"Ok, let's see. Your base THACO is 10, with -1 for having small suitcase, and another -1 for TSA as racial enemy, however +1 because of the tiny plume of smoke coming from your shoes, so roll a 9 or better."

$57 is too expensive for the average home owner that just wants to browse the web. That's why dial up companies still exist for $9.99/month.

I get 12Mbps for around $50 a month. And that's incredibly faster than what I've ever had before except at the office. If this town is getting 100 Mbps for $57, they should consider that a great deal. Sure it may not be enough to run a big corporation but you can provide that sort of internet to companies separately from home users.

What's better for society in the long run? To have the majority of citizens with the attitude that it's hard and not necessary, or a majority of citizens who think that learning is important even if it's not every day practical? Do we want citizens that are basically ignorant and let the elites do all the thinking or citizens that can tell when they're being lied to?

College should be about making students think. They should shake off the ego feeding "everyone is special" BS that they get from high school. If they can't do the most basic of work (remedial math) then I don't want them being my nurses. Maybe they're ok to cut my hair but you don't need a college degree for that. They won't be able to handle their later classes if they can't handle the remedial stuff that should have been taught in high school. It's not hard stuff to get a passing grade in, it just needs the student to study and concentrate.

Go team!

In software when you take the low level for granted you end up with a typical bloated Windows application. Of course people get away with it because you just mock people who don't have enough RAM or CPU power until they upgrade in shame.

I thought we needed more "Ilsa, She-Wolf" programming instructors.

Because sometimes it's the other way around, the thicker part is at the top. But you just start with one person saying "hey, you notice how the glass is always thicker at the bottom" and the listeners assume that is fact. Then he goes on and says "it's because glass flows like liquid and after one hundred years it is thicker at bottom" and the listeners walk away thinking that they just learned something amazing. Over the years this story gets repeated and repeated until school children are taught it as a fact that isn't question. If someone does see a some of the glass with the thicker part at the top they just assume it was installed this way but that it doesn't disprove the notion (maybe in a couple hundred years the thick part will be back at the bottom).

PC applications usually don't need that power. They need it mostly because there's so much bloat now. Processors ten times more powerful than what we used to have, and yet the applications still feel sluggish. Most people just want to email, browse the web, write some docs, churn some numbers, crop some photos, etc. You can do that on a 1.3Ghz ARM easily.

Yup. XBox was firmly intended as a wedge to get them into the gaming market. They saw a pile of money and decided they wanted some of it. Windows 8 and RT are the same thing, they saw a pile of cash and started drooling. But they didn't create the same wedge by making the tablets cheap and competitive.

The ultimate goal of Windows 8 metro and the Surface/Surface RT is that Microsoft wants a big chunk of the apps market. You know the miniature hastily built things masquerading as actual applications, most of which are just thin wrappers around a web site. They saw Apple making money here and they decided they needed some of that cash. The thinking stopped at that point, they didn't do further research to see what sorts of things were making the most money, what features were most in demand, what would happen to their bread-and-butter backwards compatibility, or even figure out if customers were even happy with Apple's locked down gulag of an app store. They also see Google raking in the big bucks by grabbing lots of data, and they want a piece of that pie too.

So the whole design if everything revolves around Microsoft making their own walled garden and data collection center. Everything in Windows 8 favors the store. They've taken the ideas from Apple and Google and run with it, being even more restrictive in the process.

I am wondering why Ballmer wasn't throwing lots of chairs around. If anything deserved chair throwing it was Windows 8 Metro.

Not sure. I don't use tablets. But if I did there is some stuff in Surface that could be nice. Quick keyboard access for example (maybe others do this, I don't pay attention since all tablets seem like toys to me). For the non-RT Surface there's the benefit that it's a real PC capable of running Windows and Linux if you want (maybe even XP). Most tablets I've seen just seem to be large format smart phones without the phone.

But look at history before the iPhone as well. All the bad things said about Microsoft can apply to Apple too. Apple was even more controlling since it controlled hardware and locked it down tight, and Microsoft only dreamed about being able to control the PC to that extent. But as an underdog Apple was given a lot more leeway. They even have fans who will explain to unbelievers that choice is bad.