I mean, I stipulated in the JE that I doubt I'll actually see it. Why would I pay someone to waste ~2hrs of my life?

Oh, I already have, baby.

"'A liar AND a thief'? There may be an uncertainty principle at work here," said Heisenberg.

We really have to put some newspaper under you, for moments when you overflow like this. To drop the current egregious example, the Iran deal Congressional shortcutting, and taking the sell-out straight to the Untied Nations is not even "kinda" conservative. In a rational time (and this sure as balls ain't) this particular stunt would be more impeachy than simply peachy.

You've got to understand: it's unlikely I'll watch this. The real pleasure is watching the usual suspects melt down.

Is that like when you try to typecast #OccupyResoluteDesk to "conservative", or do you have some other meaning in mind?

Shorter d_r: "It is better to whinge on about peripheral matters than face the reality that I have supported abject cretins."

Carriers have machine and wood shops where they fabricate lots of things, including needed parts for the carrier.

The most popular theory is that it's transferring momentum via virtual particles. That has some startling implications, but it's less physics shaking than violating conservation of momentum. I'm not sure anyone has come up with any solid testable hypotheses yet, but it seems to be something that is likely to be testable in principle.

You'd have to work out the math, but I'd be cautious being too aggressive with relativistic reasoning. Conservation of energy and momentum in special relativity are a bit tricky to start with, and don't hold when you start jumping between reference frames.

It was terrible before too, if you wiggled the mouse too much and you were 7 layers deep into the heirarchy the start menu would close or flip over to another folder, and you'd have to start all over...it was usability garbage.

The replacement in vista was still tedious, but the previous incarnation was gouge-your-eyes-out-bad if you had to navigate to something that was deep.

I've shared the extend of what I know. If there was a deeper meaning to "Who?" I regret taking the question straightly.

Isn't that the point? After decades of listening to fools, Americans are (in aggregate) dumber than ever, despite spending more (per person) on education than pretty much everyone. Frivolity, hedonism, and permanent childhood are the new wisdom, morality, and maturity. Go, us!

For a quick glance at the Exec Summary, it looks like a fairly serious product.
I hope that it informs thoughtful discussion on the point. More training and gun ownership is better.

Lol, well said.

However, to be fair to MS, they didn't "remove it" they revamped it. They rightfully identified that there was a ton of functionality jammed into it, and that it was a shitty UI for most of it, while simultaneously its primary design driver was a vestigial hierarchical folder structure from Windows 95 that really was quite hideous and unusable, and rarely used.

Every one used the start menu to shutdown, to get to control panels etc, to access frequently used and pinned apps, and to search.

shutdown? because that's where it was. No real need for it to be there relative to anywhere else.
control panels same thing. So they moved them (and also added them to right click start menu).
pinned apps... you can still create taskbar menus and pin apps etc in win8.

search -- there's two types of search:
-- type one ... "power user quick launch" . For example type cmd to launch command or pow to launch powershell, etc etc... the win7 start menu worked well for this

-- type two -- actual search. Where you want to find something that you don't know what its called, or to find a document. Having your whole search interface in a small popup in the corner that was liable to disappear on you at random was silly and useless. The win7 start menu sucks for real search.

Finally... heirarchical start menu browsing... was clumsy in Windows 95 and all but useless in a modern PC. Nobody used it unless they had to, and browsing multiple levels of nested folders was clumsy.

The start screen in windows 8 ... was better for search. And the other commands were relocated. The problem with windows 8 was simply that the new locations were non-obvious. (how do I shutdown?) And the "type one" quick search-launch functionality was now really clutzy switching to a full screen app for quick launch makes no sense. (And really the whole 'go full screen' was a mistake. The old start menu was broken... but the new one was also broken, better in some ways, but worse in most.

But they were looking for a solution to a definite problem. Anyone who honestly looks at the windows 7 start menu has to acknowledge that it does too much, and does MUCH of it poorly. It needed attention.

Unfortunately windows 8 was a step in mostly the wrong directions. Too touch centric. Too much key functionality hidden off screen. Charms bar was just bad. Not having window border controls for mouse users was just bad. Defaulting to using 'modern ui' for viewing pictures etc was just bad. 8.1 cleaned up a lot of that, but it was still not ideal. Too much was driven by the tablet/mobile design rather than really trying to solve the problem for desktop users in a way that made sense for desktop users.

Windows 10 (build 10240) seems like a pretty good compromise so far. There's still plenty I don't like, but I think its a genuine step forward from 7 rather than a step sideways.

And that makes it OK?

I see nothing wrong with it, actually. People want — and have a perfect right — to know, who they are about to trust with powers over them and/or their businesses. And the higher the position, the greater the powers and, consequently, the greater the extent people might go in their investigations.

The "opposition research" is just another facet of this. If it is legitimate for all of us to study, how Donald Trump parted with his ex-wide 30 years ago before we hire him, it is certainly legitimate for a would-be employer to check criminal history of a candidate, or inquire, whether he has done something, which may betray certain things about his character or judgement. Did he torture animals? Is he prone to binge-drinking? Has he burned the national flag? Is he a racist, sexist, or communist?

So long as private employers' hiring decisions remain their own, they ought to remain free to base them on whatever considerations they please — with the specific (if regrettable) restrictions imposed by the law, of course.

Well clearly I'm not going to have such studies to hand, not sure how you would study such a thing

Well, you made a wide-reaching statement about a certain fact. If you can not cite anything to confirm the fact, your statement remains unsubstantiated and the "fact" — highly suspect.

there is inbuilt racism / nationalism in CV selection

I can believe that — and in my not-so-humble opinion, those concerns ought to remain up to the employer as well. Both from the principled standpoint — being free must imply freedom to be wrong, as well as practical — the war on thought-crimes, waged in this country since the 1960-ies, is even less winnable than the coterminous war on drugs.