But they know where you use your credit/debit card... your mother must be so ashamed!

As far as gun owners needing to be astronauts, that's over-kill. Idiots with guns tends to be a self correcting problem. I thought all liberals preached natural selection. Why do they fight so hard against it?

Really? The low murder rate in easy to legally get a gun Plano, Texas and the high murder rate in the hard to legally get a gun city of Detroit beg to differ: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

In fact, oddly enough those places with the highest per-capita murder rates in the US tend to have rather strict gun laws full of more than a few liberal voters... odd that?

No doubt John Walker Lindh, Adam Gadahn and Colleen LaRose (just to name a few off the top of my head) wish it was that easy.

You forgot to mention that most "assault rifles" are often easily modifiable into a non-illegal configuration. Have a pistol grip? Quick! Replace it with a thumb-in-hole stock. Have a detachable magazine? Add a bullet button!

Unless the powers that be want to make illegal the Ruger 10/22 and standard hammer, any law seeking to limit access to an assault rifle or weapon that can be used to assault is rather pointless.

First, do please define "sensible gun regulation".

Second, are you aware of how much 'gun regulation' already exists today both in federal, state & local statutes?

You are hard pressed to find a legal consumer good which is more regulated than firearms with regards to it's manufacture, sale, transport and use.

Agreed, using a third party service when you know you are going to be subject to scrutiny from those in power is just dumb... but then I've come to expect that from WikiLeaks.

When I was in school long ago I found that from time to time a teacher might try to punish me for my attitude or behavior but not by lowering a value in such a way (if there was such a column on the report card), but by arbitrarily claiming I got 20% less on a given test than I really did scored. Once I discovered this occasional pattern I started to keep rather good records and not giving them an official reason on paper to punish me. Only once did this fail when I was so busy dealing with the demonstrable harassment of the professor that they gave me the lowest grade they could without garnering suspicion (though probably due to me he will likely never teach a college class again)

Julian Assuage would have been better off long ago if he married someone and put on a good enough show of being a committed husband, so much so that any allegations of rape or infidelity would seem like utter nonsense. Yes, some will say that the accusations were/are nonsense, but not weighed in comparison to who he is and presenters himself as a person they seem at a minimum plausible to the common person.

True, though I don't see many people wearing "I was abused in the past" signs around their necks... maybe I'm just not as good at reading people as others are.

So you see nothing wrong with a professor using his status to obtain sexual favors?

Even if they are offered?

I've a friend who spent some time as a college level instructor and on quite a few occasions would have rather attractive co-ed here or there who would put on the water works or even make veiled sexual offers if he to try to get him to bump their grade or allow late work to be turned in for full credit.

My friend was at least smart and professional enough to refuse all such advances, not all are so.

I'm not excusing anything, I've just heard plenty from the other side.

If you think I've not used Linux since then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

You know, it's funny when a windows shill accidentally stumbles upon the problem that his masters probably told him ten times over not to ever mention, because that is one point where the battle is objectively unwinnable for pro-windows arguments.

You know you've lost the argument when you have to accuse the other side of being a paid shill of another group.

I'm not even bother reading the rest of your likely similarly irrelevant screed as I've better things to do with my time.

From my own perspective, your argument is moot

That is the key... it ultimately comes down to a perspective thing!

I happen to own a couple touch enabled devices running Windows 8.1 and from my perspective have zero problem with the UI, heck, at times it is more useful than not, even in the 8.0 timeframe without a touch device the new UI didn't matter to me as I used the start screen much other than to search for something.

On the other side, I've gone back and forth with Linux for years and each time run screaming. I have a copy of Turbo Linux Slackware from 1996 and Red Hat Linux Archives disc set from 1997 containing Red Hat 4.1 (though some where discs 4 & 5 went missing :( )... so I go back quite a ways, and while some things have improved quite a bit... I still prefer the Windows side of things... though I tend not to spend much time bashing the other side because of the horrible experiences I've had with it.

Where is this democracy you live in? I suspect not here in the United States where while officially it is a Federal Republic... though has since well moved into the post-constitutional arena, where unelected and largely unaccountable bureaucrats have huge sway, and elected 'leaders' no longer feel themselves restrained by the laws they swore to uphold.

There is also the competition.

Back in the day you had mostly just PCs & Macs, now you have various tablets and smartphones as well.

While I need a desktop to do most of my work & play, both of my parents can get by with a simple iPad or Android based tablet... how does Microsoft sell Windows to people that no longer need it to carry out their work/play? A subscription alone doesn't give the customer anything... there would need to be reoccurring value for it, and I think that's something we'd probably hear a year or so into Windows 10 being available.

That is my impression as well. Hell, they have already been testing this model with Office... you can either go buy a single retail full version for ~$400 and keep using it in perpetuity... or pay $100 a year for Office 365 and get Office across 5 different devices and upgrades to later versions so long as you keep paying.

I know some who are still happy using their several version behind copies of Office... and others who prefer the subscription model. To each their own... and now both are supported.

How about we wait and see to know for sure? Though I guess I can jump into the wild speculations as well:

If I have the hard drive in my laptop fails...

...and I know how to replace it (discrete hard disks in laptops are starting to become uncommon), I probably already have a backup system in place to get me up and running afterwards.

... and I do not know how to fix it myself and it's no longer under warranty, then a new device may be required... but that is often the case today. Hell, the only recovery media I likely had was on the disk that failed.

... and I do not know how to fix it myself and it is under warranty, then a getting sent away for service would be required... and if it comes back with an older version of the OS... one would hope that the Windows 10 setup/upgrade process will accept a PID that was previously used to upgrade... but again, I don't think anyone outside of Redmond knows how this process will work for sure yet.