It will be come like the cable company on top of the cable company. Endless bundling of $8 a month ESPN with a dozen Swedish language Teletubby rerun stations. Shows exclusively on one platform or the other. All delivered via a regional monopoly cable layer who got bribed by the highest bidder for bandwidth. Your home internet service: low priority QoS (I wonder if that will be added to the user agreement (no servers, no kiddy porn and oh by the way your bits it the lowest priority: we'll send them ... if we aren't busy))

I like that solution. It seems though if you are too unproductive at work you will find yourself out of job and with no money for your hobby. There is a reason why they call it vocation not vacation.

I'm 34. I find it hard to get excited about the latest technology. Maybe that is my shortcoming maybe that is experience. Not being excited/dropping everything for the latest fad is a matter of knowing what is possible with existing technology and having been around for more than one cycle of: parallelism, single threaded performance, macro vs micro kernel etc etc. I'm not perfect but a lot of the attrition in tech can be attributed IMO to allowing HR to craft openings to use the latest acronyms rather than expecting experience/higher level thinking that they are fully unqualified to evaluate.

Actually ask for a specific thing rather than everything that someone has ever done online? What if they miss something.

How quaint.

Good points on mixed use. I work in Toronto and commute about 1.5 hours each way (Toronto apparently beat LA recently for worst commute time). I train/bus/walk it but with one bedroom condos going for 3-500k versus 2000sqft houses on 50' lots in the burbs it just doesn't make a lot of sense to live in the city (unless you desperately want the urban life which I don't: you can't realistically afford to raise a family in the city unless both parents are working professionals). NYC might also have been forced to be more reasonable because of its island nature. If you were stuck taking a fairy and then hiring a horse every day to get to work you'd quickly learn that if you stay on the island things get much simpler. Sadly Toronto has a lot of land around it so the "Greater Toronto Area" spans an area about 70km (45mi) in all directions outside of the borders of the city proper and silly immigration policies that allow ~40% of immigrants (not to single them out just for being immigrants but for being the source of population growth in Canada) to all move to this one city creating an endless pushing out of suburbs further and further away.

I'm not sure of a good solution to the problem. A random idea: charge people/corporations a fee per commuter mile. It would either force suburbanites to move closer to work/change jobs or push employers to move to less densely populated areas where mixed use is more prevalent, or even better which I'd like: make companies have to consider if having people commute into work to do a job they could easily do from home makes sense. I saw a Ted talk last year that claimed that cities were actually more environmental though because people generally do get around on public transit/walking more, live in smaller spaces etc. I'm not sure that it took into account that say roughly 30% of a cities population had to drive into it in the morning from much further away. Perhaps if the typical city was mixed use you would loose a lot of the efficiencies as you'd have a larger proportion of families requiring larger living spaces/schools/parks.

NYC isn't the biggest in North America though: that honor goes to Mexico city (both urban and metro areas are larger (about 200k and 2M difference respectively), then NYC, LA, Toronto.

I don't think it is just the design of cities that is different. Cars (Germany may be the biggest european exception) are much more of a status/sex symbol than in europe. There is a reason why people talk about their experience in the back of the car as a teenager: those that don't drive their dates around don't get laid. If you bike in a lot of cities it has to be a cause. Oh you must be very enviromental, or you must be frugal/cheap etc. It can never be "just because", or God forbid: I actually prefer living within a 20 min bike ride of work rather than owning a car and driving an hour each way from the 'burbs.

not if you can possibly get accepted and pay for it but if you can actually hack it. The "bottom quartile" lose their money. They have 0-100k in debt and don't have the marks/career prospects to payback or at least justify the cost of the loan. They are also down 3-4 years where they could have been earning money and could now be in a situation that now that they know that they should have done trade school they no longer have the money or time to do so.

I think we as a society need to realize that some people just simply have the makings of a really good janitor but a piss poor engineer. Lets not push everyone into going to college otherwise they and their parents get labelled a failure.

Not to mention not just barter trade but delays in timing are resolved. You can't keep fresh corn to pay your heating bill in January for example. Having a non-perishable store of value is very convenient.

I agree with the hints bit. Not as good as some shading or whatever before you try to interact with a control but even if they just did some effect when you moused over things you can click on it would have been nice. It is completely touch on a small screen centric in the OS though. You can't (easily) "hover" with a finger. Your screen is small and/or low res so you can't waste space with silly things like controls: they need to fly in only when necessary. Etc. Yet another reason why there should have been a desktop (mouse and keyboard) vs tablet interface. They could have been similar perhaps the difference would just have been whether or not the Apps menu or charms are visible by default would have gone a long way to make desktop users more comfortable. Similar to the taskbar once they were comfortable and knew where things are they could have enabled autohide.

I thought it was "great success". Now I go have sexy time with my sister.

It is part of the UI design concept: essentially they wanted to break away from trying to mimic the real world (see iBooks for example): which to an extent I agree with, adding a 1 s delay to try to pretend like you aren't on a computer is silly. But window boarder effects: I agree making them pretty doesn't hurt. They could have at least left a "Aero" mode in even if it wasn't the default.

I get sub 10 s boot time. When rebooting my monitor just recognizes no signal and then flickers when it refreshes I'm on the login screen. I don't even get to see the bios anymore because the monitor doesn't detect the computer before it is coming up on the login screen.

Win 8.1 is very usable. Stability: not so much in my experience but could be the apps I'm using. Firefox and Visual Studio generally crash once a day for me at work. That said as long as it recovers well from a crash I don't really care.

Not to mention not everywhere in the world has unlimited transfer limits on their internet. Example most ISPs in Canada have a 20-250GB/month cap counting both downloads and uploads. Afterwards you pay about another $100 a month before the penalties stop. Even if they don't directly penalize you you likely would be paying for a higher internet package/getting traffic shaped because of your high usage. So your free/cheap backup will likely cost you several hundred in penalties to backup and several hundred more should you need to restore making it almost as cost effective to just have a second 20TB array.

I get people like to do this but the easier solution for 99% of people is just to get some counseling for their hording behaviour. How likely are you t watch that S3E04 Gilmore Girls episode again? I went to university with a guy back in 2000 when storage was relatively expensive that had 1000's of anime movies. He hadn't watched most of them and didn't really intend too. He downloaded them and then if anyone recommended one of them to him he would watch it. We was downloading: just in case one day he might have a reason to be interested.

Good point about how hot it is when you are working. Most of those jobs try to work based on the sun anyways. I did roofing for a couple summers in highschool and we'd try to get to the site by first light. Still ended up working the hottest part of the day but you were often done by 2-3pm which was nice. Which again leads me to wonder what were the creators of daylight savings thinking: those that work by the sun would work earlier anyways. Those working in factories would have access and probably need artificial light (because of the walls/insufficient windows) anyways. If you are at "war time production" and not working more than a normal 8 hr work day at your factory that is probably more of the issue than insufficient daylight hours.