I bet you believe in UX too.

Why does it matter what colour a hammer is? What function does the colour have?

A hammer is the same basic shape it has been in for millennia. A flat sided lump of metal attached to a handle. Even the claw hammer is over 500 years old and looks very similar to a modern claw hammer.

The biggest innovation in hammers in the last 100 odd years was switching from wooden handles and leather wraps to plastics and polymers. Even then, this is a slow evolution rather than a radical change and was mainly done to save costs and did not in any way alter the function of the hammer.

Metro is like redesigning a hammer to have the head in the middle of the handle. Its change for changes sake and ends up being less usable than the old design. However people like you will advertise it as "Hammer 2.0" or the "iBanger" and claim it's magically superior despite all evidence to the contrary.

I can assure you, Metro is not all of "simple, clean, aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and functional" ... it's anything but, in fact unless you're doing fairly trivial tasks on a tablet.

This, a thousand times this.

The first thing I do with metro on a desktop is replace it with one of the many start menu alternatives. Metro is an interface I dont want on a phone, let alone a workstation. However I cant do this on servers as no IT organisation will permit it.

I press the windows icon to have something replace my entire screen. That is stupid as it completely breaks my concentration on my current task (and I dont log into servers just to stuff around), beyond this if you try clicking on down button it only flips between the metro screen and the programs screen, you have to press escape to get out of it.

Microsoft has slowly been fucking up a very usable GUI since Windows XP. The first thing I do on any new Windows 7 or Server 2008 box is to set the Taskbar buttons to "never combine". I never have so many applications open that I need them to be combined. Ironically, Apple and their bollocks User Experience pseudo-science are to blame for this.

So, are you a rapper, Dubstepper or Techno-er?

A few people with or capable of getting PHDs will join the armed forces for the challenge or career opportunities, this does not mean most who join the army are PHD candidates. In fact I'd say the average Rifleman/General Infantry recruit is quite the opposite.

Why would any other armed force, regular or otherwise be any different. You want to attract highly skilled people for highly skilled work, you need grunts for grunt work and there is a lot of grunt work to be done.

The only real difference is that in the west, joining the army is seen as a good move for a kid with limited prospects (meaning he didn't do too well in school) where as its an act of desperation to join al queda (meaning there was no high school to do well in and even digging ditches is a highly controlled and nepotist market).

I don't see anyone claiming that it is a crime. What I do see is a lot of slashdotters ignoring the fact that the location of the parking spot aroused legitimate suspicion from police, likewise a pressure cooker in that location will legitimate raise their eyebrows even further.

This is how it operated in London and Paris when the IRA were being bastards. Sure, with 20/20 hindsight, an unlicensed dickhead with a dead car is not a perfect outcome, but it's a much better outcome than a false negative.

Slow cooker != pressure cooker.

A slow cooker takes 6 hours to cook, a pressure cooker takes 30 minutes.

:(
That's pretty disappointing to hear about New England.

Unattended, records show the (absent) owner has no license - could be stolen. Pressure cooker - improvised bombs and pressure cookers go together like ham and cheese, Boston Marathon was a recent example.

The cops did their job and rightly erred on the side of caution, the only "injustice" is the guy will not be compensated for the damage to his car, neither the cops or his insurance company are liable. OTOH, he had no license, his car should have been parked at his home where it would have aroused far less official suspicion.

"Shall I felate you with my misshapen blackened teeth, luvvey?"

"Please do, dearest, and I shall think of England while you do it!"

True Grit is John Wayne on a horse with pistols blazing.

I completely agree.

Austerity doesn't work. Instead of giving money to incompetent self serving bankers, it would be far better to spend directly on productive economic projects: infrastructure, education, health care. In fact, significantly increased spending on unemployment payments would be better then stock buybacks for the general economy. People on unemployment spend the money immediately which generates immediate real economic demand, a driver of growth.

The reason I did not say this in my post was that I was trying not let it become too long and I wanted to avoid detail that would make things overly complicated.

As long as I'm going into detail, the ideology that you refer to is the F-word: fascism. I hate to use it, because it's just become a meaningless curse word, but it is a term of art in politics. In theory fascism combines the interests of the state, capitalists and workers into a single unified organization. In practice there are a lot of ways to do this, although they share some common patterns. One is that they are authoritarian to a great degree, and suppress (or eliminate) democracy. Another is they foster a demand economy, which is far away from free market capitalism.

Demand economies replace market forces with central decision making. Left wing regimes do this as well. Demand economies fail in one way or another, because you can only ignore market forces for so long before things go bad. An extreme current example is Venezuela, which is suffering a collapse because of ridiculous left wing policies.

In the US and Great Brittan, the right wing demand economy is run for the benefit of the wealthy elites. As I described earlier, that's how low interest rate siphon wealth from the general economy into the hands of the Wall Street elites. It's also why corporate tax rates are at an historic low, and why the 1% have so many tax avoidance opportunities.

And why on earth would I want to do that? Facebook has nothing of value to offer me that I care about and I sure as hell do not trust the company. I do not have a Facebook account and don't expect to get one any time soon. I'm certainly not going to sign up to get some random news article that undoubtedly will be available elsewhere.

Umm, while you may call it "clunky," pressure cookers are decidedly in fashion as an appropriate tool used for the right purposes. The cool, hip tech-savvy cooks use them along side their sous-vide machines and blowtorches for a number of important kitchen tasks.

Need examples? Nathan Myrhvold's Modernist Cuisine (2011), one of the recent "bibles" of molecular gastronomy, lauds the pressure cooker, in a list of "invaluable modernist tools" called it "a must-have; essential for stocks, tendering tough grains and seeds," and also noted its usefulness for sterilizing in various kitchen tasks. (For some specific home applications, see, for example, here.) Harold Blumenthal at The Fat Duck restaurant found that stocks made with pressure cookers were both faster and better-tasting once they understood the effects of diffusion laws on stock making. And here's a whole blog on Slate about their comeback.

I could go on. Pressure cookers may have been "out" a decade ago, but now they're back "in" again... best time to update your kitchen fashion files.

With interest. In dollars.

If only they had hired a single accountant to actually show up and calculate what they needed, right?

Their defense seems to be that they're a backwards country bumpkin with no economics degrees in government, who have been taken advantage of by these clever Germans who were plotting to... lose billions on unpaid loans. Those clever, clever Germans!