I've relearned to dislike them, thanks to Python.

Without wanting to speculate, this would not the first time.

n/t

Floppy drives, especially the ones at 5.25". I can't think of a more flimsy computer part.

I didn't say it was a good GUI. It's horribly unproductive.

Doesn't the tablet have a Windows button? Alternatively you can swipe from the right edge to get a Start button, which takes you to the metro home screen. But you highlight a different issue - the fact that some setting screens are metro apps, others are desktop programs and yet others have both metro and desktop versions. This is awful design, there is no argument about that.

Of course, click on the "Desktop" tile, but it seems to me that you want to switch them permanently. I don't think that's possible, nor did I claim it was (even with Start8, etc you will still be taken to metro mode when you launch a metro app).

The headline is wrong. They haven't just now "enabled" switching between desktop and tablet modes - that has been possible since Win8 initial release, in more or less convoluted ways. They have introduced a new, "automatic" way to do it.

Move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen and you get a title bar with an "X" button which really closes the program (at least in 8.1).

There's nothing I want more than an Internet-connected phone keeping a record of my location and sharing it with some random app publisher. Nothing could go wrong.

No, you can't look at the history of early transatlantic empires and try to learn any lesson that's relevant for space/interplanetary exploration, period.

That would be a valid point if human lifespan was in the millions of years. Unfortunately, the oldest verified person ever lived for ~122 years. Globally catastrophic asteroid strikes of the scale that killed dinosaurs don't happen very often. The last one happened 65 million years ago. So that's a red herring.

An astronomer estimated the chance of being killed by an asteroid as 1 in 700,000.

As natural disasters go, any person is far more likely to die from tsunamis, earthquakes and extreme weather events.

I rooted my Nexus 4 and my Kindle Fire HDX using Towelroot (on the Nexus 4 it is extremely easy to apply - just allow non-store apps and install tr.apk; on the Kindle, I had to install HDXposed, the Xposed framework and Google Apps before I could do that). IIRC it worked fine on Android 4.4 (despite scary warnings issued by Google, which can be safely ignored). But it doesn't work on Android 5. Last time I looked into it (a couple of months ago), there was not an easy way to root Lollipop - you had to back up your data and settings and re-flash.

Not gonna happen. Planned obsolescence and all that. On a related note, I hear VMware Player Unity mode is pretty much the same thing as XP mode, only better - haven't tried it yet.