Bigger areas for button presses, charms, bigger hit boxes and all that stuff, and you know what? Good for them, I hope they keep going in that direction.

See, when confronted with that GUI on a non-touch screen 23" monitor, in which clicking on the big giant idiot button causes something to open up on the bottom right corner of the screen so that I have to move my mouse back across the screen in order to click what should have been where I clicked ... just fucking no.

The Metro UI paradigm is largely useless on a standard monitor, mouse, and keyboard layout. Which what my desktop is used with.

but your view of "tablet = bad" is ignoring the realities of where the market is heading

While inarguably people are buying tablets, not all computers are tablets, nor do all tasks benefit from tablet interfaces ... and an old fashioned desktop machine does not benefit from Metro.

Certainly the flashing dynamic desktop paradigm is as annoying as ads to me, and I do not WANT any of that animated eye candy. And I know from experience it's both security and privacy holes waiting to happen. They have twice now had to abandon live desktop content because it was insecure. Why should I trust this stuff?

Don't get me wrong, once I no longer had to look at any of the Romper Room crap for 99% of my tasks, I'm happy with the OS. So far it's stable and quick ... but essentially it now looks like Windows 2003 or Windows 7 or even Vista once you turn the crud off.

Guess what, your spreadsheets still work, so does Visual studio, but I can now use the system using a touch interface too, is that so bad?

You know, once again, these are not things I do on tablets. A tablet isn't where I go to do work.

I'm lucky enough to not schlep around some monster laptop daily to to my job. A tablet for me is down-time .. it's travel, it's consuming web content, and not doing productive work.

So, here I don't want a desktop interface. I want a hammock interface. I want a plane interface. Or a hotel interface. I want the big squishy buttons.

If Microsoft would stop trying to give me a tablet interface on my desktop, and a desktop interface on my tablet ... maybe they'd understand what people actually use tablets for, and what they use desktops for ... and actually make the appropriate interface for the job.

Seriously? My bloody spreadsheets will work? Are you aware you're epitomizing the "I"m a PC and I'm a Mac" cliche? Because when the original iPad came out, and Google has had successful tablets ... most of which are used for damned near anything but spreadsheets ... nobody was using it for spreadsheets. Not even a little.

The people who are going almost entirely tablet are using video conferencing, watching movies, reading eBooks, reading their email, and doing a little banking. Because normal people doing normal things on a computer pretty much do those things.

And you and Microsoft want to be sure my spreadsheets will work on my tablet? That's pathetic.

I'm looking forward to being able to use my tablet more like a PC.

I had been hoping to use my big-boy desktop workstation like a big-boy desktop workstation ... instead I got some moronic marketing vision in which that isn't a conceivable thing, and that I clearly need an app for that, and have a touch screen. The Metro interface is more of a hindrance in that context. It's useless and cumbersome.

Maybe they will succeed at an environment which seamlessly does both. But so far from what I've seen they're doing a shitty job of them individually, so lucking into one combined thing which works is just not gonna happen.

Bah, if what happened when I upgraded my iPod Touch is any indication ... he'd still be troubleshooting the damned thing.

Can't say anything about their mapping stuff, but their software upgrade experience is getting annoying of late.

This discovery will put many people at ease.

Well, really, just you and that one other guy ... everyone else? Not so much. ;-)

Spocking 5$ bills has been a thing for a long time now up here in Canada

Man, I have got to start reading the news letter more often.

Here I've been going around with un-Spocked bills like a n00b.

Yarg! Now get 'yer booty to my cabin, and put on that frilly thing I be likin' so much.

Oh, evening captain. Mr. Jones, carry on as you were.

Well there's an answer to that, buy a modern computer

I did buy a frickin' "modern" computer, I just didn't buy a portable or a tablet.

I bought a desktop workstation, with 8CPU cores, 16GB of RAM, and which has 6TB of disk space.

And then I had to spend hours removing a fucking romper room interface designed for a cell phone.

If I buy a tablet, I expect a tablet interface. If I buy a desktop workstation, I expect to have that, and not have to strip out the idiotic and brightly colored garbage because some moron at Microsoft has decided the whole fucking world is doing everything on tablets.

The problem is people at Microsoft are stupid enough to think that the tablet interface has any utility whatsoever in a desktop machine, and forget that MANY of us still use desktop workstations to do work ... not connect to Facebook, not to share stuff on Twitter, and pretty much not a damned thing Windows 8.1 is geared towards out of the box.

Out of the box, Windows 8.1 is ahorrific mess of crap, designed for the drooling masses, and designed to be pretty and flashy, but which utterly fails to understand that essentially this is no different from the "Live Desktop" crap we were turning off a decade ago.

It's all eye candy and non substance for a desktop machine. So far, when you turn the crap off, it's a great OS. But Microsoft has no idea of what the desktop experience needs to be.

It too me a day or so to remove the crap from Windows 8.1 to make it look like an actual desktop.

So windows 10 will, what, be just as broken as the desktop was in Windows 8.1? Or it will try to suck less and be less like a tablet experience?

