The Metro APIs were designed for web front-end programmers, not people who write for real GUI toolkits. You can build quite competent Metro apps in HTML and Javascript, and if you reach any limits, your web shop could hire a third party to write a module in C# or C++ to work around it.

The API for web programmers includes also rules that that apps should be made for a finite set of fixed screen sizes. Not resolutions -- screen sizes. Metro was never designed to be scalable.

This is not only a Windows problem, though. MacOS X on Retina(tm) displays is just as bad, but there the OS draws everything twice as big to begin with and scales down if needed when compositing windows. Apple never cared about hinting anyway, so all controls and labels are just as fuzzy scaled to 125% as always.

This isn't exactly a new finding. Typographers have known this for over a century, if not multiple centuries. Why do you think newspapers are printed in seriffed typefaces?

Anodized aluminium - "aluma" - is actually a quite hard material. It is harder than aluminium itself.

The issue here, is that the outer layer of aluma just appears to be quite thin on the iPhone 5. If the parameters of the anodizing process had been just a little bit different, they could have made the layer thicker, and therefore more scuff-resistant.

Another thing they could have done would have been to round off the sharp beveled edges. That appears to be the part that is most easily scuffed.

Is there anybody but me who thinks that Apple should have made the "clock" look like a watch instead of a clock?
Watches are what people are using the iPhone clock for anyway...

There was a moment in the early days when the site went through some technical difficulties and everyone who wanted to post had to re-register. I think that I did that the same day that it happened. I got a much lower user ID when I had re-registered than what I had had before.

Being a Star Wars fan, I wish that I had registered only a fraction of a section later ...

It is worse. It is split in three parts. A lot of things from the Lord of the Rings appendices that happen during the same time as The Hobbit are being put into the movies.

Personally, I am considering waiting for the inevitable 2015 fan-edit that follows just the story of the book "The Hobbit". I don't know who will make it, but probably several people will try doing it.

Seeing it at home will probably also be the only way that I am going to be able to see it in a good threatre, in high resolution in 2D. Yes, I have 20/20 vision and the inter-eye crosstalk and lack of depth of field in so called "3D" movies bugs the hell out of me. Where I live, movies are not shown in 2D, (takes me an hour to travel to the closest 2D theatre, which is a shoebox) so watching it at home after the BluRays have come out is likely going to be my only option if I want a good movie experience.

Even the oldest, slowest PC that have any kind of keyboard and can run Windows 95 or up would probably do.

The PCs don't have to be the same type. Some can be slower than others. The keyboard layout has not changed significantly over the years. There were many typing tutor programs for Windows 95, and programs for Windows 95 still work on even the newest PCs.
(Of course, you could go even back to 80188 cpu's and DOS, but I find it unlikely that you will find used PCs that are that old. Besides, it would be better to sell those to collectors and buy more cheap PCs for the money)

The cost of shipping at least one typewriter across the ocean is going to cost well over $50. These things are often heavy.

My Commodore 64 had smooth scrolling, and it ran at 1 MHz. Your problem is probably either in the software or in the touch sensor.

It ran on a high-end Laserdisc player from Pioneer?

Yep, on NeWS the client could upload Postscript code for widgets that would execute as entities on the server, responding to user input without any round-trip to the client as in X (and Wayland).

NeXTStep and MacOS X Quartz used Postscript only for rendering. BTW, the core of PDF is an extended subset of Postscript, so a lot of it is the same.

The iPad is not a phone? I have used it lots of times as a speaker phone with Skype and 3G (UMTS).
Are you telling me that Skype and UMTS are not phone protocols?

At least they let Skype continue to be its own brand after they bought it. It is not "Microsoft Skype", thankfully.

I think that Microsoft should have continued to use the word "Metro" to refer to the touch-interface on Windows 8 and Windows Phone.
Rename the Metro interface on Windows 8 to "Metro" and rename the "Windows 8 Phone" to "Metro Phone". Done.

The Tactile Pro 3 has clicky switches. If you want a keyboard like the Apple Extended Keyboard II, you may do best to wait a few weeks.

Matias Tactile Pro 3 has clicky switches, licensed clones of the vintage Alps switch, made by a company called Fuhua. They are clicky like the ones in the older Apple Extended Keyboard, but the switches in the Apple Extended Keyboard II are different. The II's switches did not click, they were only tactile and they did also have dampening on both the up and down-stroke.
Fuhua's switches are also a bit noisier than the vintage switches, probably because of slightly different materials and/or tolerances.

However, Fuhua has announced that it should stop production of their Alps clone. Because of this, Matias has taken upon itself to manufacture its own clones - in two variants: clicky, like in the AEK and tactile/dampened, like in the AEKII.

Matias is supposed to come out with the Tactile Pro 4 variants in the next few weeks. They originally said August, but they are a bit delayed.

It is just because the first iPhone was so significant, and showed the competition how to make a smartphone "right" that the tech world is so important. If Apple does something in a new model, then the competition will react with similar functions in their phones.

The "Retina Display" in iPhone 4, "The New" iPad (3) and in the latest Mac Book "Pro" is something that I think could potentially be as significant as the first iPhone.
Power users have been screaming for decades that they want ultrahigh resolutions and a fully scalable GUI. Now there is finally one general purpose computer that has it. You can bet your ass that Microsoft is going to incorporate support for ultrahigh resolutions in the next major release of Windows.