I'll be honest, I haven't given a Dell laptop a serious look in years, but I handled tons of them through the late 2000's and the build quality was so poor that I really don't even look at their equipment anymore when picking a laptop for myself or someone else. I don't know if they've changed recently, but I haven't heard anyone make that claim. It doesn't matter to me what OS ships with the hardware if the hardware itself is flimsy. A laptop that won't bend, crack or break at the hinges within a few weeks is worth a $50 premium, IMO.
I actually feel that Asus and Toshiba build much nicer laptops at about the same price point, but I'm sure someone will disagree (after all, this is /.)

There's this pesky thing called physics that likes to get in the way: Namely, your device will be topheavy to the point of being unwieldy for non table use. The brilliance of the top containing only the screen is that it makes the thing balanced. I suppose you could put some additional stuff in the clamshell top. Ideally, the SSD, since it is a "low bandwidth" device (compared to a GPU or RAM) and requires only a few traces to be added to the cable running between the halves.

Not to point out the rotting dead fish in the middle of the room, but this is exactly what happened with cable TV, and yet there is no real outrage on that front any more. I'm not saying it's the right thing...or even "acceptable" but customers seem to never balk at ads, and content streamers never turn down a revenue stream. It feels almost inevitable.

I'd like to meet the web developer who spent several days re-implementing the frame set in javascript. It's probably on his resume and everything!

Because no criminal has ever stolen a credit card number. No sir.

Christ, only on /. could the statement "Objective C is now more popular than C++" turn into a pissing match about objectivism and then morph into a discussion about evolutionary behaviorism. I don't know if I should be disappointed or proud, to be honest.

The concern isn't that people won't have access to personal computing power, it's that the power of customizability will go away. How many generations of geeks have been raised at this point because, when they discovered that they wanted to get under the hood of their home PC, all they had to do was download a free IDE or install a free OS, with no non-technical hoops to jump through or laws to worry about skirting. That freedom is something that, as a society, we cannot afford to lose.

Of course it's not sufficient. What leader will fight if he has nothing to gain, and more importantly, expects to lose?

And, it should go without saying: People can be wrong. Both about thinking that they will win, and can take into account irrelevant factors like "guts" or "purity", and that they have something to gain (e.g. irrational concepts like "honor" or "pride"), but in modern, literate societies those factors are less common and less prevalent, varying from society to society and individual to individual.

You're still wrong. That mentality allows wars to happen, it doesn't cause them. Necessary and sufficient conditions are very different beasts, my friend.

Oh, I was careful to not define "win", on purpose.

I disagree. There have been lots of states that DEEPLY disagree about ideology but didn't escalate to war. Ideology is an excuse for war, not a cause of it.

Wars pretty much happen because of scarcity of resources and imbalance of information. Both sides think they can win (even factoring in the cost of war) and both sides can't have the resources. Structuring languages and governments can make more slightly less likely, but not significantly so.

You can't fix the imbalance of information as no society will believe a simulation all the time, especially of war, which depends on all sorts of human factors. The only way out, really, is to have unlimited resources. That is actually the main thesis implied by the push for globalization: That through capitalism, we can have a non-zero sum game (drastically increase available resources to all nations) and avert real war. And it seems to work -- but it leads to the (reasonable) criticism of the anti-globalists: that there is still a finite amount of resources and sooner or later capitalist technological innovation won't be able to extend them any further.

Which leads to the basic final disconnect: Are you fundamentally optimistic about technology or pessimistic? If you're an optimist, we've already solved the long term problems that create world wars, and the last two were simply a painful transition period. If you're a pessimist, we've only delayed the inevitable and they were merely a preview of coming attractions -- which increased resource use is hastening.

I think this is an avenue for research. Perhaps, some day, someone will devise some sort of "under-sea" or possibly "sub-marine" waterproof telegraphic cable in order to electrgraphically connect two stationary points across a body of open water. I'd imagine you'd have to customize some sort of cable-laying vessel as well. Once this breakthough is achieved, we'll be able to transmit data from a ship to shore.

Faster first, then light travel!

Great, you've invented the fat-ray. Now America will simply pay people in the third world to have American fat redistributed overseas. Think e-waste was bad for the third world? Watch out for f-waste.