Common usage as opposed to etymology dictates meaning... Which is a shame really. Give it a couple of decades and even dictionaries will resign themselves to the fact that reticent does indeed mean reluctant. This will leave us with taciturn; a poor substitute.

Yeah, but just because you've given them cute names doesn't mean that it's easy to distinguish between the two polar extremes in all but the most trivial of cases. You'll tend to find that most 'marginalized' people are there because of both active and passive factors to lesser and greater degrees. Those to the left perhaps draw the line in a slightly different place to where you'd personally place it.

I don't quite get the hate. Firstly (and my god I'm going to get modded down - look at my comment history, I'm not a shill, I'm just dull) the ribbon is a better interface than a hierarchical menu system. It (at least in office 2010 - I never gave 2007 nearly enough of a play around with) behaves delightfully in the presence of different screen resolutions (seemingly) intelligently choosing which functionality to highlight on the ribbon within the space available and which functionality to push down into a menu. It also exposes more functionality at the 'one click' level than 2003 ever did, which makes discovering functionality vastly easier. The only thing the ribbon _REALLY_ needs is a 'search' option which is available as a power tool (plugin, or whatever it's called) which really should be vanilla. Sure it's different and requires you to learn new things, but it's not hard to learn, the benefits in learning make it worthwhile and surely learning is fun??

I express the same general sentiment towards Windows 8. The Metro start screen is just a glorified task bar that is much harder to accidentally click on. The number of times I've accidentally clicked on (and thusly lunched) a bloated java program (Aqua Data Studo, I'm looking at you) whilst actually trying to bring up an already open program (at the very least) frustrates me. Launching apps from the start screen (I suspect is better - there is a distinction between launching and multi-tasking) and switching to the desktop on login is just not that big a deal. You get to work - boot your computer up, log in (and then if using Windows 8 click the desktop icon/tile) load up Matlab, SPICE, Quicken or whatever then hell you use and then blow 8 hours tooling around with that program. Seriously - how big a deal is one extra click over 8 hours? Also, being able to press the windows key and see whether any of the applications/tiles you're running have received updates is kind of neat. I can imagine that will be very useful for checking email/facebook (more bad karama)/rss feeds.

New things are neat, aren't they? Computers are cool. Learning how to tool around in different operating systems be they Windows, OSX, Linux, BeOS, OS/2 or whatever is fun, isn't it? Where did we all lose our joie de vivre? Windows 8 will seriously not alter the fundamental way you interact with your PC, it brings (aside from the GUI) nice new technologies to the table - so why the rabid hate Slashdot?

>The Applications are now brain dead fullscreen horrors. You can't easily actually close them. Multitasking now is suddenly much more like some horrid 2012 throwback to OS9, or even Win3.11. Oh the system does multitask, but now the OS just feels like it doesn't.

For the record - you close Metro apps by dragging them to the bottom of the screen... Once I figured that out (and stopped wildly F4-ing) I was a much happier camper.

I'd pay for a program that picked lottery numbers and was wrong 1 one of 100 times.

We have killed him—-you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the reality distortion field? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away general purpose computing? What were we doing when we chained our phones to fucking iTunes? Jobs is dead. Jobs remains dead. And we have killed him.

It's CDO thank you very much - where all the letters are in the right goddamned order!

But what is it?

Ever! The US has a different frequency allocation scheme to Australia. The iPad will never-ever-ever work on any LTE network that Australia rolls out. P.S. US frequency allocation scheme is bat-shit crazy (but that's a completely different and much longer rant).

I've never worked out if I drink coffee to wake up or wake up to drink coffee...

Yay! German grammar Nazis! I'm going straight to hell.

Couldn't you just 'charge' something up at home and then use that to dump a metric shit ton of current into your car battery very quickly when you want to charge that?

OK. So I tried this with the movie I happened to be watching, something starring Tom Hanks called 'Cast Away' and yeah - I've got to say - didn't do it for me.

If your vote doesn't matter for a 'third party', then it likewise doesn't matter for a 'first party' either. Your vote only (by your definition) 'matters' if a bunch of other people vote in the same manner: third party, first party or penguin.

This is a silly argument. It'll all be moot in 5 years time when we are forced to download our games (a la Steam or PSP Go) ...It is the inevitable future, perhaps we should just suck it up and not get our panties in a twist?!