Actually Comey is a long term member of the Republican party.

But you still haven't explained what you're optimizing by being on the Apple platform other than "happy". what is it about the Apple platform that makes you happy?

Really, that's odd: where I live they don't let strange people just wander in and out of offices because they want to "check out what computers you're using"

So I've been using a Microsoft Surface as my primary machine (everything except software development) for almost two months now and I'm not having any problem with "gorilla arm". And I don't think most people will. The reason being that the only time that I need to touch the screen a lot is when I'm consuming content (reading blogs, watching videos, etc.) For that I ditch the keyboard and hold it like a tablet. When I'm creating things, i.e., e-mail, writing proposals and documentation, my hands don't really leave the keyboard very much. I'm typing this on my Surface and I'm not having any problems because there's no need to touch the screen when creating content.

Citation? On Slashdot? Are you new here or something?

Actually, I was talking to a C++ programmer who told me that she was seeing growth in the tablet area in her business.

A lot of the growth in C++ is for tablets. As much as it is easier to write code in a garbage collected language, that garbage collection background process is constantly running, eating up battery life and cycles on lower powered ARM processors. C and C++ don't have all of that overhead.

But the real question is why did you buy a new TV? Was it because your old one wore out and it was time to replace it or was it because some advertising convinced you that without the new whiz-bang 1000000p display with 4D something-or-other you life would be a meaningless shell and you would never get laid and probably get cancer?

Of course Facebook (and Google) sell your information. The only difference between them and other companies that are gathering and selling information about you is that Facebook and Google are selling your information retail instead of wholesale. The information is still being used to do the same thing: target advertising at you to convince you to act in ways that you would not have otherwise and might well be detrimental to your own interests.

According to Wikipedia, Tennessee is 41st in median household income in the US. How long are they going to hold on to even that position when all of the educated people in the state (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.) start moving elsewhere so that their children will get a proper education? I think we can write off Tennessee for the near future.

Maybe the AMA and various other professional bodies should start reviewing the status of education in Tennessee to see if a child educated in such a system will ever qualify for med school. I'm pretty sure that I don't want a doctor who doesn't understand basic biology

Actually, I would think that CAD/CAM would be a perfect use case for a touch screen. The iPad might be a little small for most people (although I know a kitchen designer who uses an iPad) but for really industrial uses how about a Microsoft Surface?

The assumption that tablets will outsell PCs within a decade is based on current growth rates remaining steady. That's a pretty big assumption.

Because tablets are a relatively new device they are currently in a growth market phase of their life cycle. Once the market has reached a saturation point (and we don't know where that saturation point is), then it will enter the same type of market that PCs are in: where people are buying replacements when their old one wears out.

Of course you might be right in that all you have to do with a tablet is hook it up to a keyboard and mouse (whether bluetooth or something else) and you've got a useful, but if that's the case why not just hook up your phone to a bluetooth keyboard, mouse and display and have something even more portable?