While I think the new layout is much better than beta, it has broken my normal Slashdot reading experience.
I was reading using Google Chrome on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.... vertically. I tend to browse a lot of news vertically. This limits the vertical screen resolution.

The old slashdot layout imposed a minimum screen width and would provide a horizontal scrollbar which allowed me to see the stories without a sidebar visible.
The new slashdot layout locks into the screen resolution such that the stories on my screen appear to be about 3cm wide fitting about 4 words per line, and the right sidebar is a cool 12cm wide full of useless stuff (for reading purposes anyway).

Can slashdot please impose a minimum width on the container that contains the main content?

Problem is 100% reproducible on all browsers. Simply change the width of the window to around 650px. i.e. open up two browser windows side by side and the front page goes to heck.

Those bits of communication that only come through face to face can be substituted by more technology. Someone in a teleconference doesn't need to read my facial expression when drawing if I then say "Wow, holdup, I don't understand." There's a whole different method of communication when it comes to having an effective meeting that isn't face to face. Things like going around the table person to person and addressing each person individually, asking for confirmation of something being understood, not assuming that someone knows something etc. There's nothing magical about a face-to-face meeting that can't be communicated via a telephone using a different method. You said it yourself, it takes longer, but as soon as you include travel it is actually far more efficient.

Spend $5k on sending each person to a business communications class, and an how to run an effective meeting class. Then save yourself $50k / year on flights.

This. I use electronic whiteboards at work. The ability to share a session in the software is great. It works just like a real whiteboard except with more features and the ability for people in distributed locations to write on the same board in the same meeting is well worth it.

That was a trick question right? If the other side also has a digital whiteboard then they can scribble on the same image.

Slightly typically works out to be about 50-70% depending on geology. The lionshare of the cost of trenching is the labour with only a small part being engineering, and approvals (this assumes you own the rights to the land or otherwise have approvals to dig, if you don't then disregard this post).

But really the problem with fibre is rarely ever any of the things you list. Typically it is an excavator which digs up fibre and causes an outage. You don't get fire in underground systems which don't generate heat, corrosion is effectively a non issue, rodents shouldn't have access when things are direct buried and the network is typically out of the elements.

Outages are typically man made, though it's not common for metal thieves to pull out a fibre trunk. This one is a bit new.

Everything is relative. The last mile network is incredibly expensive. Your comment doesn't change the economics of running a fibre one bit.

Also no the customer support part of running an ISP is only the most expensive part depending on how you do accounting. See customer support is one of the few true Revex costs for an ISP. Ongoing support does not contribute to the ISP's value as a company, it's just a cost of doing business. This cost is dwarfed by the cost of the infrastructure unless you lease all of it. Where you are the builder of infrastructure, those costs are Capex and result in a lovely asset base which depreciates over time and gives for some nice tax advantages, not to mention government kickbacks.

So yes Customer Support is the single most expensive part of an ISP, if you are an accountant.

Fibre is built only as bandwidth requires it because it is bloody expensive. There were likely multiple fibres but rarely if ever can they be considered true "backups" with the main going down, the backup suffers from instant congestion which with the bandwidth we're talking about is crippling. There are entire countries without this kind of redundancy, let alone a state which is mostly desert.

Depends on the geography and the demographics. In a large city or along a coastline, or on edges of countries ISPs actually have a reasonably nice network topology where any one cut to a trunk may reduce speed but may not necessarily cut services. If you're on the edge or part of a city or state that is wired directly through then there's every chance the other end doesn't have a loop back to some network.

Laying fiber is very VERY expensive. Many companies will chose not to do it at all and instead lease it from a single owner. As nice as it would be it isn't always financially feasible to have complete redundancy.

No parent is right, it depends on which display. Only one LCD technology has the ability to screw up colours with viewing angles so spectacularly. On any IPS or PVA display the viewing angles won't mess up the colours. My girlfriend said blue and black from her laptop which has a TN display, then changed her mind when she saw it on the desktop with an IPS display.

Wow if that's how you use QED or define "usefulness" then you should probably re-do highschool maths and english.

You may want to read that in more detail, also the AC above you should read this too.

TPM is required if boot device encryption is used and supported by the UEFI bootloader.
TPM is also required if the device supports ConnectedStandby (a funny new power management method that makes Windows devices behave like mobile phones with a sleep button that keeps it connected in the background but mostly powered down).

It is not a requirement of Windows 8.1 generically.

That being said:
Most vendors will ship all but their cheapest machines with TPM chips.
Most vendors of convertible tablets are supporting connected standby and thus have to ship with TPM chips.
All of Microsoft's reference machines ship with TPM and even better ship with bitlocker enabled on the system drive out of the box, and setting it up with a boot password is trivial 3 button presses in the Bitlocker Drive Encryption tool in the control panel.

TPM is here to stay and it's only being value engineered out on the cheapest and nastiest of devices.

Because the OS provides only a very limited subset of functionality which most vendors include in their equipment.

Driver updates would require working with the OS vendor and Windows Update (actually this is one part I wish would happen).
Display management is frankly poor on the OS. Windows does not provide for strange resolutions, forced outputs, separate colour controls for hardware overlays, or any 3D settings at all.
Power Controls is another thing where every vendor has their own idea of how to improve power consumption. The OS has no native understanding of dynamic brightness adjustment, and selecting which devices can go to sleep is a windows 2000 era dig through the device manager which no users would undertake.

Basically they write the tools because they have to.

Conversely I bought guitar hero and 2 guitars. I only had to put in 10 minutes setting up the profile but that was all it took to start two of us playing pop songs and sounding good in the process. Not to mention the competition kept things very fun and entertaining and we didn't annoy the neighbours with the "learner player" sound because even if you don't play the music doesn't sound bad.

As for your experience there's two likely explanations:
1. You are a musical freak of nature. Some people are. My girlfriend's sister is the type who can pick up an instrument and start sounding good within hours, but she's also at a musicians college and has been playing since she was big enough to hold an instrument.
2. You're no where near as good as you think you are and have a really over inflated opinion of what is considered "good". I know people who have been playing for years who don't sound good and would have trouble playing in a band or playing any song that isn't in an entry level learners book.

I would go recommending your path to anyone based on your experience. It's not the normal experience.

The alternative is asking for bankruptcy. Running communications lines is about the most expensive part of any telecommunications / power infrastructure. This is one area where doing the minimum possible is the only financially sound move.

People will complain no end about service interruptions, but will complain even more when their bills or taxes go up as a result of mitigating the disruptions.

Funny you mention China, given that iOS has less than 20% of the market share there. Isn't 20% that magical evil number you quoted earlier? If I were targeting the Chinese it most definitely would not be iOS. And no the carrier and manufacturer's app stores are not the way you get apps in China. There are dedicated 3rd parties running app stores run by the likes of news companies and Tencent (the company behind the hugely successful QQ chat program). Also with 2 app stores you target some 90% of the Chinese user base crapping on anything you can achieve there in the iOS app store.

Ever wonder why there are so many more Chinese apps on Android? You should come over hear and live here for a while before being an expert on one of the largest countries with the largest Android market share.