For me it was about two and a half weeks of feeling ill, back in January (apparently a more harsh variety)

You do realize that the flu killed more people in the 1900's than all the explosives, bullets and other tools of war combined, right?

I think the opposite happens far more, that people refer to a cold that has them down for a day or two as the flu so as not to seem like a slacker by the same metric. I had the flu in January, and could not really function well at all for two and a half weeks.

Not to mention the fact, when people have a common cold for a couple days, they often refer to it as "having the flu" ... Having gotten the flu back in January, and the two and a half weeks it took me out for, I can say it really isn't that mild generally.

It's funny, but I actually disagree with you on most of these points... I hate the UI formerly known as Metro as much as anyone in Windows 9, though I kind of like Unity... I think Windows 7's, or Win8 + ClassicShell better, but how I use them are very similar.. my most common apps are docked to the taskbar, and for those that aren't, I'll hit the win/meta key then type the first few characters of what I'm wanting to bring up...

Firefox is for the most part outpacing Chrome in terms of performance and stability for the past couple releases... I actually really like Chrome's UI, though I don't like some of the tweaks they've been making to the menu structure, I do like it better. As for the Firefox UI, I can only hope they finally unify the address and search bars like Chrome has done. I don't dislike IE as much as I used to, still won't use it as much as I really like Chrome and Firefox's plugin options far more.

Windows 8.1 with ClassicShell is pretty nice imho... you really need a fairly decent machine with okay graphics though. I'd say that I am getting far more comfortable under a unixy environment, my laptop is OSX, home desktop is Win7, home htpc (which I am using now, and most often) is Ubuntu, and at work is Win8.1. They are all different with pluses and minuses.

I think that windows brings an aweful lot to the table... that said, I am more and more comfortable setting up linux for some friends and family... ChromeOS brings this a long way, even though it is missing a decent imap/pop3 mail client.

DisneySearch.com?q=wwii+holocost

Results:
1. _It didn't really happen..._
2. _Join our anglo pride group_

.....

Sorry, it may be in bad taste, and the Disneys aren't really in control anymore, but it had to be done.

I like Hangouts a lot, and the kinks in the Google Voice integration on my phone are finally mostly worked out. I do think that RTC is important, MS being late to the game was able to look at the problems, and both Google and Mozilla agree, which is why ORTC is coming into play... similar to how IndexedDB came out after other implementations. The crappy part is I'm still stuck supporting IE8 and IE9... so it will be close to a decade before I can really use this for certain things.

Other issues with WebRTC not withstanding, there are some compelling ideas in there.

Easy... get one of these automated cars driving into nascar... if it makes it through a season at least placing in the top 5, and no accidents, it's safe.

See SNI and StartSSL

You can build a piece of software that will run in every version of windows sold for the last 15 years, distribute it on a disk without any source, or special compilations... you can *not* do that with even two versions of the same linux distro a year apart from eachother.

Well, in the same vein which of the dozens of versions of linux do you install? Beyond this, take a typical 32-bit windows application, and it runs in all of them without a recompile... Want to run a program in linux, is it in your distro's install system, yes, but an older version, you need the latest, but that also means updating a bunch of other stuff to an unstable release, crap, now your sound no longer works right... there goes three hours tracking that problem down.

I think that really depends on the age of hardware... just this morning, a coworker has installed a new hard drive, and windows 8.1 on a roughly 3yo desktop. Windows installed and within a few minutes had updated all the drivers... very straight forward... my last desktop install, I had installed to one drive, and after updates in ubuntu (grub did something goofy to another drive), and it wouldn't boot anymore.

OSX is a little quirky for installs, but not that bad either... in general they are all okay... Linux is the only OS (depending on distro) in the bunch where clicking the "update all" button will often break something that worked before.

It's even more broad than that... if you look at housing, even renting in/near LA, San Francisco, New York, etc... it can be much more than that to live there. Just the difference in rent between where I am in Phoenix, and the area in SF I was looking at is about 25-30k/year difference in rent alone. Let alone restaurants and the like. Sure, large chains will be very similar in pricing for common goods, but the cost of food and housing are a lions share of expenses, and can vary dramatically.

What someone should probably come up with is something between https and http.. that being signed payloads over http... for stuff that is non critical and available via cdn, it would be nice if some of these systems could be used to cache results... the payload could be signed with the private key (used on https), and have that signature added to the header... this way signed http objects could be used via https, without the warnings... the content matches the signature.... edge caching systems can still be used (if they respect the header).. maybe use httpsd as the protocol (http + signed data) and fallback to https if there isn't a signature.

So that means I won't be getting a BJ during my tryout to be an underground super elite hacker dude?