Seriously...now that you're married, possibly have a family later, etc, start thinking about cool gadgets that are more than cool. Gadgets that will save you money, help monitor your home, etc. Practical gadgets. The very first thing I would add would be a NEST Thermostat. It is so unbelievably cool looking, will mesmerize your friends, and will keep you comfortable year round while saving piles of money on heating and cooling bills. Plus it's always cool to be able to track and make changes to stuff like this from your web browser or phone from anywhere. It's a real conversation piece. Read about it and watch the videos here: http://www.nest.com/

This response is typical anti-MS FUD. Explain the Xbox and Zune HD then. People loved both of those devices, and Windows Phone is more closely related to those than Windows. Also explain the rave reviews for Windows Phone. If you've ever actually used one, which obviously you haven't, you'd know that.

It is absolutely, without question, because of their shit marketing and lack of devices.

They don't advertise for shit, and they have fuck all for hardware.

Why is Apple successful? In everything they do, they advertise like no one's business. They make you want their product to the point where you just start calling every smart phone and iPhone, every tablet an iPad, and every MP3 player an iPod. It's like "Xerox" or "Kleenex" and it's friggin working.

Why is Android successful? It has all the features of the above player, sometimes more, but can be found EVERYWHERE, all over the WORLD, on EVERY CARRIER. It is easily hacked and has a loyal following of not only things it can do, but things you can MAKE it do easily. You can't go into any store, looking for a phone, and not see 18 different androids sitting there, begging for attention. AND it has some pretty good marketing backing from people like Verizon.

Why is WP7 losing? It does none of the above. Verizon, the nation's LARGEST CARRIER, has ONE FUCKING PHONE that itself is a year old. They have NO ADVERTISING. And, unlike the Kinect in which they have wholly embraced the hacking community, they have completely ignored it on the phone side of things.

MS, get your shit together. This is an easy fucking win.

Much like the recording industry and their straw men arguments like this one, you've completely missed the point. Artists are making as much or more now than they ever have because, eventually, they embraced it only to realize they were reaching a much larger audience with more sales. Same here. They can actually monetize this more. Instead of hard start dates and schedules, expensive books, and even more expensive tuition, they can reach a wider audience with lower prices, more flexible scheduling (like for those that work), and static courses don't have to be rerecorded. Just embrace it, monetize it, and everyone is happy.

The recording industry tried to sue everyone out of existence when they were too high. pushing out crap after crap, and online retailers with better access and better pricing threatened their models. Here we go again...

UEFI allows firmware to implement a security policy
Secure boot is a UEFI protocol not a Windows 8 feature
UEFI secure boot is part of Windows 8 secured boot architecture
Windows 8 utilizes secure boot to ensure that the pre-OS environment is secure
Secure boot doesn’t “lock out” operating system loaders, but is is a policy that allows firmware to validate authenticity of components
OEMs have the ability to customize their firmware to meet the needs of their customers by customizing the level of certificate and policy management on their platform
Microsoft does not mandate or control the settings on PC firmware that control or enable secured boot from any operating system other than Windows

Solution: If you don't want it up to your particular big name vendor, build your own system. You can bet the full UEFI spec will be implemented on Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, and other boards, where you have the choice of disabling the secured boot environment.

Also, the pre-boot environment in Windows 8 clearly allows the booting of "Other OS."

...with LTE-Advanced. ATT is JUST NOW getting in the game. I remember when Verizon first dropped LTE. It rated much higher then as well, what with no devices or users clogging the network. All the while, Verizon has been rolling LTE and devices out like mad, nation wide. And in the background, they have been working on LTE-Advanced, which will take speeds, and more importantly, latency far beyond what their current LTE can provide. Add to this that it's a simple upgrade on there part to roll it out, and they will easily leapfrog ATT before they can even get close to Verizon's current LTE coverage.

Why is it that the government gets downgraded to AA+, but if I was in the massive debt and shitty debt/income ratio that the gov was in, I'd be downgraded from A to "don't let this guy buy a pack of gum" status?

Apple didn't bring a new subscriber to the app. The user was already a subscriber that just so happened to have owned an iPhone. They then went and searched out the app, again, because they were already interested, and downloaded it to the phone. The phone is/was a medium. That's like saying Intel/Geil/Seagate/ATI/Asus/Gigabyte all get a cut of my Amazon order because they "brought" me to Amazon today. This would only hold true MAYBE if the app was already on the phone when you bought it, so you tried it out and because hooked. Even then, you got the whole causation/correlation debate.

Instead of FreeNAS, you can use Openfiler. Also, Open-E is really good, and has easy to setup block replication failover as well. If you want to go high end for custom storage, take a look at Datacore.

Don't worry Facebook. You don't have to rewrite anything from scratch. Google already has, so don't bother. Mark? Sell while you can dude...sell while you can.

Don't change the subject. You should have the RIGHT to do it, as no one else should have the RIGHT to tell you you can't.

And who is more selfish, the person whose life we're talking about, or the ones who want them to endure the pain for their own personal satisfaction? The selfish cowards are the ones too afraid to face the result that they selfishly want you to go through the physical pain so they don't have to go through the emotional one.

Yeah good argument, but it still has nothing to do with who has the right to this person's life. Who else would have more right than the person themselves?

Answer me this. How can, either via religion or any other philosophy, someone else tell me what to do with my body? I can't think of anything more fundamentally a human right than control over your own body. And for a reason why? Because it's MY body. What other reason is needed?

I don't consider religion a "legitimate" basis for anything.

Human right - rights regarded as belonging fundamentally to all persons

Fundamental - serving as a basis supporting existence or determining essential structure or function