It wasn't too many years ago people were saying the same about HD. Most of the video I watch is still DVDs on a projector that can only handle 1024x768, but when I replace the projector I don't imagine HD will be any more expensive. My mother now has an HD TV because there weren't any SD ones that were any cheaper. Once the economies of scale kick in, the prices will come down.

The difference with VP9 is that there isn't already an entrenched standard that's better. When work on Theora started, MPEG-1 was still pretty common for web video, but by the time it was released everyone had moved to MPEG-4. Theora was definitely a big step up from MPEG-1 (and MPEG-2), but not as good as MPEG-4. When VP8 was open sourced, it was better than MPEG-4 (ASP), but most of the rest of the world had moved on to H.264. Now VP9 and H.265 are appearing at the same time. No one is considering switching from H.265 to VP9, they're considering switching from H.264 to either VP9 or H.265. If VP9 is royalty free and comparable quality, then that's a big incentive to move in that direction, particularly as they already have the H.264 infrastructure set up to support the devices that can't do VP9.

The current generation of MacBook Pro has an internal resolution only 2880 pixels wide, but the HDMI port can drive a 4K display at either 30 or 24Hz, depending on your definition of 4K, and each of the two Thunderbolt 2 ports can function as DisplayPort 1.2 ports, each driving an external 4K display at 60Hz. So current generation Mac laptops support up to 3 4K displays (although I'd imagine the GPU might struggle a bit if you wanted to do 3D on all of them)...

You miss the corollary of this, which is that governments are the reason why corporations can't send men with guns to kick in your front door...

How do you fire Google? You'd have to stop visiting any web page that uses Google Analytics or adverts from Google, and stop corresponding via email with anyone who uses GMail, via IM with anyone who uses GTalk / Google Hangouts, at the very least.

Yes, but the problem with DisplayPort is that it's a royalty-free standard, so to implement it the manufacturer has to pay royalties to no one, making it expensive. In contrast, HDMI requires implementers to pay $10,000 per year plus a royalty rate of $0.15 per unit, reduced to $0.05 if the HDMI logo is used, and further reduced to $0.04 if HDCP is also implemented, making it cheaper. Or something.

Why buy it? Surely there are open source options for that sort of thing?

And about as scary as a teddy bear.

The reason for the separate menu bar is Fitts' Law, which determines the ease of clicking on something. It's a function of the time taken to move the cursor and the time taken to stop. The stopping time depends on the size of the target. When the menu bar is at the top of the screen, its height is effectively infinite because the cursor stops moving as soon as it hits the edge, even if you keep moving the mouse[1] up. The down side is that it is further away. You need the in-window menu to be about double the size of the edge-of-the-screen menu for it to be as easy to hit. The down side is that it takes longer to move the mouse to the menu bar from the window. On laptop screens and smallish desktop screens, there's a clear win for the Mac-style menus. For larger desktop screens, the in-window menus win. For touchscreens, radial menus in the bottom corners are best, but I don't know of any popular UI that uses them.

[1] Of course, this also applies to a trackpad / trackball, but not to a touchscreen.

True, although you generally do focus something when your attention is on it.

Not sure I can give you this one, as the menu is in an obvious place and the name of the active app is the first item.

Actually, it probably isn't. This is one of the things I think is sensible about OS X: closing an application is not a meaningful user interaction, it's an implementation detail. Whether the application is running but not visible, or not running is completely irrelevant to anyone except power users. Most modern OS X application support sudden termination, so if they're hidden and unused for a while they'll have saved their state and, if system resources are required for something else, will be terminated. Next time you click on them, they'll relaunch, or be there already. It doesn't matter to the end user which happens, any more than it matters whether the application is read from disk or from the buffer cache. Applications are the user abstraction, not processes.

Yes, this one is weird. As is hiding their icons unless you move over them with the mouse. In my opinion, these buttons should be on the menu bar anyway.

I wouldn't object to it, but I'd be much more in favour of extending the requirement that drivers wanting to use the public highway must have third-party liability insurance (apparently this isn't a requirement in the US?) to cyclists. The main purpose of needing a license for a car is that you can easily cause serious injury to others if you drive badly. This is less of a concern for cyclists, but it is still relatively easy to cause an accident that will cause property damage (for example, getting hit by a car when it's your fault), and an uninsured cyclist may well not be able to afford the repairs.

To be honest, I'd rather that the police would just enforce the existing laws. I see people cycling without lights at night and / or going through red lights quite regularly. If they stood a better chance of being hit with fine, they'd be far less likely to indulge in behaviour likely to cause accidents. Mind you, this applies equally to the idiots who decide that they have to overtake me because I'm riding a bike, even though the speed of the traffic is under 20 miles per hour and end up cutting diagonally back in front of me and forcing me to break to avoid hitting the side of their car...

So how is a novice user expected to discover the keyboard shortcuts? I tried alt-F4 and it worked, but that's because I learned to hit alt-F4 to close things in Windows 3.1, and I learned it because if you went to the quit item in the menu, it was right there. From a Metro app there is no menu so how do you learn this?

I use hot corners on OS X, but they are just for fast task switching and are configurable. There's nothing for which they are the only UI. Everything on OS X is intended to be discoverable. The menu is always visible and all of the commands can be reached from there.

No one who actually knows anything about HCI will describe an interface as intuitive: it's hard to quantify and largely nonsense. Being discoverable is far more important. For example, are all of the things that you can click on visually distinct from things that are just labels? OS X has made some some steps backwards in this regard, but Windows 8 appears to abandon the idea entirely. If you don't know how to do something, are there signposts to help you on the way? With OS X, you go to the menu, and if you can't quickly find what you want to do, you type it into the text field in the help menu, which searches the menu and presents it to you, even if it's in a nested submenu. With Windows 8, apparently I need to know that some parts of the screen are magic and I need to put my mouse there to make things happen (no idea what happens if I'm using a touchscreen).

Move the mouse to a random corner of the screen? You think that't intuitive?

Creating the US dollar requires:

• A large population that believes that the state has the right to collect taxes
• A legal requirement that the taxes be paid in US dollars
• The ability for the state to enforce this on people who choose not to pay.

The value of the US dollar is then backed by the requirement that some proportion of all income from US citizens and residents will have to be transformed into US dollars every year to pay taxes. In contrast, to create a new crypto 'currency', you need an off-the-shelf algorithm. The value of the new 'currency' is backed by the belief among speculators that someone else is more stupid than them and will but it for more money.