NX support was actually added between Windows 8 and 8.1, but you're right that there have been minor adjustments to hardware requirements over time. Since NX has to be supported by both CPU and motherboard, it's actually quite a hole. A lot of my company's Core2 systems wouldn't be compatible with Windows 8 or 10 because the standard motherboard is an older one.

The way I understand the rules in the US, the definition of child pornography is actually highly expansive and can include photos of lascivious intent in spite of the presence or absence of clothing. The iconic Coppertone Girl ad of the dog pulling at the little girl's bikini might be enough to cause a problem in some jurisdictions, and every once in a while we'll get stories about parents getting legal fallout for having pictures of their infants being bathed or something.

I gained 180lbs. in two years while I was on Zoloft and Paxil. I wasn't a small person to begin with. I was doing things like eating two large take-out pizzas a day when I could afford to do it. The sick thing was that I was under care of a psychiatrist, a psychologist and my primary care physician, and none of them thought my weight gain was an issue worth addressing.

I got debilitating headaches, spent a good chunk of my 20s with absolutely zero sex drive, only slept about four hours a night and had trouble stringing together a coherent sentence. For all of that, the meds never actually made me feel any better. I just took them because my doctors told me they were helping.

Eventually, I did get fed up and just stopped treatment. I had a few months of even worse headaches, but at least for me it's easier to just deal with depression and anxiety than all the problems that came along with the meds.

When I was on Paxil, I went ~15 months without once having a conscious hard-on.

My experiences with Zoloft and Paxil suggest that side-effects, most especially related to my physical appetite and sleep schedule, occur within 12 hours of starting medication or a change in dosage. I can't say I ever experienced any positive impact from either medication in the couple of years I spent at various dosages, but do know that all three of the physicians I was seeing swore up and down that SSRIs don't work like that.

I likewise found that a mental fog settled over me within a few days of starting each SSRI that I try. I felt more like I was controlling a video game character than experiencing any part of my own life, to the point that I would at times find myself sitting in the passenger seat of my own car, wondering why it wasn't moving.

I eventually decided that the pharmacological aspect to my treatment for depression was doing far more harm than good. I have to say that I have a strong distrust for purported utility of SSRIs, and a vastly lower opinion of mental health providers in general as a result of my experiences.

They no longer provide MBTF metrics for consumer (Deskstar) class drives but the uncorrectable error rate on Ultrastars is an order of magnitude higher than the others, which is a common distinction between consumer and enterprise-grade drives.

I have a number of Plex servers. Plex also allows me to publish images, music and video online, albeit to a select group of people. Were I seeking a wider audience, I'd have the options of Vimeo or Xtube or Soundcloud or Bandcamp or Flickr to put my content online.

I also have a bunch of web servers. What's stopping me from using the dozens of web content galleries, if I'm going to be using my own disk space and bandwidth instead of Google's or Yahoo's?

Seriously, what is this doing that those things aren't?

I paid for the ModernUI version of Plex. It was $2 or something and it's pretty much a showpiece for the touchscreen experience on Windows.
However, I own both a Surface and a Surface Pro, so I actually use it. I also own Plex on iOS, GoogleTV, the Play Store and Amazon's app store. Getting it for Windows 8 was really more about completing the collection.

The people who run OKC were a bunch of statistics nerds. It runs (ran, anyway) on a custom web server that performs a lot of real time analysis. Their blog is chock full of incredibly detailed information about their users. This shouldn't be news to anyone who has even the slightest clue as to how OKCupid actually works.

The special magic thing is to hit the Windows key + X. That brings up a menu that has pretty much everything you'd want to do from a start menu. Win + X also works on desktop Windows 8.x.

The hilarious thing to me is that the Windows 8/Server 2012 line is ironically the most keyboard centric version of Windows I've used, but all people want to do is bitch about the Modern (Tile) interface that you can completely, totally ignore if you're on something that has a real keyboard and mouse.

Also, Windows RT? It's not awful. Printing and scanning work great and they have real USB and storage support. Surfaces ship with Office pre-installed. RT is missing a lot of media consumption tools that are present on other mobile OSes, but as a device for doing work they're credible. I'd rather have an RT-based Surface than anything that runs iOS, though I'd prefer a good quality Android device to either.

An acquaintance of mine is a senior guy in Chicago's IRS office. He does large corporate audits, which means he's sitting across from guys in $2000 suits all day. The laptop he was carrying until late 2012 had a Windows 2000 license sticker on it and his "new" government-issued laptop is an HP that was manufactured in 2004. These guys really do make more with less and I have no trouble believing that the equipment Lerner was using was painfully obsolete and used until it died.

Chromecast doesn't do enough to add value. The only thing it really brings to the table is the novel control scheme. Yes, it's a cheap streamer that I can control with a $75 tablet or retired smartphone, but I'll bet I can find a price-competitive BluRay player that can do both those things and still play discs AND use a proper ethernet connection.

A Pivos Xios running Linux firmware with XBMC might be a decent fit. It can't keep up well at high bit rates, but the one I have can and and does play 1080p content including AC3 and DTS.

This review read like an Apple user looking for things to whine about. I don't recall seeing anywhere in the verbiage of press over the last two days any promise from Amazon that it would be some universal media-seeking device.

That being said, like any respectable media streamer these days, it DOES support Plex access, which should be your go-to tool for local content access. If it's on the same LAN with a client, you can also connect to it via DLNA and thereby use it with pretty much set top box smart enough to connect to the internet.

The single best STB I've ever found in terms of capability is the LG Smart TV Upgrader, which LG sold for about two months back in 2009 or so. It supports SMB, AFP and NFS, but it also has support for Netflix, Youtube, Hulu Plus and Amazon. It can play h.264, open VideoTS folders and it doesn't have a problem with AC3 or DTS audio. Unfortunately, it's slow as hell and the UI is ugly. I'm not entirely sure if LG is still releasing firmware updates for them but they're a pretty good alternative to a fully functional HTPC.

There's this thing called Plex Media Server.

Plex accesses locally defined content libraries, scrapes them for metadata and makes them available both locally for clients smart enough to play back the raw data or transcodes them for access by dumb (DLNA, like Playstations or the like) or reduced-capability clients like iFruits. Furthermore, it negotiates authentication-based access and sharing with the Plex Web Service, meaning that you can expose your media collection over the internet, for access outside your home or use the service to share with others. Plex isn't supported by as large a collection of consumer electronics as Netflix, but it is on a lot of smart TV systems and runs on most mobile and desktop platforms.

If you already have a respectable collection of local media and a half-decent computer you're willing to leave on, you more or less have a streaming media service that is entirely under your control. If you're enough of a nerd to be reading this deep in a Slashdot comment thread, you're also enough of a nerd to figure out how to leverage Plex or something like it to make a content service that is satisfactory for your needs.