Slashdot loves to get inaccurate and inflammatory.

Is that if you do renounce your citizenship, the US gets all spiteful and will blacklist you from coming back.

Obviously you have to evaluate your situation, but just make sure you factor that in. You wouldn't want to say "Ya, don't really need that citizenship anymore," only to find you can't come back and visit family because the government got pissey about it.

The issue with Metro is that the "Only full screen mode," is a deal breaker on desktops. I do not have a 30" screen to run one program at a time, thanks (barring a few exceptions). However they become perfectly usable when they are in a window. Modern Mix for Stardock does that, and apparently Windows 9 will do it natively. Ok well at that point, Metro is just another API you can use alongside Win32 and .NET and maybe there's some interest. If a Metro program works just like any other then perhaps more people will be interested in writing them.

Of course that remains to be seen, but a new API that is cross desktop/tablet/phone isn't a horrible idea, forced fullscreen on a desktop is.

Visual people seem to like it often. Mom loves the new start screen because of that (she's an artist/ex-art teacher). However it does have some issues for normal desktop use. Not the OMGWTFBBQ whine fest geeks make it out to be (which is largely MS bashing) but still.

The big issue is that it is clunky to use in a professional setting. Like on my desktop I have a whole lot of applications, and I often run and use many of them. The start menu is good because it doesn't occlude much of the screen. Also everything is nice and hierarchical, making it easy to find things. The start screen becomes a pretty big mess. It goes on for ever, even on my 30" monitor, because I have so much installed and it shows all icons. Yes, I can set up tiles with the most used stuff, but that really doesn't solve the issue since I already have task bar shortcuts for that, I go to the start menu/screen when it is a less used program.

Hence I run a start menu replacer (Start 8 in my case). It isn't that I can't use the start screen, I just find it inferior to what it replaced. It's perfectly usable, the 2012R2 servers at work all use it and that's fine, however a start menu is better/faster for what I do.

On a tablet, it works nicely. You need bigger icons to do finger navigation. However my desktop isn't a tablet, my screen is not and will never be touch (no finger prints please and thanks). So it is sub optimal.

Hence MS really is right to bring back the menu for desktops, and have the screen for tablets. However you are also right that the whiners need to STFU because it is not the dire disaster they like to pretend.

You're telling us not to trust a web based service, but then tell us you keep your data shared like google drive or dropbox? I see no appreciable difference in practice there. Lastpass is essentially Keepass + a specialized dropbox-type service. Your advice is especially ironic given the spotty security dropbox is known for.

At some point, you have to make informed decisions about the tradeoffs between security and convenience. For me, using Lastpass is a convenient way to synchronize the strongest possible unique passwords - essentially gibberish - across my multiple computers. I feel that having strong, unique passwords across the web is critical to keeping my numerous accounts secure.

This is exactly how security is supposed to work - a researcher discovers a potential flaw, discloses it to the vulnerable companies, who then promptly fix it and discloses this fact in detail to it's customers. The system is arguably more secure than before, not less.

Incidentally, as it turns out, this attack is apparently only applicable to those not using a browser plugin. That's not to discount the seriousness, but I was never actually vulnerable to this attack, since I only use Lastpass from my PC using Firefox + Lastpass plugin.

Oddly enough, I'm pretty impressed with my local waste hauling company. I was getting overcharged for the size of garbage can I had for a number of years without me noticing after containers had been switched out to different types. I placed a single call to my utility company, and they told me they'd have to contact city hall, who manages the city-wide contract and billing. "Great, I'll never see that money", I thought, with quotes about "fighting city hall" coming to mind. A few weeks later, I see a full refund in my online account for the overcharged amount. The employee had followed through and taken care of things for me with just that single phone call. WTF? Excellent customer service from a utility? Mind blown.

In general, I rarely complain when mistakes are made. After all, we all make mistakes. What really counts to me is how those mistakes are dealt with. I think I might write a letter thanking their customer service department. It's probably a rare enough occurrence in an otherwise relatively thankless job, so it would be nice to know that their efforts are actually appreciated.

So yeah, thumbs up for my local waste disposal utility.

In Tucson 10%ish of the drinking water comes from reclaimed water (aka filtered sewage). Makes sense in an area with not a lot of fresh water resources. Also in those areas you can have different kinds. You can purchase a non-potable (not for consumption) water source for irrigation. Again, reclaimed water, but it undergoes less filtering and thus is cheaper. Plenty of larger places get a hookup to keep their watering costs down.

It is a very sensible way of doing things and you actually have more control of purity than water that comes out of the ground.

It is easy to make good DACs these days. Basically any DAC, barring a messed up implementation, is likely to sound sonically transparent to any other in a normal system. When you look at the other limiting factors (amp, noise in the room, speaker response, room reflections, etc) you find that their noise and distortion are just way below audibility. Ya, maybe if you have a really nice setup with a quiet treated room, good amps, and have it set for reference (105dB peak) levels you start to need something better than normal, but that isn't very common. Even then you usually don't have to go that high up the chain to get something where again the DAC is way better than other components.

