Binoculars won't cut it if you want to see Jupiter's moons or Saturn's rings. Even if they have the magnification you still need a tripod to hold the view steady and you really need something with an equatorial mount to follow the objects or they will slip out of view very quickly I used to have a 90mm refractor with a manual equatorial mount (you had to rotate with knobs).. I'd go electric if I got one today... especially if a bunch of kid's are taking turns looking through the thing.

I find that my Twist has twitchy or broken touch & mouse control. All pointers can randomly jump around no matter if you are using the trackpoint, touchpad or external mouse. Touch misses so often it's practically useless for anything other than launching apps. Auto-rotate is unreliable and frequently sticks in the wrong orientation. I expect (or hope) that these hardware problems don't exist on the Surface but I would still expect any Windows 8.1 hybrid to act like a slow tablet and mediocre laptop combined into one device which frequently does what you did not mean to ask it to.... Even the appearance is hard to get used to. I can't see the windows controls/scroll bars very well, for instance, no matter the color scheme.

I've got a Lenovo Twist and it is, by far, the most frustrating device I've ever used. It's partially Lenovo's fault for bloatware & minor hardware issues but mostly I blame it on the schizophrenic OS that is Windows 8.1. Want to use it as tablet? Try manipulating that file with your fingers when a default app takes you to the desktop. Want to use it as a desktop? Whoops... That file just opened up in some crippled, full screen metro app...
Just want to login to the damn thing? Why is the screen stuck upside down? I just pulled a neck muscle.... <Sigh>

You'd think someone would have thought to allow separate default apps for desktop/tablet mode. Launching a file from one mode only to have it open in the other is aggravating hell... desktop windows controls don't work well with touch input.. not on my 8.1 tab/laptop anyway. And if you went the other way, you find yourself in a crippled metro app that doesn't have the function you were looking for.

LAYOFFS

Having worked in government IT for a bit, I'd say their story is entirely plausible and not entirely unreasonable. How many years of backups should they be required to keep? But hey, don't worry. Congress shall pass laws mandating backups and we will spend millions on tapes to be used once until
subpoenaed.

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

In any case this is some petty, inconsequential, political bullshit we are talking about. Did the extra scrutiny result in anything? Anything at all?

Oh, but cheap, exploitable labor is the Capitalist's god-given right. Just another commodity.

Tell you what... If you stopping making up misleading headlines I'll try and not be so cynical about them.

IMHO,

Ultimately this is a culture war and will only be won over the long term. For starters we could push back against Saudi Arabia instead of coddling them. I don't see how anyone can expect to win a war against Islamic fundamentalist terror when the spiritual center of Islam is controlled by fundamentalists with unlimited funds from oil sales. We also need to promote a more equitable distribution of wealth, world wide. Poverty breeds violence, ignorance, and fundamentalists of many stripes.

We could quit behaving like hypocrites, ignoring blatant and obscene human rights abuses by our Islamic dictatorship "allies" because it's profitable in the short term.

We could quit pissing our pants at the thought of terrorism, accept that it may occasionally happen (as it always has), and carry on instead of over reacting. Islamic fundamentalist terrorism has never represented the existential threat to western society that some would have us believe. It may be a thorn in our side for quite some time but the pain and damage it inflicts is entirely absorbable.

We should quit using this pathetic war on terror as an excuse to destroy ourselves.

The reaction to 9/11 pretty much proves that the US will accept no risk unless it's self inflicted.

How long until we hear that?

Even Nexus is only good for a few years.... I'm holding my breath for another year of N4 updates.

Absolutely. For example Microsoft's misguided decisions to do things like hide file extensions by default and obscure the way files are organized with with My Documents, symlinks, and .ini files which hide true directory names have been counter productive in my experience. These decisions only serve to assist a limited subset of users who never venture beyond routine computer use and totally screws them over when they do.

There's got to be some acceptable balance between ease of use and NOT keeping users ignorant.
What constitutes ease of use for my mother is not necessarily the same as ease of use for my kids. It seems to me that we should be designing software that will teach our kids useful skills while not deliberately obfuscating the way technology works rather than for a previous generation who may never need or want to know what's really happening.