Head Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs) are pretty common, your bog standard motherboard sound chip (intel HD, not AC87) can probably do them if you install the drivers. Add a pair of IEMs/'canalphones' (so you're not sending sound through your algorithmic pinnae followed by your physical pinnae) and you have positional stereo sound.

Kickstarter units are being shipped before pre-orders from the website. I'm not sure where the 12/12/12 date came from either: as of this posting, Palmer has yet to announce anything new on the MTBS forums (where the Rift development emerged from), though Dycus (another member of the Oculus team) has said an announcement is coming 'before Wednesday'.

Hard to tell without access to the raw figures, but if the number of T-bone crashes has reduced, replaced by more rear-end incidents, is it possible that the injury rate, or at least number of serous injuries or fatalities, has decreased? Even if the net cost in car damage increases, that would still be a win in my books.

What for?

It's a requirement as part of the Windows 8 hardware certification (applies not just to laptops and desktops, but to anything that the manufacturer wants to put the 'works with Windows 8' logo on, e.g. motherboards) that:
a) You be able to disable secure boot
b) You be able to enter your own keys into secure boot (either through adding them to the existing keychain, or wiping the keychain and adding keys)

Here's the relevant legalese from MS:

Being someone who wasn't around when .gifs were new (and barely around when Unisys threw a hissy fit), I too have never seen .gif being verb-ed. Not on reddit, not on 4chan, not on Tumblr, and if you've seen a .gif nowadays it's probably originated from one of those three.

If they tried this by locking Secure Boot, they'd get an angry letter from Microsoft. It's a requirement for Windows 8 certification that the end user can add their own keys to Secure Boot.

So, identical to existing CAD packages such as Solidworlds, Pro/Engineer, Catia, FreeCAD, OpenSCAD etc? Yeah, that's a totally new generation right there, nobody has marketed products for solid modelling physical objects with the intention of producing them with some sort of additive/subtractive machining process before, no siree.

Unless, of course, the Universe is crocheted.

What Logitech device do you have? My MX revolution happily works offline with no problems, as did my last keyboard (Logitech Illuninated). Not even a sign-in page in sight.

Defibrillators do not 'jump-start' the heart, they defibrillate (i.e. stop fibrillation). This is often rolled into the function of a pacemaker.

Don't forget that a good chunk of Japan (and importantly, the chunk that ran on the same power grid system as Fukushima No.1) wad just been close to levelled by a tsunami. While the storm surge and rain flooding from a hurricane is nothing to sneeze at, the infrastructure destruction is nowhere close. Getting backup generators and lines into place for any plant whose internal backups fails is going to much easier on the American east coast than it was on the east coast of Japan (where most heavy lift equipment was busy freeing itself, or on immediate lifesaving duties).

I can order a set of custom-moulded earplugs for my headphones for £100, which includes the price of a casting of my ear canal at a ophthalmologist. An EQ is basic enough that you can buy commodity ICs to do so, and the EQ need only be performed occasionally during a checkup, and not even necessarily with the same device.

Rifles, yes (you need to be a member of a shooting club). Pistols even more so (pretty much restricted to security companies). But shotguns? £50 plus a "valid reason" (for which "because I'd like to own a shotgun" is acceptable), along with a suitable place to store it, is all that is needed for a shotgun certificate.

You have obviously not actually used Windows 8, because what you have said is totally false. You start regular desktop programs from the start screen in exactly the same way as you start regular desktop programs from the start menu: by clicking on them. Just for you, I went and set up my old Win8 preview VM and took a screenshot of the start screen with some desktop programs on it. You can also do the same press-windows-key-type-first-few-letters-of-program/file-hit-enter method you can in 7 and Vista.

Think of the start screen as a start menu that happens to use the full display rather than just the left hand 1/5 of it. Have you ever, even once, needed to be able to see whatever is in the remaining 4/5 of the screen while selecting something from the start menu? It's a massive waste of space.

For any 'serious work' (which I assume you to mean 'anything not running in Metro), the interface is the same as 7 and before. And you 'dig into the OS' by clicking an tile (aka a slightly larger desktop icon icon), either for the desktop itself or for a desktop application.