You don't even get 4 GB of addressable memory. Windows will give you 2 GB, or 3 if the user enables the "3GB switch". And that's straight process addressable memory, you're not actually going to be able to utilize the entire thing. You can do the sorts of heavy-handed memory management that game engines do on consoles to avoid fragmenting it too much, but your addressable space is being chopped up in variable amounts by third party shared libraries (Nvidia's driver takes a bit of memory over here, Steamworks takes a bit over there...), so you can't count on reliably allocating large pools out of it.

Yes, the Steambox connection is a complete non sequitur in this article. I don't see any connecting premise presented between "Valve is releasing a Steambox" and "Valve will push Steam towards free games". There are arguments presented in the article that Steam will end up like mobile platforms, but they have nothing to do with Steambox; they're along the lines of "Valve gets money from IAPs or sales so they don't care" and "market pressures will push prices to $0"

Superstore/Loblaws is still charging for plastic bags in other provinces, even where it's not required. They're doing it in BC and Ontario at least.

SURF will run in realtime on a CPU (not at 60+ FPS on most commodity CPUs, but still acceptably), but yeah, his thing is definitely not that. For feature detection it uses something like haar-like detectors like SURF does (hence the speed), but there's a lot more to it. The papers are worth reading, it's a really neat technique.

See SURF. And there's real-time GPU implementations of SURF and SIFT that run on the order of 60 FPS or faster.