Tearing can happen when the frame rate is lower than the screen refresh rate. All it means is that the frame is updated mid screen refresh. Triple buffering can resolve tearing for frame rates lower than the monitor refresh rate at the cost of input lag.

I get quite a bit of tearing with VLC on my Win 7 HTPC.

The Fisher Price UI insult is aimed at XP, not Windows 8. And as long as you don't use any Metro apps, the Windows 8 UI works just fine for desktops and laptops. I don't stare at the start screen for hours on end just like you don't stare at the start menu for hours on end.

Because those applications you mention have workarounds, but the underlying problem is that upload speeds are generally so much lower than download speeds as provided by ISPs.

Phone and keys in the same pocket? That's a great way to scratch up the phone.

They need to be tall enough to not cook any passers by.

To be fair, it IS off topic.

Relative to the Sun? Yes it does.

You're missing the part where Server 2012 and the R2 variant don't come with the Store enabled, and Metro apps don't work out of the box. You only get the Start Screen part of Metro unless you install the desktop experience components.

As the others have already stated, it's not locked down. And even if it is, you could just install a generic Linux distro instead and run Steam on that.

Not accurate. Some, but not all, non-commercial usage doesn't require a license for the media, but the software still needs a license.

Check your math. It adds up to 90.7%. Non-Windows makes up the rest.

LibreOffice uses GPU acceleration for various calculations. I'm not quite sure where Mantle plays into this, I'd have thought they'd use OpenCL, but perhaps they do use it somewhere (maybe for drawing charts?)

CPUs can bottleneck even at 20% utilisation. The task manager will show 20% average utilisation, but that could mean that it sat at 100% utilisation for 20% of the time, rather than 20% utilisation for 100% of the time (or some mix in between).

For the extreme example of the 90 degree bank, when the car is always tilted sideways in the complete loop, gravity will pull it down and the side railing of the track will hold it in place. If there was no gravity, the railing isn't strictly necessary. This situation describes the infinite gravity well of a black hole in the deformed rubber sheet analogy. In this case, yes, the curve will keep the objects from escaping orbit. If, however, the slope of the rubber sheet isn't vertical then no orbit is formed simply by the distortion of the shape. It can bend the path of light but cannot describe an orbit of a satellite or simply the falling of an object towards another object when the object initially starts with no momentum.

For the extreme example of the full loop you describe where the car is upside down at the top of the loop, the car needs to be going fast enough to counteract gravity at the top of the loop. The formula that describes this minimum speed is V^2 / R = g (V is minimum velocity at the top of the loop, R is radius of the loop, g is the gravitational acceleration that must be overcome). Notice that when the car is vertical gravity is pulling the car backwards, which causes it to slow down. It will speed up again by the same amount (if you ignore friction) at the other side of the loop as it's vertical facing downwards. This situation is completely different to the deformed rubber sheet analogy, I'm not even sure why you brought it up.