It's not fear of change, it's fear of version x.0. Wait until AT LEAST service pack 1, and preferably don't switch until whatever comes after Windows 8 is on SP1. Microsoft releases beta versions of their operating systems. It has nothing to do with fear, just plain common sense. Let early adopters fix the bugs and clumsy UI.

Windows 8 is the new Windows Vista/Windows ME, the first generation after some major paradigm shift in Microsoft thinking.

You have access to what you want to see, and read the things you want to read, and people you want to talk to. When you read a random magazine, or talk to a random person, or have random thoughts, something new and interesting might happen in your life or you might learn something new. Change! Avoid! Step outside your closed little box and take the chance to experience something different.

Yes, like talking to other people.

Windows 8 (and 7) scale UI just fine. There are, and always will be, unruly apps and do not cooperate and don't scale their UI properly. And of course, when you're scaling bitmaps by non power-of-2 factors, like 125% (such as in TFA), they're going to look like shit, no matter if it's Windows or OSX.

Companies do this often. HW is not B&N core competency. It will never be a premium brand, which means they will be competing in commodity space with thin commodity margins and cutthroat competition. They should concentrate on books, real and electronic, and do better and innovate there.

I mean, this is not bad, losing the ability to drive even if you like to to it. Think of all the time you spend driving, and what you might be able to do with it now that you have it available again. You can do work, read a book, watch a movie, study, learn something new, sleep. Now that you don't need to see out the windows, you can have heavy tinting, you can be nside the car naked, masturbating, having sex, having an orgy even! There will be a whole range of things we haven't thought of yet that we'll be doing while in private transit. Surely, you will be able to find something enjoyable to do.

The point is you're assuming what people like and don't like, based purely on your own experience, which you deem to be "normal" and "typical". This is a common attitude. I don't drive very often, and for me driving, even on city streets during rush hour, is enjoyable.

This is all beside the point. Driving is now a candidate for automation, regardless of its perceived enjoyability. Lots of things that many people used to enjoy have been automated or otherwise went the way of the dodo. It's just not a factor we should be considering, and there's no benefit to arguing about it. If you enjoy driving, you'll just have to find something else to enjoy while your car is driving itself in the future.

Stop trying to explicitely criminalize individual behaviours. Doesn't work. Distracted driving is distracted driving. How is texting different from arguing with your passenger or yelling at your kids in the back, or any number of other things people regularly do that do not involve cell phones or texting? All are equally dangerous to texting, and perfectly legal. But being caught with a cell phone stuck to your ear is pretty obvious. Much harder to catch "distracted driving". It's all about politicians being seen "doing something about it". Causing an accident while texting is punitively punished, but causing an accident because your girlfriend was giving you shit is just something unfortunate that could have happened to anyone.

The point is, _someone_ wanting to read your archive in the future (or a completely alien civilization) cannot do so if they can't make sense of the data. You assume the media will survive. That's why you're worried about this in the first place. If not, then you assume the reader will share your fundamental knowledge, concepts and technologies, in some form.

The whole point is, it's 1,000,000 years later. We've gone to the stoneage and back twice. Who knows what happened. You can include plans and blueprints and primers, but building something you've never seen before, like an optical drive or a display or a binary computer requires a massive amount of fundamental technologies and understanding. It's a whole way of thinking. For example, we use electrons to power and operate computers, and convey information via a flat image in the visible spectrum to perceive with our eyes. Even math, who's to say it is the universal language? We assume it is, but maybe we just don't know any better, maybe our math is too primitive, or makes assumptions that are cultural, not natural.

Obviously in response to a post higher up.

It's a ban. Using weasel words and technicalities doesn't change it. Incandescent can't meet the "efficiency" targets, laws of physics say so, therefore they will eventually be non-compliant, ie, illegal, ie, banned. Not everyone can afford a $50 (or even $5) light bulb, when they might only live in an apartment for a year or two.

Something to think about next time you fill out an online survey or petition that collects your email address. Read the fine print much?

In nominal terms? Wow, just add a bunch of 0s to your currency, voila! instant economic success!

Well, this is kind of a general complaint, isn't it?

These days, consumers really have no clue about ANYthing. How much research do you do into anything you buy? How much research do you do into the food you buy? the car you drive? the place you live? the place you work? the place that holds your life savings?

If you're like most people, probably zero.

Lets face it, we've gotten used to our omnipresent government regulating things to be safe for us, that we simply assume everything we see on the shelf is safe, whether it's been certified or not. Even when it is certified, you cannot make that assumption, as the mountains of daily FDA recalls tell us.

Consumers need to take responsibility for their purchases, and demand real testing and certifications of products, not the fake feel-good veneer we have now.