Here's a quick, entirely true story of a windows 8 activation:

(Preface: I'm a software developer, and regularly develop under, run, and test with: XP, Win7, OSX, Mint, Ubuntu, etc. I like and use each of these for entirely different reasons.)

A friend of mine, non-programmer but average to above-average PC and Mac user for more than a decade, bought a new, name-brand, laptop that came with Windows 8 "pre-installed." I was over when she began booting it up for the first time.

The first boot / install began by asking for wif access, and asking for (unusually personal) mandatory information, phone number, email address, etc. which it then (presumably) validated. I did not see a way to bypass customer information capture, which is possible with every other OS I've had experience with.
  Then it began an install routine, and crashed. We tried twice more, with some sort of connection failure to Microsoft crashing the install each time. On the fourth try, it finally succeeded, and then began an install that required (I believe) at least 3 in-process system reboots.

Almost an hour later, my friend was "rewarded" with the baffling windows 8 UI. Her reaction was exactly: "Well, it looks like you can go anywhere Microsoft wants you to."

After nearly an hour of raw frustration, intrusive marketing practices, you get hit with the UI from bizarro-world. And there's no obvious, intuitive way to use it like you would, say, every other computer that you've used in the last twenty years.

By the time we'd bothered to google for ways to defeat her new laptop's UI and use it like a general purpose computer, my friend had made up her mind.
She *hated* Windows 8. We returned the computer, stopped by the Apple store on the way home, and picked up a Macbook.
(She set it up in under 10 minutes, began using it right away, and has been happy with it since.)

I don't think my friend will ever buy an Windows machine again. And I can't say that I blame her.

I *still* can't believe Microsoft got something like the first hour of ownership/UX with their OS so completely wrong.

I remember reading something about Ballmer unilaterally kicking everyone who raised objections to the win8 UI off the team. I guess this is what happens when you fill a bench with yes-men, maybe?

>the AWB is a class of weapons that is rarely used in crime

Sure, that distinction belongs to the semi-automatic handgun. But it is frequently the AWB class of weapon used in spectacularly high profile mass-murders.

While by far most of America's 32,929 civilian firearm casualties in 2012 were singular affairs of homicide, suicide, ground-standing, etc., most commonly involving semi-automatic handguns, the AR-15 (along with a handful of AK-47 variants) seem to be the favorite weapon among manifesto-writing mass murders willing to gun down entire rooms full of school children, moviegoers, mall shoppers, etc.

Why do mass murderers seem to be drawn to the AR-15? Is it the 800 rounds a minute fire rate that the aftermarket accessory stocks boast of?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=IMChi7FFSMA#!
Military fantasy attachments like bayonet mounts and ultra-high capacity clips?

Who knows? Whatever the reason, it's these weapons that tend to show up at America's most shocking scenes of horror, time and time again. And that gets them noticed.

>Most of Japan is high rises

>Also, a lot of the buildings in the US are older than those in Japan

You've clearly never ever been to Japan.