So how does one do this on Windows? I suppose you could do it by IP with the Windows firewall but I thought you were against firewalls; additionally, with IPv6 there's no guarantee that the prefix assigned by the ISP will remain the same, if I'm reading other comments correctly. Isn't this kind of task is exactly what a firewall is supposed to do for you?

It is almost an improvement over the start menu. I found the start menu too small in Vista/7 once I had 10+ applications installed. A pop-up launcher (if the Modern UI launcher opened in a pop-up over the current app/desktop, for example) would actually be an improvement, in my opinion. As it is, running full-screen on my 27" monitor is rather wasteful and used to break my focus before I got used to it.

This is another thing that makes sense on a tablet or notebook screen, but is just wasteful on a large desktop monitor. Why can't Windows 8 have a proper tiling window manager for Modern UI apps or allow you to run them in a window on the desktop? This would, in my opinion, completely eliminate my problems with them.

That's exactly what I mean by "touch-first". Touch interaction is (supposed to be) the primary interaction method for Modern UI, and that is, if not a major problem, an annoyance if you have no inclination or ability (no touchscreen) to use that input method.

Aside from (some parts of) Networking and the Lock Screen, I can't think of many settings that need to use the Modern UI interface to access.

TBH, I was originally somewhat excited to hear that MS was (finally) making their UI touch-friendly. Instead, we got a patchily-implemented touch-first UI. They threw out everything to force an Android/iOS-style mobile OS onto their users when there wasn't even any evidence that users actually wanted that. Instead, MS is trying to enter an already-crowded market with an inferior product. Then again, they pulled it off through sheer persistence with XBox, so maybe it will be considered an acceptable alternative 4 years down the line.

Common use case: User wants to run a SMB server on his home network without it being accessible from the Internet.

Yes. The violation would occur when you execute the code in order to read or write from an exFAT partition.

Write support only works out of the box on Vista and later. Not a huge problem to work around, but it's there

UDF certainly looks like the most appropriate candidate for a truly universal file system, though

It's not really a replacement for FAT, though. F2FS is very obviously designed for flash memory, whereas FAT is media-independent.

I wasn't aware that the APK encryption in JellyBean was mandatory.

Nope

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It varies by region also. This is what I get for email, in order: hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, bigpond mail (I live in Australia), wikipedia

For maps: Google Maps, whereis.com, NBN Co rollout map (Australian), travelmate.com.au, wikipedia

If it's to do with advertising, I guess it's because they use exclusively Google-owned advertising networks for on the pages for their own services. I honestly don't see the problem with this (doesn't Microsoft do the exact same thing with Bing?)

IIRC, the problem is that Google's own services appear to be favoured in search rankings over competitors. I would think that this is primarily be because they're significantly more popular than the competitors, though, and not due to any bias on the part of Google.

A search for "email" on Google returns Hotmail as the first result and "web browser" gives an ad for IE, the wikipedia page for "web browser", Opera, and Firefox before Chrome appears. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly shady on there based on my rather unscientific test.

Aside from the fact that all those packets would likely just be instantly dropped by my firewall (I'm not running any public-facing services on my public IP), I wouldn't call my ISP about it. It's not their responsibility, their responsibility is simply to deliver packets destined for my public IP to my network (I could bring net neutrality into this here). If you did manage to DoS a public service I owned/ran, the sole responsibility for that would be on you.

The same model TiVo that lets you add disks to its RAID array?