At this point, I'm forced to conclude (from a week or so of running my new Windows 8.1 machine) that most of the decisions Microsoft has been making indicate they no longer know how to write a UI for a desktop, and they're entirely focused on writing only stuff for tablets.

They keep betting they're going to be successful on the phone Real Soon Now ... and they're so busy playing catch up they might need to worry someone is going to come out with the next new thing before they can put out a copy of what everyone else has had for years.

So the same experience on a Windows 10 phone as a desktop? That's based on giving you a crappy experience on the desktop.

Every time I see a comment like this I wonder if the person has some kind of reading comprehension problem

Funny, when I see comments like this I conclude the poster is an asshole.

There was no deficiency in the Bitcoin protocol

Speaking of reading comprehension, did I fucking suggest it was a failure in the protocol?

The problem with Bitcoin, as I see it, is it seems to bring out the stupid in people. As in people handing over virtual money, to a shady player, who is neither a bank nor operates as a bank, and isn't insured as a bank, and then are surprised to get ripped off.

It's like the people who have drank the kool-aid about bitcoin become irrational idiots who think the unicorn shit which has been smeared all over bitcoin makes it immune to this.

I don't give a crap what you do with your money. But when I see people hand wringing about losing the money they essentially gave to a shady stranger in a dark alley ... I'm forced to conclude it served these people right for being idiots. Yes, the crypto worked beautifully

I don't give a crap about how wonderful the crypto is, or isn't, in bitcoin. But it seems like people using it suffer from either blind optimism, or inherent stupidity.

Which seems to be the case in all speculative markets, and very especially bitcoin, which seems to give widespread encouragement to become an idiot ... either in what you do, or in how much of a drooling idiot you become on the topic.

Sounds like it was an overwhelming success, then.

Every time I see stories like this, I think ... gee, so you entrusted millions of dollars with an entity which isn't a bank, isn't regulated as a bank, and who more or less mostly just promised they wouldn't steal your money ... and somehow people are surprised by this.

On what basis, exactly, does handing strangers your money make sense when you have no legal basis to get it back?

It's hard not to see this as a self inflicted problem, and people handed sacks full of money to some guy in an alley with no receipt thinking they were investing.

Sorry, but I'm afraid this was people believing that Bitcoin was somehow magic, and that nobody would ever be a crook.

Damned bastard Khajit and Argonians, can't trust any of them ... wait, what?

A spokesman for Curiosity said it would be taking some well deserved downtime, basking in the sunshine, and streaming "Rovers Gone Wild" videos.

The spokesman also added Curiosity is long overdue for a vacation in the Martian Riviera.

NASA officials were unavailable for comment on how Curiosity seems to have gotten a bottle of Wild Turkey, a keg, and a beer bong.

The machine doesn't just go ping. It provides information about frequency, phase, polarization, and time of flight between two points.

LOL ... Temba, with his arms open!

OK, this is really big science ... and I just need a few more small words ...

We have two small widgets a known distance apart, these widgets are essentially fixed in place, but will wobble when acted upon by ... well, obviously gravity waves.

Since there's nothing big enough to make two things that far apart wobble at the same time (short of something very kinetic, which we'd measure through several other means) ... .. we infer that we have measured the passage of the only phenomenon which could make out widgets wobble? Shit.

So basically a long baseline widget wobbler which weighs waves of gravity. (Assuming of course the theory is right, the engineering is right, and these events happen often enough to measure.)

That's some wacky science right there. Still not sure I got it even close.

but since all our theory and all our observation says it should be detecting them and only them, it's fairly safe to assume it's actually doing so

So, build me a fucking god detector. And when it goes off, I'm going to call bullshit like I'm calling here.

Look, I'm no physicist ... but surely someone can explain how a machine that goes "ping" is proof positive that it has detected the thing it claims to be detecting, no?

It's clearly something glaringly obvious that I'm too dense to understand ... but the mere fact that a machine goes "ping" doesn't mean it worked, or that it proved anything. It means people invested in saying "see, it went ping, therefore it worked" will be happy ... but the rest of us aren't sure how.

So, a big giant expensive machine goes ping ... and the only plausible explanation, because we have great theories and everybody did their part ... is gravitational waves?

I'm aware I'm not qualified to refute that fancy physics, but it seems like there's a step in there that could use some dumbing down for the rest of us.

Because, let's face it, with a simple light switch, I can build you a bullshit detector. It's demonstrating that it actually worked, instead of just being a light switch, which is the tricky part. ;-)

So can anybody better versed in the physics fill this in a little: "an ultrasensitive instrument that may soon detect ripples in space and time set off when neutron stars or black holes merge".

If the machine goes ping, we infer the machine is working perfectly, and somewhere a neutron star or black hole has merged? But you have no independent confirmation other than the machine going ping?

So, set the damned thing to go ping, and claim you've found gravitational waves ... profit!!!

Seriously, I'm confused. Surely there has to be some other way to confirm the machine works than having it tell you it worked.

Or, you know ... Factoring-attack on RSA-Export Keys.

Seriously, there's a lot of different ways to do an acronym (or a backronym as this likely is).

My suggestion? Get over it.