Most of the improvements in win 10 are actually in the kernel and security as well as DX 12. just that the general user community focus on the UI, not MS.

The thing is our knowledge of the universe is so infinitesimally small that really it would be far fairer to call it a guess than a Hypothesis.

NO, they stated it is free if you upgrade in the first year. After that time if you want to upgrade you pay normal upgrade price. There is no expiry or only good for a year.

PC gaming is currently over 20 Billion and is still growing (though slowly), Mobile gaming is around 20-25 billion as well, how the fuck do you turn a 50% market share into a drop in the bucket? Regardless they are two separate markets. You can't compare mobile games to desktop games, of course those games would never do as well on a desktop, how would COD, Halo, Far Cry do on a mobile device?

high performance gaming where all these expensive gaming cards are made for does not happen on portal devices, it happens on desktops. You can't just say look a variant of OpenGL runs here here and here and claim it is now dominating, the truth is it hasn't made any significant inroads in the desktop gaming area. On the desktop it isn't even a close race, MS completely and utterly dominate the space. As long as they have a strangehold on the desktop then DX will not be obsolete or even close to it, it is even looking like it will be jumping ahead again with performance which will probably increase its market share even more.

did we just jump into an alternate reality where suddenly MS no longer has 90%+ of the desktop gaming market? OpenGL supporters have been saying DX is obsolete for over a decade and if anything they have lost market share during that time.

I voted B5, but I think Red Dwarf would be my favourite (start in late 80's but most episiodes were in the 90's). Lexx also should have been on the list because it was just so original and weird.

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.