His father was an electrical engineer, but maybe he knew that a single data point is irrelevant in statistics.

Not quite. The Earth moved underground, while Trantor built domes aboveground. However, the end result is pretty similar, and he also stated the same reasons for doing so (which pretty much matches what they're saying about this project).

That's what happened to Trantor in Asimov's Foundation series:

Trantor is depicted as the capital of the first Galactic Empire. Its land surface [...] was, with the exception of the Imperial Palace, entirely enclosed in artificial domes.

And so it begins...

Love how you just can take a single message, completely out of context, quote a bunch of text which is perfectly true, and claim it says anything about your use case.

It was a release announcement, it wasn't out of context, and it was entirely relevant.

Your bullshit is old, has been debunked multiple times over

How could you debunk the point I'm making when all I have to do is link to their own release announcement and point out what it says directly disagrees with you?

nothing but hot air from the camp of the other, abandoned desktop

Nope, I was using KDE from the 1.0 betas all the way to the 4.0 betas. I only switched to GNOME after the KDE 4 debacle, and I found that even worse and ended up moving off Linux altogether.

KDE 4.0 was pretty much the same way. The developers proclaimed quite loudly that it was not meant for everyday desktop use. A few Linux distributions took software that they were clearly told was not ready for end users and gave it to end users.

There wasn't a single hint of this in the official release announcement and they were pushing it like crazy to end-users. Quote:

The KDE 4 Desktop has gained some major new capabilities. The Plasma desktop shell offers a new desktop interface, including panel, menu and widgets on the desktop as well as a dashboard function. KWin, the KDE Window manager, now supports advanced graphical effects to ease interaction with your windows.

KDE 4.0 is the innovative Free Software desktop containing lots of applications for every day use as well as for specific purposes.

The idea that KDE 4.0 wasn't intended for end-users and that the developers were clear about this was just an excuse they fell back on when it became apparent 4.0 was a miserable failure in the eyes of end-users.

The cause of the problem was a piss-poor attitude towards release management compounded with a complete inability to take responsibility for their choices. Yes, I'm aware of all the excuses, but they don't hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Read that press release. Can you honestly say that's warning non-developers to stay away?

It's a release candidate, so it's meant for testing and preview purposes, like the developer preview of Android L.

If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".

This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.

I could sit in an empty room for days without issue.

So could I. But if I was sat in an empty room with a button that gave me a shock, I'd definitely press it - not because I couldn't handle the boredom, but just to see what it's like. I'm not sure this study really measures what it intends to.

Well, if the Gulf Stream ceases to exist due to the changes (which has been considered a couple of times), the Swedes won't be all that glad I guess. Siberia will look like a warm and cozy place in comparison. Rome will be a bit colder than New York.

A lot of your personality is defined by your IQ:

Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people. -- Eleanor Roosevelt

So, why is the spirit of the law ignored when it comes to tax code? Why are there so many companies with their seat in places like the Cayman Islands or San Marino, while 99% of the work force is in other countries like the US or somewhere in the EU? They still don't have to pay any taxes.

Isn't the definition that you have to be able to give a patent to a developer skilled in the specific art and he/she can implement exactly the device described by the patent without inventing anything new? If that's not possible, the patent is supposed to be invalid because it's an abstract idea instead of a concrete implementation.

there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Stop making excuses for a shitty UX. Android development is an utter pain in the arse in a lot of ways and as long as people like you make excuses instead of complaining about it, it's going to continue to be an utter pain the arse for years to come.

Consistent experiences across mobile platforms is not useful. You want consistency across the applications on the platform that the user actually uses. Normal iPhone users aren't going to care if Android users get a different UI to them, and normal Android users aren't going to care if iPhone users get a different UI to them. But both groups of users do care if the application they are using works differently to the other applications they use on their phone.

The point of the web is not so that resources are dynamically loaded from servers every time you access them. The point of the web is that you have a decentralised set of resources that are linked together.