be stolen at all.

Attempting to track it can work, if the thief isn't smart enough to just wipe it and ditch the SIM (removing your ability to track the device anyway).

This hasn't really appeared to be accurate in practice. In theory, they could do this, but from what I've read most SSDs on the market appear to hard fail. Probably due to the controller dying, as it's nearly impossible to wear the NAND into a read-only state anyway. They also tend to fail with no advance warning. Might be one of the only areas other than price where SSDs don't work out better than HDD, but time will tell.

As usual, always keep a backup. Don't assume your drive will fail gracefully (that goes for HDDs too).

I've been using SSDs in my computers for 5 years now. If you think they're overhyped... I can only assume you haven't used one?

Admittedly, they're more expensive than platter drives (I still use all spinning drives in my NAS, where storage is more important than speed), but I do not miss load screens or waiting for my computer to become responsive. I have to deal with that crap at work still, I feel the chug of the HDD every time I open a solution in Visual Studio.

Because RAM caching is just a band-aid and only speeds things up if your entire working set can live in memory (or close enough that disk IO becomes rare). Netflix has way too much data to do this, and they were bottlenecked by disk IO even with the complicated caching system they had in RAM.

Essentially the SSD servers eliminated the disk IO bottleneck, so the RAM changing became unnecessary (which also reduces CPU and memory load, since caching is not free).