Metro is intrusive? Your inexperience with Windows 8 is showing. If you're using the desktop, you'll likely only ever see the Start screen for a couple minutes in several hours of PC use. Even then, for most purposes, it works exactly like Windows 7 and Vista. Hit windows key->start typing to the first couple characters of the program you want->hit enter. You don't ever need to use the tiles unless you have some urgent need to use non-desktop apps. Even things like the classic control panel are still there and are easily accessible via a large shortcut on the the "Computer" section of Explorer.

Unless they're coming from Windows XP, almost all the behaviors from programs they know and love should work exactly like they did in Windows Vista and 7.

The main problem I've had is that every newer router I've tried in the 3 or 4 years have has had horrible reliability problems... dropped connections and the like. I got tired of messing with them and spent the $50 on the WRT54GL (which is what it's still going for on Newegg: and haven't had an issue like that since. Sure, the wireless is slower, but my WRT54GL's been running stably and consistently despite not having been rebooted in over 2 months. whereas the newest router I had required a full router reboot every couple days. That wasn't my doing. That wasn't a faulty hardware. That was the default setting in the router's setup page under its "maintenance" page. The default setting had the router set to reboot on Tuesdays and Fridays.

Do they make new routers that can maintain a stable connection for under $100?

I wish I had the latency of dialup. I'm currently using Exede satellite broadband. So I exchanged a 56 Kbps connection and 250 ms latency with a 12 Mbps connection and 750 ms latency.

It's a trade-off that I had to make. No DSL/cable broadband in my area (southern Indiana).

If you're using software in which 16 GB of RAM is way too little, perhaps you should focus more on desktop computers instead. You're trying to use a butter knife to cut a steak.

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Amazon reviews of games are completely useless. Almost all reviews for popular games are from people who never played the game and are instead riding the hate circlejerk. I bet if you looked at the reviews for SimCity, less than 5% of them would be verified Amazon purchases.

I don't know if many people on Slashdot have noticed, but this is *not* an untimely change. Why? The price of many new CD releases is now lower than the price of an MP3 album. When Taylor Swift's "Red" album came out, the CD cost $9. The MP3 album cost $15. This is not an isolated incident.

A game that costs $100,000 to make, but sells at $2/game has to sell over 50,000 copies to make a profit. A game that costs $2,500,000 but sells at $50 has to sell the same. Your first point is only valid if you're willing to pay a higher percentage of the cost.

Dear Indie Game Devs:

• Your game isn't intrinsically better than others because it looks like a SNES game.
• Stop making games that think that difficulty for difficulty sake is the best mechanic a game can have.
• Stop making clones of games from the early 1990s.
• Stop refusing to sell your game on marketplaces like Steam, Origin, and the Windows Store. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.

PC Gamers:

• Buy games that you like.
• If a game is worth playing, it's worth paying for. No excuses.
• The *only* point made when you pirate a game is that the PC has a pirating problem. You are not hurting "the Man"; you are hurting gamers and yourself.

4G, if you can get it, isn't much worse than satellite. I currently have Exede. $75/month for 15 GB of data usage, 12 Mbps. Unlimited data 12-5 AM. However, satellite has a built-in latency of 700ms. Don't expect to be playing any games that require low lag. Also, that latency is definitely felt while surfing.

You're assuming that the fix for stupidity is evolution. Me, I vote for cybernetics.

Or use Google Chrome. It has an Google-built PDF reader and Google-managed Flash updates. You never have to touch an Adobe installer ever again.

But if you're anti-EULA, Foxit is no help. Point of comparison: The Foxit EULA is 3,683 words long. The Adobe section in Google Chrome's EULA (which covers Flash) is 2,476. Google Chrome's ToS in the EULA is 3,983 words.

I've found Gmail's "not spam" reporting flag to work incredibly well. Never have I had the same email source marked as spam twice after I've told it that it wasn't. That alone makes me only use Gmail as my email provider. Why? Because *all* free email has built-in spam detection, most of whom have horrible learning algorithms. As far as I can tell, most ISPs that provide website access to email pre-check email for spam, too, even if you've never used the website and rely solely on SMTP. And there's no way to even check if there are filtered outs messages if you're using a program like Outlook, because they sit in a spam folder on the website version of your email, never to be sent via SMTP.

The first self-driving cars that hit the market will likely be so decked out in analytics software and video cameras, that it would take the police about 2 minutes to figure out who was at fault in a crash.

What I find particularly worrying is that, at least initially, many of the ethical choices programmed into these machines will have been written by people who tend to be heavy on the Aspergers side of empathy (as many technically inclined people are). Should we really be leaving decisions like this to people who literally can't understand how most of humanity behaves?