I've used one for a while, and I found it very good. I don't understand why you think metro sucks that bad. It's an OS, and you SHOULD only be seeing metro for a few minutes per day. The rest of the time you should be in your applications actually doing things, and neither android nor ipads run any of the applications I need.

So if you can do a calculation in HTML and CSS, then it is a programming language?

Ok, here: http://experiments.hertzen.com...

Ooops.

LESS can calculate 1 + 1 just fine, as can css. Just not output the way you probably want, perhaps. For example: "margin: calc( 1px + 1px);" works just fine.

You mean like a router with a UI for configuring it? Plenty of system developers need a UI as well -- configuring, monitoring, reporting. I suppose you could code in some system specific front end tools, but why would you?

No, but then you are limited to writing experimental micro-controllers, or desktop applications. Not knowing CSS does pretty much limit you from being able to write any web application, and most phone apps.

The customer paid for a 75Mbps link between him and the first hop. He got that. He didn't pay for a 75Mbps link between him and every possible host on the internet. That's silly.

Still not a SI unit, but better.

No. Every person should be prosecuted for every single trivial offense until such time that we realize that many of those trivial offenses should not be offenses at all. By just prosecuting a "random" sample is to burden a select few with a punishment that most get away with. That isn't a fair or just system.

Have you been to any of the expressway oasises? I haven't been to them all, but the northbound one on 294 has a charging station.

Odd, because the very first link I went to on Dell's website for business showed machines with Windows 7. I didn't even have to search.

I haven't heard them say that. It just increases their cost in support for an OS that they get no revenue on, and backporting fixes to it takes considerable resources. Support has been extended multiple times, and even now you can still get support, but you have to buy a support contract from them for it, and yes, it is getting more expensive every year. Feel free to stay on it as long as you want.

So you chose your vendors poorly, who didn't stand behind their poorly written products. I can write code on open source platforms that will likely break in future versions too. I can also pick bad vendors on open source platforms that may go under next week or next year as well. Your argument is irrelevant to your conclusion.

You are talking about insurance benefits. Benefits are earned and used by an employee, much like money is. It would be akin to saying that if an employee decides to buy with their earned money that the company doesn't agree with, that they should be able to deduct the cost of it from that employees paycheck because they don't want to give the employee the money to pay for it. Essentially giving the right to the company to dictate what the money an employee earns can and can not be used for.

To be fair, both were and still are cross platform compatible. .NET (BCL) and C# can be run on any platform and contain nothing that is tied to windows. They didn't actually write anything that ran on other platforms, but that was because there was a (mostly) lack of interest on those platforms to do so. However, Mono does run on many platforms and runs .NET code just fine, as did moonlight which was available for the mac ran silverlight stuff. Everything that anyone would need to actually implement .NET on another platform is freely available, and C# was submitted as a standards document.

Now they also do distribute some higher level classes that are tied to the windows platform, but those are the exact things you would expect would be tied. Mostly UI stuff that has no counterpart on other platforms (Forms, etc). Just don't use any classes that contain "Windows" as part of it's name and you should be good to run any of your code on any implementation outside of Microsoft's version for Windows.

Of course, you do realize all major motion pictures are shot at 24fps with the exception of a handful.

My first new video card was a nvidia RIVA TNT. Was made by diamond, and I bought it with my 486/25. It was $600.

High end video cards have always been $600-$1000 ever since the 386 days. Unless you quit your gaming bug before then, you never had a current gen high end video card.