Isn't that really old news....nothing new going on there after the riots/protests finally ended is there?

It seems you're living in the UK. Windows Phone has had more success there than in the US. American consumers are fairly close-minded; they, by and large, follow the herd and refuse to consider alternatives. Android is gaining traction, but I still come across people who chose that platform only grudgingly; they prefer the iPhone but aren't willing to pay the premium to get one. They're painfully ignorant of other platforms, as evidenced by all the fanfare over ApplePay and the way people talk like Apple has invented NFC payments.

The problems for Windows Phone are exacerbated by atrocious retail and carrier support. Microsoft talks extensively about partnerships but carriers do little to promote the platform and most retailers don't care their phones at all. The only place you'll find them are carrier stories and there employees, either due to ignorance or pressure from management, actively steer consumers way from Windows Phone.

Um, this law is wholly illiberal, why would liberals ever want this?

"But why would they want to kill their own customers?"
"Why do madmen do anything? They're bloody madmen, that's why!" -Arcanum

Political debate gets a lot easier when you pretend your opponents do not have any motives besides being card carrying villains. This also has the added benefits of not needing to think your own politics or their consequences, after all since your opponent is evil you are by definition good. Operation Barbarossa? What's that?

Basically, the OP was simply confirming their tribal identity as one of the Good Guys, and happened to belong to the tribe called "conservatives". Since the issue at hand is not one of the flag issues - issues used for defining the tribe's identity - they were free to acknowledge the proposal as evil and attribute it to the other tribe ("liberals"). Had this been one of those issues, for example gay rights, we'd been treated to a convoluted logic to "prove" that their tribe was correct and the other evil.

This kind of behaviour is typical for political fringes, where it serves to help the members keep their flame going, but since the US only has two parties it gets injected straight to the core of the nation's political life, the result being increasing instability.

So nothing has made it through the Chunnel yet?

Also, for the natural foods buffs, please note that honey is mostly fructose and glucose in almost the same concentration as HFCS, so if HFCS is bad for you, "natural" honey is probably not a solution to this problem.

Well, perhaps we could repurpose a rollercoaster to produce a less sugary alternative to insect vomit?

The base coding languages, which are abstractions of the machine language. Those are the only libraries that should be installed, in the first place.

I don't really see how an interpreter or a JIT compiler would help the problem, or even be a library for that matter. The issue isn't how to make the same code run on multiple architectures, after all, but how to make the program logic flexible enough to handle the absence of a service yet make full use of it when present.

Also, most languages are still stuck with only standard input and output without third-party libraries, which are typically an awful fit. This is not the 80's anymore, that hasn't cut it for the long time now, and not really even then. Most applications aren't headless servers, and require graphics and proper UI.

Reminds me of this one: Girl to boy "You have one of those, and I have one of these. And with one of these I can get as many of those as I want!"

It depends on whether you consider "look what happened to me!" to be worthier than "look at what I achieved in my life through my own skills and determination".

Wan Hu was determined to go to space. That didn't do much good for him, since he happened to live in 16th century (if at all). It takes more just personal qualities to achieve anything at all, thus evevery achievement has an element of "look what happened to me!". And of course this is all ignoring the fact that while you did indeed earn those skills, the intelligence and discipline required to do so were handed to you by birth and upbringing, both of which simply happened to you.

It takes more than just the end result ot judge the worthiness of an accomplishment. You also have to determine the starting point and any factors influencing the performance along the way. But that might lead to some uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of pure meritocracy, and especially about how fair it actually is, so in practice people simply worship fortune and fame.

You're also assuming that the Soviets simply sent up the first woman who happened to walk past the recruiting office, with the famously reliable Soviet technology eliminating the need for any training or even basic guts, but whatever.

It was a military surplus rifle that had been "sporterized" (mainly by cutting the stock down to a more civilian profile).

The Enfield has an interesting history: Back in the period leading up to WWII the British mmilitary had a good idea the war was coming. The army was armed mainly wiith the Lee-Enfield bolt action rifles and they knew they needed a good slect fire automatic/semiautomatic rifle to replace them, least they be outgunned. But they debated over WHICH design to pick for so long that, when the Blitzkreig brought the Germans into a faceoff with the British, the autos weren't yet deployed.

It turns out that the Lee-Enfield action has a number of features that make it VERY much faster to operate than other bolt-action military weapons of the time. The bolt has a very small throw angle. It has rear, not front, locking lugs (out where there's lots of clearance and little stress and opportunity for dirt to gum them up). The action is almost glassy-smooth. The bolt ball is located where it can be opened by the thumb, while slapping it closed with the palm, doesn't require accurate positioning of the hand, and guides the hand back to the correct position to fire, letting the user's attention remain on the target scene and sight picture. It cocks on closing (rather than on opening as Mausers do), dedicating essentially all the energy on opening to case extraction, rather than splitting it with spring-cocking and keeping the opening and closing work closer to equal.

The result is that, with a modicum of practice, a rifleman with a Lee-Enfield can achieve higher firing rates than the operator of a machine gun. (Machine gun rates are deliberately limited to make them easier to control and aim, avoid wasting ammunition, and reduce overheating, burnout, and jamming.) It can't keep it up as LONG, because the Lee Enfield has a small, fixed, magazine. But it can fire a couple fast, controlled, bursts - just what is needed in many situations - using a powerful rifle cartridge.

By comparison the Germans were armed with things like the recently developed "assault rifle" - a short-barreled select-fire rifle (for easy handling in cramped hallways or popping up out of a tank hatch), firing a low-powered cartridge. (Militaries had figured out that a gun should be designed to WOUND, not kill: Kill a soldier and you take one out of action - wound him and you use up him, his buddy, a medic, and a lot of infrastructure and supplies taking care of him and shipping him back home.)

The Blitzkreig stormed across much of Europe and encountered only limited resistance, typically armed with the likes of the slower bolt-action Mausers. Then they came up against the British. They knew the Brits were armed with bolt-actions and believed their own propaganda about their lack of resolve. So they expected to sweep them up as they had their previous encounters. They came charging out, and were blasted back, repeatedly, by withering fire. There are records of communications from the front where the officers were claiming all the Brits were armed with machine guns. (I hear one of these records is a recording - with the officer in question being killed in mid-message by a round from one of those Lee-Enfields.)

He's just teasing Chris Grayling.

"absolution"

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Police are searching for them under an old Ethernet bridge.

My trick: never going to CNN