A very large fraction of the population, particularly scientists and engineers, would be permanently out of work. Oh, and science/engineering education, too, never to return as old people die off and young people spend time on things more likely to get them a paycheck, like auditioning on American Idol. Like it or not, the free market is just a little too risk averse, too interested in next quarter's profits, to invest in the long-term, high ambition projects that ultimately keep the STEM community alive.

Read: Laid off. No work. Will design radar-evading SCRAMjets for food.

Maybe he'll get a job in China. Nobody cuttin' the military over there.

Yeah, well, so long as the public goes into a 4-Minute Hate every time some pundit says "wasteful spending", people with money (and they don't need to be smart) will be the only ones who pick up the ball.

Five words guaranteed to put a damper on anything: "Who's gonna PAY for it?"

Not a vagina, just a camel-toe.

From Krita's FAQ page

Yes, my dear sir, those are EXACTLY the ones I was referring to.

That would require making a new commitment to the desktop, which would require standing up to all the marketing analysts who insist that the desktop is soooo yesterday.

As one who's livelihood depends on the desktop, I badly want Microsoft to get back to its bread and butter, and quit forcing Ribbons and Modern Apps that only get in the way of workflow. But I don't hold out much hope that anyone in Redmond has enough spine to turn it around.

Maybe something more like Gigabtyte's Brix Pro, or AsRock's Vision X. Going small comes with a cost, and often requires an external power brick (Mac Mini has power supply built-in), but there are lots of tiny PC's out there.

Agreed. But Microsoft got greedy. It wasn't just about getting into the mobile market, it was BEING a market. Metro is a vector for the Microsoft store, where they get to take a cut of every app sold. Bean-counters saw the revenue of Apple's App Store, and demanded that Microsoft get in on that racket by leveraging their market-share of the desktop.

They figure if Metro wasn't front-and-center on every desktop as a non-option, people would opt out and the Store might take too long to take off and generate the apps needed to persuade people to switch from iOS or Android. Trouble is, these things can't be forced.

I use Windows 7 at work, lots of word processing and PDF documents. These are now essential to me:

Winroll (right-click on X pushes window behind other windows)
do-PDF
Handyfind (must-have find-text-as-you-type tool, works in most apps incl. Office)
Cygwin (rsync, fortune messages in a periodic loop)
ClassicShell
PDF-Xchange Viewer (free OCR)
7-zip
Actual Window Manager (Commercial, but worth it. Sizer is a less capable but free substitute).
T-Clock 2010
Office 2003 (white-hot hate for the Ribbon; will re-consider LibreOffice/OpenOffice if they ever provide a Normal/Draft Mode for Writer)
Marxio Checksum Verifier
LibreOffice Draw
Gimp (imports and edits scanned PDF files)
...and my weirdest one: Window 7 hack to enable focus-follow-mouse.

The latter was available for XP under TweakUI, but went missing with Windows 7 and I needed it so bad I wound up hacking something myself.
Like Winroll and Actual Window Manager, this feature is inspired by a lot of time with X11. I cut my teeth back in the day with twm and lots of X-terms and Emacs windows, and I grew used to simply hitting the mouse with the side of my hand to shift from one window to another, without actually gripping the mouse and lining up my finger to click the button. Now, I find wherever I put the mouse pointer, I expect the underlying window to scroll with the wheel - I don't expect to have to click the left-button first and often don't want the window to raise either (oddly this is how it works on stock OS X, but only for the scroll wheel).
Windows plays surprisingly nice with focus-follow-mouse, and the odd UI glitches here and there with one app or another I've learned to work around; it's worth it.

Well, I wasn't trying to suggest a theory, more an observation. :-\
and I tend to think you're right that U.S. companies are paying far more and getting far less. The nagging question is why this keeps happening.

If I have a theory, it's that when money gets big, people start getting irrational. You can't control whether the man you hire is going to do a good job or not, but you can control how much you pay him. Pay him less, and he fails, shame on you because you were too cheap and you got what you paid for. Pay him more, and he fails, shame on him because you did all you could.

Puts a well-connected CEO-type in a real sweet bargaining position, which would tend to keep inflating CEO salaries.

Here's why that didn't happen: Blackberry was in financial trouble, losing money each day, which gets the biggest shareholders (including the Board members) really nervous. When a company is losing money (or widely perceived to be), it can't get (or has to pay a lot more for) loans, like the short-term kind (commercial paper) it needs to do day-to-day stuff like pay salaries. The Board demands quick action, and that requires an intact management structure. The Board can't get things done if all its executives are jumping ship to save themselves. But to stick around, the senior-type executives gotta get paid.

Eliminate bonuses? Take a pay cut? Here's the thing: dollar-for-dollar, most senior executives are better off quitting ("retiring"), unless some divorce, gambling addition or coke habit has eaten away all their savings. Also, it's just a thing that senior management types tend to find new jobs (e.g., consultant) more easily than your typical laid-off worker (or just about anyone else). All this adds up to one thing: Mr. CEO can demand the kind of pay that makes it worthwhile for him to come to work each day for a company that isn't sexy, that may not be around much longer, and requires that he do, well, unpleasant things. Like fire 1000's of workers.

And by shedding thousands of workers the company can't afford to pay, he makes the books look better, which gets Wall Street to lend money again, which pays the bills to keep the lights on a bit longer, and makes the Board members a little happier, who pays him a bonus to stick around longer and save them the hassle of having to find someone else to do his job. At least until the company is worth enough on paper that it can be sold off and finally be someone else's problem.

Awful, isn't it? That's how shit happens!

or just install Classic Shell (or similar), and have the Metro screen bypassed automatically.

Third-party workarounds are the saving grace of Windows.

I remember this same thing when Vista came out. Pre-release press was met with a lot of reviews pointing out its failings, but once it became clear that Vista was a done deal, along came the shills. Article after article cherry-picking a good feature, rationalizing away its faults, diverting attention to the age of XP, or just shilling that we should all just get used to it and that's that.

Then Windows 7 is announced and all that goes away. Vista? Vista who? Windows 7 just worked, and people didn't write about it so much as just get it and use it.

But when Microsoft dropped the Windows 8 turd, the smoke machine fired right up again and articles like this just crop up all over the place, all trying to urge us that Metro is great and get used to it because we're stuck with it because the focus groups said so. Even though the adoption numbers clearly show that REAL people hate it. Probably bunches of these apologists are paid for by Microsoft, and others are just going for that warm fuzzy feeling of following the herd.

Microsoft really should get some better focus groups.

Well could I have her Metro instead of the baked beans then?

I suggest the Admissions Department screwed up. From their own web site, Harvard rejects roughly 95% of its applicants, yet this guy made the cut.

My guess is he'll get his slap on the wrist, be allowed to graduate, join the Old Boys' Club (to which all Harvard men are entitled), and someday ruin the work of scores of hard-working engineers, driving some company into bankruptcy, and then offer his wisdom for a fee to the Federal government.

Either way, there'll be a nice fat endowment to the alma mater come tax time. Point is, Harvard sent a lot of outstanding applicants to their safety schools so a dumb guy like this can forever put Harvard on his resume.