How is that a bad result? If they arrive, drop off a set of supremely-convincing beliefs, and leave, the only result is that everyone now has the same religion. Everyone having the same religion means no more religious conflicts. As long as the religion isn't "sacrifice your lives for your alien overlords", I'd say it'd be a positive outcome.

You missed the point. He knows where things are running and how to fix them if they break, but the other group knows nothing but "use the IDE" and they haven't bothered to learn what the IDE is actually doing behind the scenes.

When are modern TVs ever truly "off", though? The screen may be off, but the rest of the internals are still working away...

I don't understand what the programmers of all these crypto libraries were thinking here. Even for the most basic and unimportant program, the rule is "if the data comes from outside, verify!" This is vastly more important when cryptography is involved, so why is it that all these crypto libraries seem to blindly trust whatever the Internet is sending them?!

Hopefully Toshiba will work to fix OCZ's infamously poor SSD reliability. 1.8GB/sec transfers mean nothing if the drive is so spotty you may as well be moving your files to /dev/null

Be careful. Advocating a from-scratch rewrite, instead of fixing the broken parts of a mostly-working system, is the hallmark of a CADT development model.

Or, hell, just add back most of the configuration options they removed from the system. I know a blank screen is trendy nowadays but sometimes I just want to look at a screensaver, y'know?

From his question, it sounds like the Unity interface would be too much for their low-end PCs, so plain Ubuntu is out of the question. Heck, even on my mid-range PC the Unity menu is a bit sluggish. I've never actually used Mint, but it looks like it's a good way to go.

XFCE, last I used it, was good but just slightly too different in its behavior to be a good first step into Linux for traditional Windows XP users.

A menu that's actually usable, that doesn't throw you into the awful metro interface, is considered by Microsoft to be "exciting near-future stuff".

...That's just goddamn depressing.

Tell that to my dad, who used to be perfectly happy playing Freecell, and writing things down in a spreadsheet while crunching numbers with the calculator program (yes, you can do calculations in Excel, but no, he doesn't trust it). He also had a backup scheduled to run once a week.

In Windows 8.1, the godawful Calculator app takes up the entire screen, so good luck copying numbers back and forth. I tried to help him schedule a backup like before, but the only solution I found was a 3-freaking-lines-long powershell command. To top it off, Windows 8 is unable to read the backup files made by Windows XP (what the hell, Microsoft?!). And Freecell and Solitaire are nowhere to be found!

Vast improvement to home users my ass. It's harder to do things that used to be easy, and downright impossible to do things that used to be merely complicated.

Bullshit? Not likely. My parents were just forced to buy a new version of Word, because the WORD documents they were getting sent looked like crap in older version of WORD they had.

We can look at a microcosm of the Internet - YouTube and its ContentID system - to see what happens when people can trivially take down other peoples' content via bogus claims (or, worse, take control of the content and all its profit). In summary: it's not a fun place to be, unless you're a big company or someone who lives off misappropriated ad income.

Oh, and also: USB didn't exist. God help you if you were trying to get a serial gamepad to be recognized by a game.

Cough sputter- What?! Are you seriously saying that the PC as a gaming platform is roughly the same as in 1994?

Here's a quick example of the sort of change that's happened:
In 1994, most PC gaming was still done in DOS, on computers without a dedicated graphics card. Games drew to a framebuffer. There was only a single processor, and there was only a single application running (ignoring Win3.1's cooperative multitasking, but most games required that Windows be shut off first anyway). The application had unfettered access to memory, and when it crashed it usually took the entire system along with it. CD drives were a novelty, and 14.4k modems were all there was in the way of "networked multiplayer", but they tied up the phone line so you couldn't stay on too long.

This is America. Nobody is supposed to be above the law, especially the government.

Congress may not be concerned with the NSA's actions, but they've already proven themselves willing to trade away our freedoms wholesale so that they can claim to be "tough on terror" during the next election cycle. We need to hold their feet to the fire and make them reign in the NSA.