The funny part about PETM, as per wikipedia, is that "Success was also enjoyed by the mammals, who radiated profusely around this time.". I'm not saying global warming is a great thing.. but I mean, it's pretty clear that mammals prosper from warmer climates.

I played all last night and I had no issues.. made about 5 cities. So I don't know what this article is talking about. They were also still there this morning.

I honestly can't find exactly what jobs are being killed. What jobs exactly are even considered middle class seems to be highly contentious and subjective.

Can anyone point out to me an exact list of which jobs are reducing by technology? I, personally, don't consider a manufacturing job to be middle class, for example. And, it would seem, neither does wikipedia: "The following is a list of occupations one might expect to find among this class: Accountants, Professors (Post-secondary educators), Physicians, Engineers, Lawyers, Architects, Journalists, Mid-level corporate managers, Writers, Economists, Political Scientists, Urban planners, Financial managers, High school teachers, Registered Nurses (RNs), Pharmacists and analysts, etc...[8][34]".

I read TFA, and nowhere does it say how big The Hobbit was.. only that Avatar was about a Petabyte. Why isn't this stated anywhere? It's very frustrating, and also makes the article less useful, since its entire premise is that "The Hobbit creates big data challenge" with no specificity.

I see a lot of posts in here about banning guns. They are far more controlled where I live (Canada), but rest assured shootings that happen in Canada are always with black-market guns. It's not the people who legally purchase and register firearms doing these things, it's those who obtain them illegally.

You may argue that making guns harder to get, like here, reduces this kind of thing. That may be correct. But no matter what, people can get anything, and they will, if sufficiently demented, do something bad.

What's the answer to that?

I don't know, my friend read this Slashdot story once that had no anecdotes in it at all. So, it does happen.

I think this: post from Pi is a better "walk-through", as it includes descriptions as well as pictures.

But, that's just me.

No, that is not the case. WP7 apps are written in a Silverlight-based environment, whereas WP8 apps (Metro style) are written in a HTML/JS environment.

Through my work, I get almost every tablet/thingy that comes out. I got the Surface RT the day it came out because of this, and have been using it since as my replacement for my Nexus 7, eee Netbook (ubuntu), and in tandem with iPad mini.

I see all this shit on Slashdot about how much W8 sucks, and it's true, for desktop. If you took the "desktop" mode of W8, and put JUST THAT on desktop with a start menu, then it's solid (just a win7 upgrade). If you take W8 Metro (or whatever it's called now) and use JUST THAT, it's about 80% of what you want on a tablet. I say 80% because the gestures, while powerful, are really unintuitive.

As it is, I have to say, as someone who actually USES the Surface, it's a nice device, and Metro is actually rather pleasant to look at (yes, there's no apps for it). In addition, the gestures are nice, if you learn them. And, in addition to all of that, having a "desktop" mode on the tablet (the keyboard includes a trackpad) is also nice, although it feels disconnected. I think Microsoft hasn't gotten it perfect, but I think they are on the right track.

As a side note, I don't know why there's so many pro MS articles on Slashdot lately..