Windows drivers have to be hacked to poll at 1000hz, the fastest they can poll. In other words, the fastest they poll WHEN HACKED is 1/50th as fast as your claim. The default is 125hz, 1/400th your claim. OSX has no problem keeping the disk defragmented and indexed while maintaining battery life. No need to check if the printer is there until you enumerate the available printers when you open a print dialogue. Every old Windows app I try to use has to be hacked into working in newer versions of Windows. Most of the things you list don't impact battery anyway like logging (most likely to in memory caches), in-memory registry, and concurrently loaded dlls.

Isn't blocking the release of the source akin to blocking free speech?

All the windows 8 features that I refuse to adopt are objectively worse than what they replace. I witness others that have attempted to adopt them and they fumble around exactly as I predicted someone (including myself) would in such a situation.

I've been using Windows 8 since its release and haven't gotten used to it, despite using all sorts of third party 'reversion' programs (replacement start menu etc). Personal experience and the experience watching others fumble through Windows 8 a year after it's release shows people aren't "getting used to it", Regardless, suggesting to "suffer and get used to something" that *should* be an improvement over the replacement but isn't is ridiculous.

Do you mean to ask if you can manipulate the UI from any thread? Then no. There's really little point anyway, it's so easy to just enqueue an anonymous Runnable into the EDT. If it's changed to be "thread safe" then all swing projects will become unmaintainable.

There are countless, often hidden, configs on the TV, in Windows, and in graphics card drivers. Even if there exists no config that can solve your issue, that does not mean there is a problem in the HDMI spec. It is VERY LIKELY there is a design flaw in any one (or all) of the following: Your TV, your computer, your graphics card, windows, or your drivers.

The HDMI spec does not differentiate text signals. Text simply exacerbates a lower level filtering issue one of your components is experiencing. This is definitely not, as you originally stated, a problem with the HDMI spec.

I suppose that the HDMI spec might have explicitly disallowed overscan, sharpening filters, resampling, motion compensation, or any of many other filters that could cause these sorts of artifacts. In this regard, yes, the HDMI spec is at fault.

How many orders of magnitude on the probability of a random shuffling do you need before something is copyright-able? A compilation can't be much higher than ~10 orders of magnitude.

Here I thought these companies employed engineers where they really employ writers.

This is clearly either a misconfiguration on your TV, your computer, or a design flaw in the TV, or your computer based on the simple fact that many people who use HDMI to connect their TV to their computer don't experience this problem.

The OP was speaking of college specifically, not education categorically. If the matter is personal pride or knowledge, it would be a lot cheaper to do it outside of college using books from the library or purchased from a book store. What value does a college bring? The diploma (for earning potential) is one, maybe a 'learning environment' (which would be pretty easy to argue against, depending on the college), or a sense of discipline... I feel the diploma/earnings-potential is really the only one without a good counter argument.

How authentic are the fur seats?

Or how technical people look upon sales, marketing and PR people with disdain, because those people know how to relate to the public

Do marketing and PR people really know how to relate to the public? I find most marketing and PR is a gamble. Countless super-expensive campaigns are utter failures (for a particularly good example, see the Tropicana Packaging debacle, or the recently revealed poor sales of Windows RT tablets). They might be better at relating to the public than technical people, but even the best firms are just throwing darts at a dart board. Some campaigns are great, but most are just lost in a sea of similar monotony or are complete disasters.

It's not as much the spin-rate as the pit density.

I agree; normalized databases come naturally. You have to work at it to have an non-normalized database.

"for whatever it's worth, many software engineers do need calculus in their day to day job" If by many you mean "a lot of people", but I would estimate this at less than a half of a percent of software developers. All I am saying is make a more universally useful course mandatory instead of a course that might be used by a tiny fraction of the graduates mandatory.