Interestingly I think firefox is almost at the same state as IE (just a few less years of cruft) with a desperate need of a good purging to get rid of the bloat and cruft, maybe if Spartan is successful Mozilla will realize the sorry state of firefox and we will see a similar improvement from when we went netscape->firefox. IE 11 is a decent browser, but has its performance hamstrung by its backwards compatibility though I do find it acceptable to use on a machine (still swap browsers if it is my own machine but I no longer feel the need to change friends or family away from it).

most of these apps were written when there was no standard, there was 3 or 4 standards, if you wanted to stick purely to standards were destined to be highly restricted in what you do. This isn't the case anymore but the reasons back then for doing this stuff were far less obvious than they are today.

You don't drive your Ferrari around at max speed all the time, Gamers DO drive their video cards at Max speed at regular intervals. Regardless they paid for the performance and received less than they paid for, Ferrari would be ridiculed/sued/have massive backlash if they published figures for their car and the real numbers were more than 10% lower.

I am yet to see a decent review that ranks essentials last, basically they are nearly always sponsored by the AV community and essentials loses out on heuristics for unknown virus's and malware, but realistically when it comes to that they are all miserable failures, just some of the commercial ones will try and convince you of how important that feature is.

It is common practice for most countries, the only thing new here is a western country letting china do it too.

Tom's hardware has the latest Jan update for graphics comparisons. The R7 260x is best bang for buck but the 750ti is not quite as good value but as you don't like ATI it may be a better choice. All really comes down to why you are upgrading and what you play though.
http://www.tomshardware.com/re...

yes, without a doubt, though the damage is probably already done as it is hard to recover such a PR mess. Personally the issue for me is purely the camera, we have enough invasions of privacy without inviting new ones into our lives. I don't want to be in a restaurant, shop or even in public with people wearing google glass as I object to being recorded by others where it isn't strictly necessary, especially people that don't seem to have any social etiquette with regards to the rights of others.

No, common sense is appointing someone with an unbiased view in either direction, not someone walking into the job with a preconceived position.

It doesn't seem obvious to you as you don't seem to understand the concept. you are looking at a screen, if they choose to place an object on that screen in your vision it can appear transparent or completely solid, depends completely on what they wish to do with it, either way it is completely irrelevant whether the environment is bright or dark as the object is on the screen.

Certainly looks a lot more interesting and viable than google glass. Once google pushed the wear it anywhere video camera recording what everyone is doing it became socially a dead product. Lets wait and see if MS can productize it without making the idiotic mistakes of google that led to the highly deserved coining of the word glasshole.

Oracle seem to be the one organization that doesn't appear to be getting better with security, if anything they have deteriorated over the last few years. wonder what it will take for them to take security seriously.

If the numbers are accurate I am shocked. No way can I believe Google+ usage is that high.

Software end of life usually comes in the form of old hardware dying and no one willing to invest money to write drivers for old software so yeah it does have an end of life, fixing new vulnerabilities is NOT inexpensive either. The human resources of having adequately trained and available devs, support engineers and testers alone runs into the millions.

probably because Zoe Quinn supposedly unfairly profited from the corruption. a good review or mention of your product from journalists can seriously help your sales. corrupt journalism is a blight on the industry, those willing to engage those journalists in corruption are just as bad and Zoe is supposed a prime example of that (won't pretend to know if it is true or not), her role became exacerbated by her lack of grace and social skills in dealing with this in a constantly escalating war of words from arsehats on both sides of the fence.

Very true, but the same can be said of her victims.