For 5k, you can get a laptop and a desktop.

If you're at your desk, use the desktop. Are you in meetings 8 hours a day?

When I say VNC, I also mean anything like it (remote desktop etc...)

I'm an electrical engineer and we use laptops and we VNC into linux workstations to do very compute intensive things.

If you need the computational horsepower and portability, why not have a desktop and VNC into it through your laptop?

It appears the idea they are trying to patent is that, in a 3D world, when you turn the camera to look a given direction, you should only see some avatars, and not others (that is, only the ones in your field of view). Additionally, if there are a lot of avatars, this patent claims protection for the idea that the client can implement a maximum number of avatars to display, and to use the knowledge of the maximum number to display, combined with the position information, to determine some subset of the avatars to display (presumably the X nearest avatars, where X is the maximum number to display, though the patent doesn't specify this explicitly).

Neal Stephenson covered this in 1992 in Snow Crash when he described the behavior of avatars in the Metaverse (the 3D virtual world in the novel). In large crowds the clients would typically display other avatars as ghosts to cut down on rendering time and to avoid avatar collisions.

If you keep your money in a bank, it doesn't just sit there. The bank lends it out to other people or businesses - so leaving it in a bank isn't so detrimental to society. If you are unwilling to spend it, the bank will spend it on your behalf - while paying you an interest rate for the privilege.

"why the lucky stiff" is a person's nickname.