" Microsoft seem to be focused on last minute refinements of the UI ..."

The words "Microsoft" and "last minute" in the same sentence are....concerning. Hell, they have enough issues when they're not trying to reach self-imposed deadlines.

And you're assuming these outliers made up a significant portion of the population based on....what?

Do some digging yourself:
http://www.civilwarcauses.org/...
http://www.vastpublicindiffere...

I have to say that looks very promising. I'm in.

...where ladies need to stop falling in love with men and stop making men fall in love with them. Because when a man and a woman get together, it's always the lady's fault. How do I know? A Nobel scientist told me.

Faster boot up? Faster application launches? Faster searching? What, exactly, is faster?

When US corporations were destroying local economies, most Americans didn't have a clue because our corporate media never thought to bring it up. Funny that.

some people are just paranoid control freaks. I worked with a guy who was always worried about losing his job-which he was quite good at--and getting him to share knowledge, passwords, etc could be excruciating. And this was a unionized, government position, he was about the last person who should be worried about getting canned.

I've had 3 or 4, different brands, that after a year or so would only work with brand new batteries for a few shots and then quit, and forget rechargeables. Now that phone cameras have become good enough, I haven't owned an actual camera for some time, maybe they've improved.

...provided they don't show the same damn one every time. I find a lot of good shows through the "Recommended for You" category, if they teased one of those I'd be OK with it. But it's a slippery slope. You kids won't believe this, but used to be we didn't have to sit through half an hour of commercials in movie theaters, they even showed cartoons before the movie. And my lawn, get off it.

From TFA(screenshot): "There's also an all- new browser designed to get stuff done online."

Admittedly, getting stuff done online with IE could be painful. Glad they saw the light.

"First-name basis" implies that one is fairly well acquainted with the person in question, so an introduction would be unnecessary.

...or let teachers introduce technology into the classroom. "

Oh hell no. Tech in the classroom is not an end unto itself, and certainly not a justification for Powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, PP can be a useful tool (in some cases), and yes, it don't work without tech in the classroom. But the idea that any random PP show is valuable because "it's introducing students to technology" is ridiculous. Students are on a first-name basis with technology, they don't need to be introduced to it.

Granted that's an idiotic problem, but in fairness I remember being annoyed by the stupidity(but not THAT stupid) of number-line exercises over 40 years ago. Yes, the standards are loose enough to allow educators to make crappy problems and exercises. They should be.

Common Core isn't a curriculum, it's a set of standards: At this grade, students should learn how to do these things. How you teach them to do it is not mandated, so educators are free to try different approaches. Some of those suck, but that's nothing new, parents have been complaining about "New Math" for as long as I've been alive.

I think you don't know how to read the standards. MD.A.2 doesn't require that teachers write a single problem that includes all those elements. It suggests that they cover a number of problems that incorporate those features. Perfectly reasonable. Yes, that's too vague if you're defining requirements for a software project, but that's not what they're doing. "Standards" and "requirements" are not interchangeable, requirements are narrow and quantifiable, standards are broader and more open to interpretation. Note that in the article you cite "requirement" appears only once, and in a very specific context.