XFCE may look superficially like XP but actually has all sorts of differences that make it irritating as hell to use. Just off the top of my head:

- No decent file explorer. Thunar is abysmal compared to XP's.
- Window borders too small, like 1px. Resizing windows is a pain.
- Window maximize behaviour is annoying, because you can still drag the window out of fullscreen after it's been maximized, yet dragging it to the top of the screen doesn't automatically fullscreen the window again.
- The 2 clipboards, one of which is a "mouse buffer", is so unintuative I would classify it as a bug. Linux desperately needs a unified clipboard.
- The start menu (yeah Win8 did away with it but it's bringing it back) is a nightmare. On Windows, its contents can be organized by easily drag/dropping, and generally the programs listing reflects somewhere on the file system. On Linux, no drag/drop, .desktop files all over the place to edit if you want to modify stuff, and the menu editor is broken (like "move up" and "move down" don't work)

Cinnamon or KDE might be better.

Actually, I think the low point was the final episode. The idea of the Borg, a massive hive mind responsible for the destruction of hundreds of civilizations, being defeated by one fucking human woman by infecting them with some virus? What complete and utter BS. Nobody in any of the other civilizations had that idea?

Then stop buying computer monitors that are designed for viewing Hollywood movies and start buying ones that are designed for general-purpose computing.

Weird... I don't understand the problem they're describing in that blog post. Surely JS code can detect when viewport size is modified, and change images accordingly.

Or, future generations will be even lazier than we are and won't think of privacy and true freedom as really desirable things, so they won't mind what we did(n't) do.

So you're saying they may have been dying out from our gun bullets before we met them?

I highly doubt Obama evolved his actual attitude on gay marriage. As with most things, we'll never know what Obama really thinks about it. What he evolved was, as you said, his position on it after seeing the way the political wind was blowing. Eich was merely more honest and stuck to his guns instead of pretending he now believed the popular thing.

Yeah but say you build a new PC and install Windows on that, it's a whole new set of hardware talking to MS's servers for updates. Aren't they going to complain about that?

How does that work, though? How does MS know you've removed it from the old drive, or do they just trust you?

Yeah but Vista and 8 are such a POS you probably won't want to keep them for 10 years.

Does that apply if you've already activated on one PC, and want to install it on a new PC? Presumably you have revoke the install on the old PC or something?

Except that it isn't the lifetime of a decade, is it? Microsoft will want you to "upgrade" and pay them more in a year's time, like they did with Vista -> 7 -> 8. And as I mentioned elsewhere, changing my PC hardware means I have to go through some stupid reactivation process.

Well there's also the issue of having to "activate" Windows now. What happens if I build a new PC? I have to go through some crappy procedure to "transfer" my licence onto the new machine... or maybe MS don't even allow that?

I stick with XP for one of my desktops because I put my own hardware together (no OS preinstalled), and I don't want to pay horrific sums of money (£135) for a new operating system - Windows 8 is even more expensive to buy a worthwhile edition of. It's behind my free Debian install which acts as a router+firewall. Works for me.

In Britain, MEP is a very widely-understood initialism so I'm not really finding this joke funny. :-) You Yanks use acronyms all the time anyway, don'tcha?