Actually, the worst thing fior me about Windows 8 when I had to use it wasn't even the lack of the start menu; it was the fact that every time you move the mouse cursor near the corner, Windows 8 pops up some stupid sidebar. I want to move the mouse cursor from one monitor to another and Windows 8 kept getting in the way of that every time as if I were using a tablet device that needed these gesture popups.

Tiles can hold useful information that changes though. I dunno about you, but I always like to see what the current weather is every time I go to open an application.

It's a well-known survival trick actually, see?

Vote UKIP. Whatever you think of their other policies, we really need them in for one term to get out of the political union the EU imposes.

"It's evening"? Huh? What do you mean?

I really had high hopes for Dwarf Fortress; I kind of like complex strategy games with steep learning curves, and I could even get used to the wacky interface. I remember the precise moment I just decided to stop playing it, though; when dwarves started complaining about their clothing being ragged. You have to have an entire economy. To make clothes. For your dwarves.

And this isn't some accident, it's by design. For me, they've gone so far into the micromanagement that the game just isn't fun at all, it's tedious. And that's really a shame because I think if they hit the right spot with the complexity, it could be really great. I had been looking forward to making some really big complex dungeons, but making clothes for dwarves and getting the idiots to actually put the new clothes on, all the time? Fuck it.

'Hate' is an understatement. The language's syntax is broken by design. It's a shame another scripting language couldn't have caught on.

No. The real problem is that it is not backwards-compatible with Perl 5, making its rate of adoption guaranteed to be almost zero.

Well it's already solved in places with competent regulators, so don't try pretending it isn't.

Get back to me when we don't have years and tons of nuclear waste just lying around in conditions not in fact all that different from Fukushima.

What, and that nuclear power's fault and not the fault of incompetent lawmakers and intransigent greenies?

No, time has a certain kind of intercourse with you.

its turns out that making modest cuts in energy consumption isn't that painful, saves some money, and may have longer term benefits

There are 2 main problems.

First, if we're going to continue to increase in technology and especially if we're going to go for electric cars, we're going to need to use a LOT MORE electricity than we do now. Filling people's heads with the idea that we can use less energy as part of the solution is feeding them bullshit.

Second, and this is from my perspective, any energy generated by solar or wind is energy not generated by nuclear. As I see nuclear as the only viable option for generating the amount of baseload we're going to need for the likes of electric cars, that fills people's heads with the idea that we don't need nuclear, which is also problematic.

Because most of the risk is due to human factors, which have not been eliminated

No, it's really not. It's mostly technical, and we can build integral fast reactors now with passive cooling where a meltdown, or effective sabotage, is virtually impossible. You should actually open your eyes to this evidence.

Why do we need to cover the risk of Fukushima-style accidents when we're NOT BUILDING 50-YEAR-OLD NUCLEAR PLANTS??