We will always be at war with Terror, citizen.

...what happens if china funds and develops fusion technology in the next two decades, and using it's plethora of foreign owned companies, patents/trade secrets the technology...

Then they get to learn that karma is a bitch.

True, I had indeed forgotten that. It would have made a good April Fool's theme, except it was too disturbing to be funny.

It auto-senses a mobile client (at least an iOS one) and assumes you are running on a 160x120 PDA from 1998.

If you visit news.google.com on an iPad without signing in, you'll see what I mean.

Marissa appears to be a very data driven person, always looking for "proof" of display/design feature ideas and concepts, even for whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide.

In other words: "Welcome to the local maximum, Marissa. You might as well settle in and get comfortable, because you'll be here forever."

Dunno. Google News underwent a similar asinine redesign before Mayer left, geared towards making the site readable on a smartphone or small tablet screen while removing roughly half of the information.

The difference is that a signed-in Google user can turn the News redesign off and revert to the previous text-heavy format. It's actually a good incentive to sign in. It doesn't appear that Yahoo has the same insight.

What the hell did Musk do to deserve that comment?

Interesting, I didn't know that. Neither ISE nor Vivado will run on Win8? Why not?

Pretty much goes without saying. The surest way to build a billion-dollar empire is by emulating everything the last billion-dollar empire did except for the mistake that brought it down.

Trouble is, you eventually become the monster you fight. Ask Microsoft, for instance.

When companies put facebook.com/company instead of company.com in their TV ads, you know something is fucked up.

Wait, wait, I thought it was aol.com/company. No wonder that doesn't work anymore.

Oh, I get it, it's like a game.

Windows key zork
You are standing in a large server room on the 69th floor of the FrobozzCo building, next to a rack.

>examine rack
The rack contains various servers, patch panels, and cable looms. On a shelf nearby is a Windows 8 laptop and a pipe wrench.

>check email
With what?

>laptop
You'll have to open it first!

>open laptop, then check email
I don't know the word "email."

>you did a minute ago, dumbass
I don't know the word "dumbass."

>open laptop. press windows key. type 'email'
A list of programs whose names contain 'email' appears. However, the list is empty.

>open window
Perhaps you missed the memo. Given the tragic and (more important) costly events following the last round of layoffs, FrobozzCo management has decreed that the windows in the server room must remain locked at all times.

>get pipe wrench
Taken.

>break window
What do you want to break the window with?

>wrench
CRASH! A shower of heavy plate glass fragments cascades into the parking lot below. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm begins to sound.

>throw Windows 8 laptop out window
THUD! A near miss on your boss's new Porsche. Using passages unknown to you, a security team rushes to its defense.

* * * YOU ARE FIRED * * *

Your score is 0 out of 400 possible points. This gives you the rank of Welfare Recipient. Play again? Y/N

The real irony is what Microsoft actually resembles most: a Communist central planning agency. They hand down five year plans that look good on paper and test well in "focus groups" but that end up causing general mayhem and malaise when force-fed to the workers.

It's as if Ballmer was visiting East Germany when the wall came down, and got a good deal on a bunch of old books they were throwing out.

That's true, too -- there is no reason for anyone to upgrade from 7 to 8. There was no good reason for Microsoft to produce Windows 8 to begin with. But most people who are still running versions prior to 7 can safely upgrade to 8 plus ClassicShell or one of the other Start menu replacements.

ClassicShell is nice for those of us who never liked the Start menu in 7. It has an amazing array of customization options.

The 'minimum effort' way to access programs, control panel snap-ins, etc hasn't changed since Vista: press the start key on your keyboard, type the first, occasionally second (and possibly third, for lesser-used programs) characters of the name, then hit enter

I liked this feature better when it was called "MS-DOS."

Correct, there's no reason to downgrade to Windows 7 if you install Windows 8 plus ClassicShell.

But the Start Menu hasn't been restored in Windows 8.1. It's just another raised middle finger from Ballmer to the rest of us, and hopefully the last.