The internet facilitates reason, criticism, satire, and alternate points of view. And yeah porn, fun, shopping and irreverence. All things which an authoritarian theocracy has reason to fear.

But at the same time it is interesting how many shills leap out of the woodwork in any news article which is critical of Russia or Israel. Clearly these countries have teams of people who make concerted efforts to drown out, berate, brow beat or otherwise pooh pooh any story no matter how credible it is.

One person with perhaps enough battery / oxygen to go a few hours. No where to sleep or eat or go to the toilet. I think the cartels could do better than that for their money. And while I'm sure the inventors would love a continuous flow of orders for subs, I'm sure they wouldn't like the continuous police heat that comes with it.

The cartels already have been building their own subs. A luxury toy sub is probably not much use to the for the sorts of loads they want to transport. I expect with a little more time they'd be able to develop autonomous subs that navigate from one point to another completely submerged. Such things already exist in the oil industry so it's not hard to imagine one doing drug runs.

These things had already evolved to have lungs and strong fins, presumably for leaving the water for reasons advantageous to survival (e.g. escaping a drying up pond). So they have been exposed to land before and the evidence is there in physiology.

What the experiment mainly does is demonstrate the endurance of the creatures to stay on land for extended durations. Unsurprisingly these extended stays on land gives the fish get an upper body workout so they get better at moving around.

I find live tiles quite useful. They tell me if I have unused email, the weather, the time, the currency exchange rate, breaking news etc.

Besides, the springboard UI is for tablets where the expectation is someone runs one app at a time. If they switch away from an app it's to run another app. It is not comparable to a desktop where someone may have 20 windows open and therefore their mental processes and context are built around that. I have no major objection to the start screen in Windows for tablets but this isn't what the thread is about - it's for the desktop behaviour.

Anyone who thinks self driving cars are likely to be capable of driving on open roads in all circumstances by themselves in the forseeable future is living in cloud cuckoo land. There MUST be a conscious, unimpaired human being able to take over when the need arises because the need will arise.

Ah but you see they're disruptive innovators which makes it perfectly okay to ignore rules and regulations put in place to ensure cars are safe, and driven safely by knowledgeable non-rapists.

Not really. Just something like the old start menu but with some of the functionality and styling of metro. It doesn't have to be exactly analogous to the start menu because the start menu is not something which was immutable to begin with. But it should be familiar to someone who is used to the start menu and it could add useful stuff from metro such as live tiles.

Anyway I think it's remarkable how fucked up Microsoft managed to make it. I remember before Windows 8 came out being positive that they wouldn't walk all over mouse / keyboard users and yet that's what they did. Win 8.1 took off most of the rough edges and in general is an excellent desktop. It's just that disconnect between the desktop and the launcher still hasn't been solved.

Before starting let's be clear that the start menu has never been an immutable thing. Every release of Windows has changed it, often in very substantial ways. Go back to the days of Win95 / 98 and the thing is appalling.

Regarding your question, most recent versions of the start menu offered you multiple ways to access your apps. You could pin menus to start. You also saw a list of apps you used a lot. You could navigate all apps if you wanted. You could also start typing straight into the bar if you knew the name of the app. You also had links to control panel, to services, to devices, and run... command and power / log off options. And other stuff in a little semi transparent box which didn't stop you losing context of where you were.

Windows 8 offers much of that functionality but chose to smear it over multiple screens activated by swipes, hot corners, and other nonsense - is control panel in Start Menu? Haha no, it's that gesture on the right buried under settings and you won't even see it unless you are in the desktop at the time. How do I shut down? Haha we've hidden it! And so on. Windows 8.1 took some of the rough edges off (e.g. more discoverable shutdown) but its all over the place.

The only sop to the Old Way is Windows+X brings up a power menu, but it's basically its a hack that shouldn't exist if they just put something where the start menu used to be.

That's why I said metro apps should live on the desktop. Once you have a mini metro / start thing and the apps run alongside the "classic" apps, there is little reason to open the start screen ever again. Maybe it's a user setting somewhere that takes a sensible default - devices with touchscreens or multi screen displays enable the start menu, mouse and keyboard devices default to desktop and mini metro.

I don't think the apps are inferior or redundant to the desktop counterparts. The closest Microsoft got to an "app" in the past were gadgets and few people bothered with them and arguably all the apps in Windows 8 are better anyway. Even where there is a counterpart, e.g. Internet Explorer, the desktop version hasn't gone away. The metro one is obviously easier to use in tablet mode however.

The biggest bug bear is apps are treated differently in the UI and how they're activated. Windows 8.1 at least sticks them in the task bar and fixed alt+tab so they're peers of each other. It also put close buttons on top of the apps. Now it needs to house them in windows with resizing capabilities. At that point people can take them or leave them. Perhaps they could even allow apps to be docked in some sensible way or pinned to the background.

Anyway it should have never come to this. Microsoft clearly made a beeline for tablet land. It's understandable that they did but they seriously botched the execution and failed to anticipate the backlash. Let's hope they make good.

Just a mini metro which launches from the start button and serves a similar role as the old start menus. i.e. something which doesn't cause the user to have a brain fart when their entire screen is hidden and replaced with a massive launcher. Let the user customize it and have access to all apps and control panel etc. That and remove the distinction between metro apps and classic apps on the desktop. Let them both live there. Outside of these issues Windows 8.1 is pretty stable and fast really.

For essentially the largest collection of vanity gaming shares in existence.

Someone will have to point me to the part of Austrian School of Economics and libertarianism which says it's okay to have competitors and rivals iced.

Buy up some cats from a shelter and roast them too to cancel out the birds.