But if animals ain't gonna be eaten, why're they made up of meat?

Precisely! Wind & Solar are good for low power devices, but for heavy duty applications, such as air-conditioning or transportation, it's just the dirty fuels for now, and nuclear whenever it's ready (as in the environmental wackos not opposing it)

As for the headline, I'm one of those who don't cut energy use. But then again, I'm not concerned about global warming - so I duck the 'hypocrite' label, and instead embrace the 'callous' one

There was a time I loathed UNIX, but Microsoft letting down their RISC platforms (Alpha & MIPS), and most recently, the forced Windows 8 UI change drove me to this. Yeah, I could have gone Linux, but had issues w/ it in the past.

On SSL, they now have the choice of SSL or LibreSSL. If they wait long enough, they'll also have LibreUnicode and LibreIPv6 to choose from as well

The sizes come in 3 sizes for some icons, and 2 for others. There is no way I can reduce the size of the tiles to be really small squares that I can just line up on one side. Yeah, same was true of icons, but at least they were small enough.

Other thing - I did install classic shell, but classic shell doesn't get rid of the accidental charms bar on your right popping up accidentally either if your cursor goes too far right, or sometimes, for no reason at all. It was frustrating working w/ it. I finally bit the bullet - had a PC-BSD CD that I had picked up from LinuxFest a few weeks ago. With some difficulty, installed it, and now Windows 8.1 is a thing of the past on my laptop. Am ironing out some rough edges, but otherwise, it works fine for what I do - e-mails, web browsing and FreeCiv.

Slashdot doesn't have IPv6 support, for whatever reason

Could be a new source of income

1. 1. Buy a bunch of online games
2. 2. Kick up huge debt
3. 3. Sell kid to traffickers
4. 4. Pay off debt
5. 5. Impregnate wife again
6. 6. GOTO 1

Not just that, they are huge, fixed sizes & occupy a disproportionate area on the screen. Hit the Windows key again, and you get a desktop, but just 1. Oh, and when you add new apps from the Windows store, they are invisible, unless you pan down and get it added to the Metro screen

I bought a new laptop last week, and wiped out Windows 8.1, replacing it w/ PC-BSD 10. It was some work, had some rough edges, but was worth it!

Plan 9 is an academic project? I thought it was an internal research project of Lucent/Bell Labs

Minix3 is a BSDL OS. So even if AST stops working on it, others can take the code as it is, and build it further, fork it or do whatever

Virtualization OSs are not microkernels. Microkernels require the bulk of everything to go into userland, such as device drivers. In Hypervisors, OTOH, device drivers and a whole lot of other common resources that OSs use are packed in the kernel.

Until you do a search for a new address, as opposed to something you had already bookmarked

Neither MapPoint nor 'Streets and Trips' were free. Both cost ~$20-30, IIRC. Ever since the advent of free online maps from Google, Bing, OpenStreetMaps, et al, it's doubtful that anybody would have paid real cash to buy something that was a more crippled version of those, sans features like location of major landmarks, updates & so on. End result is these products being canned. Only thing I'm surprised at is them being canned now - I'd have expected that to happen 10 years back.

Incidentally, does Microsoft still sell Encarta in the era of Wikipedia?

I flew recently, on 2 occasions. They clearly ask people to disable cellular functionality on their phones at all times, and leave the phone in Airplane mode. As of now, Airplane mode still disables not just cellular reception, but Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well. So it's misleading to claim that despite FAA rulings, things have not changed. The reason things have not changed is that the airlines have not transmitted that decision, but have kept it at status quo - allowing only Airplane mode.

One of the flights I was in had an in-flight Wi-Fi. I think it's time that the OSs - iOS, Android, Blackberry OS and Windows Phone - all changed Airplane mode to leave Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on, but disable cellular. That would be the most workable solution.