Blingy might not be the right word, but I am personally not a fan of glossy/shiny/textured interfaces. For example, I much prefer the style of Android's 4.x Holo interface design over iOS. I think the design for Outlook.com is a HUGE improvement over Hotmail.com, and would like to have seen Microsoft push the Windows UI in the same direction.

I don't like it when interface elements are noisy and cluttered and compete for attention with the content I'm looking for. I don't like lots of high color icons and small text; I prefer nice typography with a little bit of breathing room.

But there's no accounting for taste, right?

I'm not a fan of the "UI formerly known as Metro" either, but there are ways to bypass it. It's not simply just a system setting as it should be, but here's the best solution I've found so far:
http://www.wesnext.com/login-directly-to-desktop-bypass-metro-ui/

The Desktop in Windows 8 looks just fine once you get past Metro. It's less blingy than Windows 7, although there is still a lot of room for improvement. I have seen some minimal UI concepts that I think are quite attractive:
http://dribbble.com/shots/576250-Windows-UI-Concept

I'd take the WiiU over a PS3 if the WiiU played blu ray discs and supported DLNA for photo, music, and video streaming over the network.

As far as I know, it doesn't support any of that.

The locked bootloader situation may have more to do with the carrier than the manufacturer, although Motorola certainly isn't blameless here.

There is a reason that the Samsung Galaxy S3 had an unlockable bootloader on every single carrier it was released on except for Verizon.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/07/09/verizon-blames-samsung-for-locked-bootloader-in-galaxy-s-iii/

4: at the very least, stop cutting the corners off all of the phone designs. It seems like a poor attempt at looking futuristic, but it's just awful. Ugly ugly crap. Go back to the 2011 phone designs if necessary. The Droid X wasn't this ugly.

If they were to offer such a feature, I'm guessing they would also give carriers the option to disable it.

I tried a friend's Kindle Fire, and was a bit disappointed with the performance.. I don't know if it was just me, but the interface felt laggy and failed to register presses about 1/4 of the time. Amazon's launcher is garbage, and the rest of the hacks to the OS likely are too. I think performance will improve quite bit once someone gets an AOSP build of Android good and stable for it.

FTA - "All five of these elements are so large and unstable they can be made only in the lab, and they fall apart into other elements very quickly. Not much is known about these elements, since they aren't stable enough to do experiments on and are not found in nature."

Unfortunately, we do not live in some kind of web developer utopia where everyone diligently updates their web browser to take advantage of new and superior standards.

Both of these sites should be replaced with an OCCUPY CRAPPY OUTDATED WEB BROWSERS movement. Well in sentiment at least, I've never been very good at naming things.

Dunno about cloud servers, but my web servers are located at FortressITX in NJ. Looking forward to seeing how they handle the storm.

There has been some really interesting stuff going on for the Droid X (and Droid 2) lately.

With the development of 2nd-init, it's now possible to run stock android, CyanogenMod, and MIUI, totally MOTOBLUR-FREE

More information:
http://cvpcs.org/blog/2011-06-14/2nd-init._what_it_is_and_how_it_works
http://cvpcs.org/blog/2011-08-18/time_for_some_motorola_merging
http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?t=1820
http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?t=2222
http://rootzwiki.com/showthread.php?t=531

It would be nice not to jump through all of these hoops, and maybe soon we won't have to. But for now, this is as good as it gets for your Droid X. I'm partial to MIUI with ADW Launcher, it's a very polished ROM.

IE9 does finally support border-radius, but I know it doesn't support text-shadow.

Here's a comparison between IE versions:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(v=vs.85).aspx

Unfortunately, it doesn't matter how well new versions of IE support new standards. The masses won't be using it until they buy a new computer that already has the latest version pre-installed. Most of them are too terrified of breaking their computer to proceed with the upgrade they're prompted with through Windows Update.

I believe most mobile browsers work that way with the URL bar scrolling up off the screen.

In Android 3.0/3.1 the URL bar scrolls off the screen but the tabs remain.. I would definitely prefer to be able to instantly get an address bar by double-tapping the tab instead of having to scroll all the way back to the top of the page to access it.