Now that said, there can be a reason to get a soundcard given certain uses. For example you don't always want to go to an external unit, maybe you use headphones. In that case, having a good headphone amp matters and onboard sound is often remiss in that respect (then again, so are some soundcards). Also even if you do use an external setup, you might wish to have the soundcard do processing of some kind. Not so useful these days, but some games like to have hardware accelerated OpenAL.

Regardless, not a big deal in most cases. Certainly not the first thing to spend money on. If you have $50 speakers, don't go and buy a $100 soundcard. If you have a $5000 setup, ok maybe a soundcard could be useful, but only in certain circumstances.

As a side note, the noise in a PC isn't a big issue. Properly grounding/shielding the card deals with it. A simple example is the professional LynxTWO, which is all internal yet has top notch specs, even by today's standards. http://audio.rightmark.org/tes...

Are you sure about that? I mean sure not reading the article is pretty common on Slashdot but not reading your own sources is pretty lame. The article you linked says that New York will experience more flooding under storm conditions. The top category of flooding in my linked article for the flooding damager during Hurricane Sandy in New York City is 6-18 feet of water, because the top recorded flooding level was a little over 17 feet of water. There seems to be more than a few buildings in that top category. And the article says the average flooding level in New York city will rise by an estimated 4 feet of water by 2032 (20 years after the article was published). I don't see how that can be considered good evidence for your claims no matter how I look at the issue.

If he had removed anything they'd just claim that the removed emails contain the evidence that they were looking for, and more people would be inclined to believe them because they now have evidence that he's hiding something. Frankly, I suspect even if he opened up his email voluntarily and didn't remove anything personal they'd claim that obviously he'd already hidden the evidence they were looking for. Witch hunts don't end just because you're co-operating with your would-be executioners.

Using the numbers from Venus Atmosphere Temperature and Pressure Profile:
Average Earth temperature: 14 degrees x 1.176 = 16 degrees Celcius
Average Venus temperature at 1 atmosphere (49.5 km above the surface): 66 degrees Celcius

It appears that you shouldn't be able to do so, and that's ignoring the question of whether the surface temperature on Earth should even be directly comparable to the temperature 49.5 km above the surface of Venus.

No, generally speaking anyone who denies that global warming is occurring is labelled a "denier", because the evidence is conclusive that it's happening. The people who deny that catastrohpic climate change could occur because of global warming ir more properly lablled as a "luke-warmer", because they generally don't believe it will get "that hot".

No one (but you) is using it for that purpose.

Surprisingly, close to half of Americans don't actually believe that, they think that there's no consensus on whether global warming is occurring. Probably because their primary news sources are under the control of Rupert Murdoch who personally stands to lose money from his portfolio if it's widely acknowledged that global warming is occurring and that human emissions are a key factor. Rupert, in case you didn't know, has a lot of money invested in coal companies which would bear the brunt of the effects of regulation, carbon taxes, or carbon trading markets.

I can't comment on the file format issue in Office, as I'm not familiar with that.

As far as DirectX goes, I do recall how they released DX 10 on newer platforms (Vista and up). Personally, I think it was a stupid decision, because it limited the potential adoption of DX10 rather than providing an incentive to upgrade to Vista as they hoped. They're pulling the same boneheaded decision to limit the latest DX release to the Windows 8.1, if I recall correctly. Again, trying to shore up a crappy OS release using DirectX will do nothing but cause DirectX to stagnate. The OS's will be replaced in their own sweet time. This seems to be a more recent trend of Microsoft's, and it's a bad one.

I think that the examples you cite are bad decisions on Microsoft's part, not because of what they did, but because they simply did it too soon. I think it's reasonable for them to stop developing software and platform updates for their older software at some point, but with DirectX 10 it sort of had a backlash effect. Even today, overall DX11 use is often paired with a DX9 compatible rendering engine simply for legacy WinXP support, even though any modern video card has long had DX11 support in silicon. We're only now seeing a trickle of DX11-only games starting to come out, all because of that decision. Well, that and the fact that the Xbox 360 was roughly a DX9-equivalent machine.

So yeah, some good examples there. I was thinking mostly in terms of 3rd party application compatibility, for which they have a really good record (i.e. you can pretty much play any DirectX videogame ever as long as it was properly written, which I think is pretty amazing). But they've done some fairly silly things with releasing their own software and platform updates.

Yeah, that was the weird part. I lived close enough to feel the blast, but the winds blew all the ash east (I lived north of it), so didn't see a bit of the stuff. Felt bad for some folks in eastern Washington, who got blanketed by several inches of ash, if I recall. Fortunately, they're much better equipped for snow removal than in Western Washington, so that was fortunate. I'm guessing by the time it got to Texas it was a much lighter dusting? Still pretty impressive.

Sorry, I meant currently active volcano. Unless I missed a major geological event, I'm presuming there aren't any currently active supervolcanoes.