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.

Errr... the article you cite explicitly points out that the errors were the fault of the "publisher" of this particular $0.99 public domain ebook, and it was not the result of any policy or "gatekeeping" on the part of Nook or Barnes & Noble.

No, he is not. There are various offenses under the National Security Act, and the ones of which Snowden is being accused are not eligible for the death penalty.

You're confusing statistical herd immunity with factual herd immunity. If 90% of people in the United States have herd immunity, but a particular community of 2,000 people has only a 10% vaccination rate, then there is no herd immunity within that community.

People who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons, for instance because they're babies and too young to get the vaccine yet, or they have compromised immune systems (for one reason or another). People in these groups have to rely on otherwise healthy people to do the right thing and get vaccinated.

Yeah, you must be. ;-)

So where did Der Spiegel get these documents? On Friday, Edward Snowden accused the US government of intentionally leaking documents to The Independent that were potentially damaging, in an effort to discredit the responsible reporting being done by The Guardian and the Washington Post. He said he had never worked with nor even spoken to anyone at The Independent. Is the same thing happening here?

Bad Grammar Nazi loses war: http://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=thusly

Windows PowerShell is arguably a superior CLI to Bash.

This is actually something I think about often. Steve Jobs' "genius" was that he always told people what they wanted, then gave it to them.

Microsoft, on the other hand, always CLAIMS to make changes because "that's what people want." They do endless research to see what buttons people click after they click this or that button, and then they make those buttons bigger so they're easier to click. They arrange the Office Ribbon based on what they see people doing. Everything, EVERYTHING is based on research, both through direct surveys and blind feedback from their software running in the wild... ...and yet, when they make the changes, most people seem to respond negatively. But Microsoft won't revise its changes -- or allow a smart, Steve Jobs-like human to make the decisions -- because they have all this research, so they "know" what people want. "You say you hate this? Well you're wrong, you don't hate it, and I can prove it."

TL;DR Microsoft actually seems hamstrung by its own design methodology. It designs by committee, vote, and statistical study, rather than by inspiration -- and its slavish adherence to those methods means it has a hard time recovering from its own mistakes.

Actually, the Start Button does include one benefit: you can right click it to get the system administrator's menu, which has a bunch of useful stuff on it. The same menu was available in Windows 8, but you had to know it was there because there was no icon to let you know about it, and there was no way to activate it on a touchscreen.