Even worse, try shrinking your browser window to half of the width of the screen or so, so that there isn't so much wasted space. On my Windows machine, in Chrome, the entire layout explodes. UI elements disappear, images appear distorted, etc. I guess it's trying to switch to some kind of "mobile" view, but the whole thing looks absolutely atrocious when it happens on a big screen. It looks like a child designed it.

Et-hem I think you mean Dice.com, the Number One source for career advice for engineering and technology professionals. Please turn in you /. account.

Exactly. The best thing would be to ship him off for a job at a meat-packing plant, so he can earn the money to buy his own fucking phone.

Hey, watch it. This is Dave Eggers we're talking about. Dave fucking Eggers. Every time he sets his pen to paper, the entire staff of The New Yorker looks up from their screens and stops typing, just watching in stunned awe. Scientists have shown that each David Eggers book of the last 20 years has raised the collective IQ of the entire United States by an average of 6.2 points, even among people who had their friends tell them about it but never actually read it themselves. Another study showed that just holding a Dave Eggers book in your hand so that the cover is visible makes you 14 percent more attractive than conspicuously reading The New York Times Review of Books on the subway. I did my master's thesis on the electromagnetic properties of Dave Eggers (in places with low EMF interference, people have actually reported that their fillings started picking up signals from NPR when Eggers is around) and I can assure you, this man is a blessing upon the literary world no less significant than the Christ-child, and you are not fit to shine his shoes.

As I understand it, in the US if "you have to ask for it" then it's not OTC. The only person you can "ask for" something from is a doctor. Pharmacists can advise you on things like drug interactions, etc., but they can't actually give you drugs without a prescription, and they can't write prescriptions themselves.

I see your point, and as hyperbole it works, but it actually is not true. I was there, I booted PC-DOS computers, I boot computers to Windows 8 today, and while it's true that today's hardware is radically more sophisticated, your point is false. I can boot an Acer tablet running Windows 8 in about half the time it took to boot a PC-DOS computer from floppy disks.

Actually, the 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie Contagion is a fairly realistic depiction of a pandemic and the reaction in the US and around the world. Well-researched, keeps the fearmongering to a minimum while still depicting a scary scenario. Takes into account the role of fringe media in spreading panic/pseudoscientific "cures," among other clever touches. A public health organization arranged for a free screening in my area, with a Q&A period afterward, if that gives you any indication of its accuracy.

What a strange thing to say. Do you expect that of your consumer Wi-Fi router, too? I mean, sure, there are third-party firmwares that will let you do some of that stuff, but that's true of Android, too.

It's the platform vendors that are encouraging it. "Come make apps over here, kids, it's a goldmine! We need tens of thousands more apps by next week to help sell the platform, so get cracking!" A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft put out a tool that was basically a wizard-based UI for generating trivial, pointless "info about my restaurant!" apps. How are customers supposed to find the signal through all the noise when that's how the app store is run?

What I don't understand about this shocking new "alignment between Intel and Google" is that all of the Chrombooks up until the second-generation Samsung have used Intel chips. The first few used Atoms, and I think Acer is using something called a Celeron (though what goes by that brand these days, I'm not sure). Samsung's newest one uses its own Exynos chip, but it's unique in that. All of the rest of them use Intel chips. So what has changed, exactly?

Whatever, but if you reread the GP, what you call hot-linking is clearly what he's talking about.

I kinda hear that, about size, but I agree with the others who say that until you've tried to lug around a great big tablet, you don't realize the advantage of the smaller size. Pinch-to-zoom can take you a long way with devices like this.

That said, yeah, I've had a Surface Pro for a while and I've never really said, "Whoah, I gotta fire up Photoshop and try out that pen!" So maybe the screen does want to be just a little bit bigger for that.

Sounds like the Surface Pro meets all of your requirements, except maybe the screen size. As I understand it, the digitizer isn't as good as a full Wacom tablet, but the latest drivers make it good enough for most art purposes.

Except your bandwidth. Image leeches typically do things like linking your images to their MySpace page, or using them as the background image for some other website full of ad spam links, so you end up paying for their site. It wouldn't be so bad if they just "stole" your images by downloading them and using them themselves. The problem is that they don't download your images.

I seriously question whether JavaScript's internal number representation would be accurate enough to implement a calculator for use in education. All numbers in JavaScript are represented as double-precision floats, which IMHO are not going to be accurate enough for engineering or science use (except, perhaps, with some very fancy footwork on the part of the developer).

Also, my understanding is that phones, tablets and the like are not allowed in classrooms precisely because their broad programmability makes it easy for students to cheat. How hard would it be for a student to flip back and forth between an app that looks like a calculator and a browser window with all the answers in it? Hardware calculators offer educators some assurance that this isn't happening.