Yeah, they apparently weren't able to roll out FIOS to anything other than outlying suburbs across most of the U.S. Not very many people are able to get FIOS, and they stopped expanding their service area a few years ago, and even sold off parts of their fiber network to other companies in certain markets. If you aren't in a FIOS service area now, you probably never will be.

Both Verizon FIOS users were reportedly very happy (other than their experience using Netflix).

Lenovo is a Chinese maker.

And they are offering these at low prices -- in the developing world -- because nobody in the western world wants this Windows 8 crap.

It's not the size of your screen, it's how you use it.

But I guess that line is only said by people with small screens.

They have to firesale those devices in developing countries. In the US, the EPA isn't going to let them just bury them in a big hole in the ground. The Windows 8 software might leak into the soil causing a massive ecological disaster.

And Microsoft seems to just love, and perhaps even encourage this particular confusion. In fact their poor branding would seem to have been deliberately designed to cause confusion leading to people buying an RT device and then discovering that it doesn't really run Windows apps. It only runs the tiny library of Windows 8 RT apps.

Your own argument about western culture arriving slightly delayed in the developing world should have caused you to conclude that the developing would would think something like:
1. If westerners aren't buying this Windows 8 crap, then why are they sending it to us?
2. If westerners are using non-Windows tablets, then we should be too (but perhaps just a bit delayed)

Yes, it's hammer time. For Microsoft. And it's about time.

It's great that you bench 285. However you conveniently neglected to mention how much you weigh and how many umpteen thousands of calories you stuff in your face every day.

Can someone who has tried this tell me whether two particular bugs that were present throughout the life of Plasma 4 have been fixed (OK, you may not think these are bugs, but I sure do: I can't imagine how they were ever allowed to persist, since to me they seem to violate pretty basic requirements of GUI behaviour):

1. If one has a menu present (for example, by pressing the K-Menu button), does an incoming notification still cause the menu to disappear, so you get the delightfully random experience of clicking on whatever happened to be under the item you were about to click on?

2. Can a single misbehaving plasmoid still cause the entire desktop to freeze? (This typically happens to me if the network connectivity is lost: poorly-written plasmoids that need network access can block and cause everything -- not just the plasmoid in question -- to freeze.)

No, all of science is debatable. Even Newton and Einstein.

The ones insisting that science is "settled" and undebatable are the same old religious authority figures dressed in new clothes.

Unfortunately taking art classes does nothing to actually increase your creativity -- it's an innate characteristic of the human soul (or brain, depending on your religious views).

Tell her to go into medicine. There is no way doctors are gonna be replaced by robots, ever.

On the off chance that some tremendous breakthroughs do lead to medical robots like in Star Wars, NOBODY will have to worry about getting a job. I'm not holding my breath though.

> And yet, they are still making gobs of money. In fact, they are more profitable than ever.

I remember in the late 1970's when IBM people were laughing at these 'toy' microcomputers. HA HA! Those toys will never be like real computers. Certainly not a threat to IBM which is making gobs of money. In fact, IBM is more profitable than ever.

IBM introduced a PC in 1981. Thinking they might sell up to two million. By the mid 1990's IBM had lost the PC market, abandoned the PS/2 attempt to re-monopolize it, and eventually got out of the PC business completely. Before the end of the 1990's IBM had re-invented itself. Think the same thing won't happen to Microsoft? You may be too young to remember, but in the 1980's, even by the late 1980's it was completely laughable to even consider that IBM might find itself on hard times. But it happened. And just a few years ago it was laughable to suggest that Microsoft might lose its industry dominance. Not so much laughable anymore.


> Moves like this don't really help anything.. not even the bottom line, since the massive cuts crush morale and limit the ability of the company to innovate to keep ahead of the competition.

Moves far more radical than this may be the only way Microsoft stays around in the long term. We'll see what Microsoft looks like in a decade.

You lack faith in Microsoft, sir.

Windows 8 is going wonderful! Everyone loves the new UI. That is why Windows 9 will never bring back the Start menu. Just watch, you'll see!

PC Sales are not being affected by the new mobile device trend. Microsoft will dominate mobile devices and phones any day now! You'll see!

Oh, and some day Microsoft will make a dent in data centers, and Microsoft Azure Cloud will become important. Of course, Azure Cloud is the only cloud service that was built for Windows instead of Linux workloads. And Windows is used by some large* computing cluster users, um, somewhere. And businesses using Linux workloads would be happy to trust their business built on Linux to Microsoft, a company that to this very day is working to destroy Linux.

(*and by large, I mean much larger scale than you are thinking if you are thinking of Windows)

A Mars landing will cost hundreds of millions, even if these experiment payloads are small. How exactly are they gonna come up with that kind of money? Skimming through TFA didn't reveal any details.

Is this like, put out a bunch of press releases to get publicity, then hope Paul Allen or some other billionaire will fund it? Because the kind of budget they will need is a wee bit out of Kickstarter territory.

Isn't there one near the Mexico border in NM that already exists?