This tablet is $50. And the latest Raspberry Pi 2 B is $40. If you add a power cord, case, and storage to the Pi, it is now ~$60. Imagine how many projects the tablet would inspire if it was reasonably programmable. Or how about the tablet without a battery and screen? Those are the two most expensive pieces.

It sounds like this might be in response to all of the reports of massive amounts of spam accounts: http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/08/14/1851243/inside-the-real-economy-behind-fake-twitter-followers This might be one way to reduce the ease that the spam-twitter-herders work while at the same time providing a bit of income.

Could you give a little more detail? Also living in the midwest, if I COMPLETELY replaced my electricity needs with solar, I could only spend about $4,000 total on a system and have it pay back in 3 years. In some very brief looking online, this MIGHT pay for the inverter and installation. What size system did you install?

All that this shows is that there isn't much difference between the ISPs. They had to scale the chart (it doesn't start at 0) just to show the differences. As Netflix commented in the linked post, their HD streams are much higher (4.8kb) than these graphs. Of course the graph is just an average, so it doesn't speak to how HD users are affected.

Another point which I rarely hear about in discussions of the iPhone is how it is fundamentally marketed differently. We have had an iPhone for many years now. It hasn't been the exact same hardware this whole time, but it has been an "iPhone" the whole time. Now think about other mobile phones. Ask someone what phone they have and it is either "LG", "Motorola", etc. Mobile phone models change so often than no one can remember what model they have currently, because there is a good chance that you can't even buy the model anymore. Apple has won the marketing game because by keeping the same name, they don't have to scrap all of their previous marketing whenever the model changes.

There's one big reason - latency.

Not all games are twitchy FPSs and racing games though; and not every element in even *those* games has to be calculated for instant feedback.

Let's say you have a flamethrower in a game. You need to be able to see where the flames are going, and where your enemies are going, 'immediately' so that you can get a good kill.

But all the indirect lighting from those flames bouncing around in the scene lagging behind by, say, 150ms would be perfectly acceptable.

e.g. offload the intensive bits and pieces to the cloud, rather than the entire thing.

Although the entire thing would be possible in due time as well - players are already playing with lag; lag induced from rendering off-site is minimal compared to the hops between you and the average game server. Bandwidth is a far bigger concern; especially when you consider more and more ISPs introducing caps.

As far as CPUs go.. oh, absolutely, they'll get ever more powerful especially after Larrabee. But the games get more demanding as well. So now you need a new CPU, but it uses a different socket, so you get a new motherboard, turns out your old cooling fan won't fit, beside.. the TDP of the new CPU is 120W, so you'll need a watercooling solution anyway, etc. etc.
There's a lot of reasons why 'gaming on the cloud' ( I do hate that term. ) can be a good thing (from the technical up above, to the energy efficiency, to technical support, to non-invasive anti-cheating constructions), just as there are down sides to it (potential for lag, slurps bandwidth, no resale options, game could be abandoned at any point and you'll have no recourse, etc.).

But to state it's doomed before it's even launched... hmm. Let's have them give it a shot, first?

Yeah.... I was just thinking the same thing. How quick we forget our history. This sounds like DIVX (not the codec - but what Circuit City was pushing) all over again, just without the physical medium (aka DIVX Disc).

What bothers me about these "subscription-based" consumer models is that a verification system is required to authenticate or "authorized" consumers. Such systems can easiely produce reports on consumer habbits and veiwing preferences. Reports could be given to Goverment agencies, FBI profiling can be modeled, etc... Granted, not really a big issue in a free society like ours (cough cough), but has anyone seen the German film "The Lives of Others"??

What do all of these have in common?

Some sort of license to work, i.e. they have to prove in some way that they know what they are talking about. Why are you trying to hold someone in an entry-level job up to the same standard as a "professional"?

And what about the tank-burning laser that can be fired from an airplane? Well, we haven't discussed that but I'm at a loss as to explain why.

How about actually searching for something as simple as "laser"? This previous article appears on the first page:
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/13/0315230