Except the only reason they're "copying" it isn't because of the iPhone, it's because to do a nearly bezel-less display, it's one of the best solutions. I still think how Samsung handled it with the S8 and Note 8 made more sense, but I suppose if you want all the display you can squeeze into a device, it works. But I really don't think customers wanting an iPhone X copycat makes that big of a impact.

Sure it's useful. It refutes all the religions that claim mankind was made be some deity. That's money well spent in my mind.

I use BD-R as a method of backing up my photography work as I hit certain quotas of data (obviously pointless to burn a BD if I don't have ~25GB waiting to burn to it). I do still buy Blu-ray movies (and lately the 4K UltraHD variants) mostly because a) I want to "own" the movies (even if the studios think they're only licensing the content to me), and b) I like to use tools like makemkv to rip the disc and store it on a hard drive collection of movies. At approximately 25-35GB per movie, it can get kind of large, but the picture quality is worth it.

Wondering how long it'll be before we can rip 4K UHD Blu-rays though. :/

I use them mostly for gaming. I've found phone screens to be too small, both from a visual perspective, as well as an interface perspective. I couldn't imagine trying to use them for productivity though. Can you get BT keyboards (or use the on-screen keyboard)? Sure, but both typically sacrifice something (appearance, feel, layout) to remain portable. Even laptop keyboards don't feel right compared to a desktop keyboard.

Having said that, as others have suggested, they do have their limited uses. Watching videos, browsing the web and performing basic tasks (sending an e-mail, updating a spreadsheet, making minimal edits to a document) all fit within reasonable use for them. I also think as their prices come down they will be a basic addition for most people for just those very reasons: performs all of the tasks they can with their phone, but on a significantly larger and easier to see/interact with screen. I know the Galaxy Tab S2 is a natural complement to folks that use the S6 or S7: you can take calls/texts received by your phone on the tablet. I wouldn't be surprised to see similar functionality on iPads for folks with iPhones.

Yes, but the model up until now has mostly been either free (OTA) or paying for an entire service (cable, minus the odd premium channels). This is streaming, which inherently limits the available quality to whatever CBS feels like providing and whatever your available bandwidth can handle; with ATSC OTA there's little reason to made content look worse on purpose, though cable/satellite is a mixed bag (cue up the stories of Comcast squeezing more and more channels into smaller space).

The money they make off of television advertising (OTA/cable) is pretty big, IIRC. Also, FWIW, CBS made a profit of $1.4 billion last year... hardly sounds like they're hurting. I guess what I'm getting at is... they appear to be forcing people into a specific service using a name brand they know will get at least some people to bite. You have a loyal fanbase, why potentially ruin that by forcing them on to your platform? To make it so you have to pay for it AND can't skip ads?

Whoops, my bad, no idea where I got $15 from. :( Still, other than being able to watch whenever I want, I can see this turning into an expensive thing to do if every individual network has just one show you want to watch.

Yeah, I haven't had cable in 12 years or so. It's been a combination of OTA television (local news, some prime time television now that they're mostly off the reality television bender they were on for ten years) and torrenting. If I'm going to pay $15 a month for something as limited as what CBS is offering, it better be advertising free.

I think it loses the ability to call itself a "TV series" when it refuses to air over a conventional method for getting television into your home... Just sayin'. I love Trek, but I hope this flops so CBS will know their service is lame. (But if it flops, CBS will likely blame Trek and keep pushing ahead with the service anyways).

As languages further abstract away the underlying hardware, it's helpful to understand how it all works. Especially if you've never had to step into an assembly language debugger. The most likely (and probably relevant) architecture would be x86/x86-64, followed closely by some variation of ARM. IA64 isn't relevant, but if you read up on a little bit of it (there was a series of articles on Raymond Chen's blog a few weeks back), you'll learn about an interesting take on a processor architecture (which offloaded much of the optimization work to the compiler; it was also heavily slanted towards parallel processing unlike x86).

How much of that pound of chicken was actual chicken and how much was injected water? Just curious.

The only likely users are techies and early-adopter types. I could see a small business in these things for gamers and marketing and some other niche uses but I really don't see full immersion VR headsets becoming a mainstream technology.

Not sure I'd qualify the porn industry as niche, but if they pick up on this, and I reckon they will, that might certainly push sales big-time.

Besides, why "stream" things as Google advertises?

Because some things are a lot more fun to watch in real-time at the same time as other people. Think (e-)sports and things like that.

Sure, I can watch the match the next day on youtube, but it isn't quite the same.

The current theory is that Mars, like Earth, at one point had a molten core that spun, thus causing a magnetic field that held an atmosphere.

The core solidified, stopped spinning, the field collapsed and the atmosphere went its merry way off into space.

In other news, just because your house burned down after getting hit by lightning does not mean it's safe for my 3 year old to play with matches.

Does Japan know something that Detroit doesn't?

Math...

But give them some respect, they aren't backward savages like most american's seem to believe.

Or, to phrase it somewhat differently, they're hardly any more backward and savage than most americans.