Disclaimer: I work for microsoft as a UI/UX designer/prototyper, primarily on Windows's "Metro" interface, so I'm probably HIGHLY biased in this area. But I may still be able to shed some light on this. I've been using Win8 for about 8 or 9 months now. Originally, I was in the same boat as CowboyNeal - I loathed the new start menu. It felt wonky to scroll through and find my programs. After using it for a while though, I highly prefer it to the old start menu. The start menu on Windows 7 was great for mouse navigation - short traversals to each entity meant that you could get through them quickly with a mouse. Where it failed though was in keyboard driven execution. Win 7's keyboard launching capabilities absolutely sucked. I wrote up a pretty technical paper on its shortcomings, one specific example was heirarchy of information in search: while trying to launch Dota 2 in windows 7, I pressed the win key and typed in "dota". The first result was an autogenerated xml file that I didn't even know existed on my computer, with "dota" matching a substring of a randomly generated hash. The "Dota 2" program was 14th on the list, despite me opening it often. Because of this, I rarely used search on my windows box. In OSX however, I almost always use spotlight (~95% of the time) to launch anything. Noticing this I decided to give the search in win 8 a shot, as I heard it had been improved. It was vastly better - better than spotlight and probably on par or slightly better than quicksilver. Since the standard desktop is still there, and the keyboard driven launching is actually usable, I just stay in desktop mode and use the metro home screen as a glorified spotlight. It takes some getting used to due to the fact that it's fullscreen, but it has more data on screen at once, which means on the rare chance that I am searching for something more detailed, it seems to be a bit more efficient. That with the speed improvements in 8 over 7 (8 is a lot snappier) makes me prefer it to 7 nowadays. Just food for thought.

What consequences does the state of Alaska face if they aren't published by that date?

Heaven and earth? Hardly. There wasn't even a search for him. His location was known the entire time.

Why, because search terms aren't auto-completed? You can still search for them, they just don't show up in instant search nor are suggested for users - much like adult content. IMO this is a good move. I don't want to be searching for "minified js engine" on google and have some sysadmin on my ass about why I had a google suggestion packet coming to me that was for "mininova.org".

Unity definitely does, at least in it's current state. I used it all last month, and experienced some major slowdowns/memory leaks if I left my computer running for more than a week. At the worst of it, it took ~2 minutes for their app launcher (think alt+f2 equivalent) to open. Not the app itself mind you, that's just the time that was needed for the launch prompt to display. Granted it's not ready yet, but I just don't see it catching on in 11.04.

Are you trying to imply that everyone who enjoys driving speeds?

Yea. Actually there's a budding market for it. They even made a class of vehicle for those who enjoy it. They're dubbed, "Recreational Vehicles".
Snarky comments aside, it absolutely is. A hammer is a tool to get work done in one man's hand, and an instrument for another man's hobby. Ever seen a biker gang moseying down a highway on a sunday morning? They aren't going anywhere, they're just there for the ride. Classic vehicle owners often go for joy rides. I personally enjoy going for a ride in old diesel pickup trucks, something about the purr of their motor and the way they lazily meander down the road does it for me.

What about those of us who enjoy driving?

Why? If it's only drawing power from the DIMM slot, what benefit does that serve? Sure, in a 1U rack it *might* save a trivial amount of space. I just dont see a market for it.

It's a buy-two-get-one-free deal.

4 days for 5 flowers? A brute force approach to the traveling salesman problem is a n! growth rate. For 5 flowers, you only have 120 combinations. That'll take a few microseconds to solve on my phone. You wont start seeing time being measured in days until you hit 14 flowers or so. Not saying you're wrong about the fact that we have problems, but just that 5 flowers isn't going to stress anyone.

erno: "hm. I've lost a machine.. literally _lost_. it responds to ping, it works completely, I just can't figure out where in my apartment it is."

Good for him.

It was discovered in 1947, they got the Nobel prize for testing the properties of it.