All governments spy on each other, and they have since the invention of espionage. And they all know they all spy on each other, too. They just need to exercise the good sense to not get publicly caught. Not getting caught is getting harder in the digital age, as everyone from airports, customs, trucking, retail, and city infrastructure is beefing up their security. They may suck at it, but it makes hiding invisibly that much harder.

Guns can be _extremely effective_ at changing governments, ranging from assassination of critical leaders to armed revolt. The assassination of Arch Duke Ferdinand of Austria triggered World War I, which reshaped Europe and governments and economies around the world.

Then you need to review the Ninth Amendment, which spelled out that rights not explicitly mentioned by the Constitution may still exist and be recognized in a Constitutionally relevant way. There had been hesitance about stating rights in the Constitution explicitly meaning that rights _not_ spelled out would no longer be acknowledged as valid.

I've seen people harassed by the police for carrying costume swords, with no edge, at a Shakespeare performance fresh from a day at a Renaissance festival. The police tried to confiscate his sword, without any receipt. When it was clear he would not surrender it without being arrested and creating a paper trail for his confiscated property, they eventually turned him loose.

The earliest "gun control laws" were applied by Imperial governments to colonists, to control a growing civilian population with a remotely managed and badly outnumbered Imperial military in _every_ nation's colonies. Then there was a long gap, due to the War for Independence and the 2nd Amendment, then it started up as a US federal policy in the 1930's applied to machine guns and sawed off shotguns. It grew in the 1960's _due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King_, which illustrated the growing risk of assassination for respected leaders.

We use "mils" in the semiconductor industry, and they also did in the paint/coating industry when I worked in it 20 years ago. A "mil" is a thousandth of an inch... a milli-inch! This can lead to some funny mixes, like "grams per square mil" for shear force measurements.

In other words, it's a problem. A solution that requires all users to have technical knowledge isn't a solution, it's a fantasy.

That's all pretty much a non-argument. Live tile content can be turned on or off by application, or live tiles can be completely disabled. So if a business wants to turn off live tiles for Twitter, they can send out a Group Policy Object to disable live tiles on the Twitter app. They could also add custom live tiles for the corporate share price, company newsletter, web server status, or whatever they want. Don't worry about them.

And as far as I'm concerned, live tiles have never been an issue with Windows 8. I turned off a few I didn't want, but that's only because I hate the distraction of blinky flashy things when I'm looking for something else. But tor the most part they're ignorable. As for the maligned start screen, it simply isn't much different from the Windows 7 start menu button, although it needs the tree-structure metaphor returned as that's how people group their apps.

No, the problems with Windows 8 were the "charms" and the "gestures". With a mouse or on a trackpad they are unintuitive, difficult to control, difficult to remember, difficult to discover, and almost impossible to activate. And that's coming from someone who loves his Surface Pro!

On a Surface or phone, Windows 8's UI is mostly harmless because the interface take place where the hands and fingers are already located. But they are an overflowing truckload of stinking horseshit on everything else. I'm unaware of any big corporate American business that ever installed it on their desktops (it crept in on a few Surface tablets and Windows phones, but no sysadmin was stupid enough to roll it out to the desktop.)

Microsoft learned several big lessons from the spanking they took on Windows 8, but the biggest is "listen to your corporate beta testers. If they tell you it's shit, IT'S SHIT. AND YOU DO NOT ROLL OUT SHIT."

The other day I had a 'softie tell me over lunch that "Windows 10 is our way of saying 'oh god, oh god, we're all so very very sorry about Windows 8 and we promise we'll never ever do it again.'" So from here on out, I think we can count on Microsoft to cater to the business and desktop users, as that's where a huge chunk of their money comes from.

Agreed about anecdotes. However, I can say that I have to reboot my Windows 7 PC weekly because of serious degradation in performance. I have installed a fair bit of software (the PATH can no longer be extended) but there's only about three games (Freeciv, Kerbal Space Program, Elite: Dangerous) and no apps, toolbars or junk. The rest of the software on there? MariaDB, Ingres, GRASS, QGIS (OSGEO is basically Cygwin, so I've now three incompatible Cygwin distros on Windows), HOL 4, Active Python, Active Perl, Erlang, Rust, Blender, PoVRay, BMRT - the sort of stuff you'd expect to find on any PC, nothing fancy.

And Netscape. Which is a horrible resource hog and is honestly not usable in its current form. I have abandoned all efforts to get Chrome usable. I'll probably deinstall both and switch to Amaya. Which barely does anything, but it does it tolerably.

You mean to tell me that the US doesn't even trust the other Five Eyes nations' spy agencies to be able to do this?*

*Yes, I know, to get round legal restrictions, it was very normal for the US to spy on the citizens of the other four and to exchange that data for information collected on US citizens by other members of Five Eyes. However, we now know all the agencies DO spy on their own citizens, routinely. So the US can ask GCHQ to wiretap British citizens in Britain, it doesn't need to spy on Britain itself. This behaviour suggests wheels within wheels.

You mean to tell me that the US isn't all caught up in the US-UK "Special Relationship" stuff?**

**Most Americans were unaware there even was one and get horribly confused when the British talk about it.

Linux is indeed better. Not because of Open Source (the code doesn't care) but because it has fewer bugs (about 0.1% of the bugs per kloc), non-intrusive strong security (rated EAL 5+ on conformant hardware, conforms to B2 Orange Book standards), superior multi-processor support, superior memory management and superior networking.

Graphics? Not an OS issue. That's a GUI issue. Never confuse how something gets data with what it then does with it. The GUI is not central to Windows (as demonstrated by console mode startup, but should be obvious to anyone running it as a headless server). The core OS functions are, and always have been, resource management, virtualization, security and stability. (Filesystems are virtual layers on top of physical disks, so are resource management and virtualization.)

Linux is better at the things an OS is meant to do. Windows has an adequate GUI, but the OS is abysmal. Besides sales, the only reason the game industry likes Windows is that it has useful libraries - DirectX (an alternative to the functions the GUI itself provides) and easy access to GPU functions (bypassing the OS altogether, running on bare metal).

The reason Linux doesn't have these? Look in the mirror. The face you see was quite capable of working on GGI, KGI or Linux Framebuffers, of helping in the Berlin project, of submitting patches for SDL or Avagadro, or even hacking Wine to improve support for DirectX, CUDA or other graphical features.

I'm no innocent myself, but I own up to my guilt, I don't blame the OS (which IS innocent).

Windows 10 IS Windows 9. Microsoft engineers are even still calling it Windows 9. The source tree is the same, there have been no major changes.

What has happened is that Windows 9 has been getting very bad press and is still riddled with bugs. Instead of releasing a version number nobody will buy and would only have to patch almost immediately anyway, OR getting slagged off for Yet Another Delayed Release, Microsoft is renaming it version 10 and delaying the release until the bugs are sorted.

You will observe Microsoft has been talking up Windows 9 for some time, but now all talk (and apparently all memory) of it has ceased. Newspapers suffering amnesia is amost acceptable. Slashdotters??? WTF??? I'm sorry, but there is no-one in or around IT that has a single, solitary excuse.

There have been cases of Boeing 777s and modernized 737s developing unexplained system faults. Do not be so sure that RFI was not to blame. These have had much worse reliability than other Boeing models in recent years and as no other faults have been offered by Boeing as explanation, it is illogical to simply dismiss the one fault we know about as unrelated to the unusual number of abnormalities and crashes specific to these two models.

Obviously, Boeing has no interest in being honest about the problems they know about, be they software or hardware. Nor are they likely to Open Source anything, so there is no possibility of scrutiny by an independent party.

Simple logic (and self-preservation) says they have an unattributed defect capable of causing catastrophic failure, and a defect that can potentially cause catastrophic failure, therefore fixing the defect is essential.

The cost? The cost is insignificant. Boeing is hardly poor and is quite capable of covering the airlines' cost as this is a manufacturing defect. The airlines? They're making enough money that they can afford riots on board when seats are tilted. Besides, this is the cost of doing business. There's a price for bad decisions, all other sectors (except, apparently, banks) are expected to take the rough with the smooth. If several go bust because they chose unwisely, that's how life in business goes. You pay your money, you take your choice. Besides, they'd still be doing better than the German in Last Crusade.

If I went into business and made bad choices, would you be telling people to ignore my expenses? No? Good. If I'm not fit for purpose as a businessman, I've no business expecting support. So why should Ryanair, a notoriously incompetent company, deserve better? Because they're too big to fail? Not a good reason.

All you need are some windows that open in flight. Problem solved.

The HARD part is creating a movie where the plot is; "use large geometric shapes and pack them well!"

That's not the plot, that's the theme. The plot will be "good guys kill bad guys". The only real question is whether "Tetris" will turn up as a heroic or villainous doomsday weapon.