Which doesn't mean a thing when the interface is so clunky that I'd rather use anything else to get the game up and running. If Windows 8 SP1 includes some options for turning off "Metro", "Modern" or whatever the hell it's being called now, and gives me back a start menu (you know, so all the applications aren't hidden by default) then maybe upgrading will be an option. For now all of the under the hood fixes are vastly overshadowed by the suckstorm that is the UI.

I think you underestimate what an absolute torrential downpour of data you are talking about. The big nasty one is "using recognition software to track you on the streets and in public buildings". It may, just possibly, be technically feasible to do this for a small, secure area. But realtime processing and tracking of something like a major metropolitan area would require bandwidth that would make Google cringe. And *that* is assuming that you can interconnect all of the necessary systems and get them to talk to each other coherently.

They aimed too high as it is. $380 million will buy a *lot* of lawyer time for appeals and suchlike. If it was $10-$20 million it might not be worth Apple's time, but $380 million assures *years* of appeals.

The thing is, most people already have their apps and whatnot, and re-downloading them is free. So you get very little in extra sales when people upgrade their devices. If they went to a model like that people would pay less for the device and then have to repurchase all of their apps at every upgrade. All that would accomplish would be to put people off of upgrading their device in the first place. No. They really can't afford to go to a model where they recoup the price on iTunes sales. Too much would have to change and people would rebel.

Exactly! And the explosives in a stinger are probably an order of magnitude more effective than that in your standard IED. Sure it won't drop an aircraft out of the sky without the fancy electronics package, but it could still ruin a Humvee's day. For that matter the rocket propellant would probably make a fairly effective pipe bomb. Two for one.

Look, the fundamental problem is that you'd still be giving them a stockpile of things that violently go boom. Okay, without the high tech guidance stuff it's not so useful for knocking down airplanes, but that missile can still be disassembled, a new detonator plugged in the the go-boom juice and the guts of a stinger missile will still very satisfactorily destroy a ground vehicle in much more spectacular fashion than your average IED.

Nah, the idea being that that prevents Iran from establishing a Muslim Caliphate, uniting the Muslim world against the U.S. and moving from there to dominate the world. The joke is on us though, the Muslim Caliphate will be centered in Turkey.

Umm....it's about ability to consent. To the best of our knowledge and ability, people who are protected under such laws lack sufficient faculties to grant consent to the person having sex with them. Ergo, they were raped. It has nothing to do with "purifying" the gene pool, and everything to do with being as humane as possible to people who got a raw deal due to fate/circumstance/birth/whatever.

Count me as another vote for the tessellation from eldvojohn. Very artistic, but cool, and nerdy. Couldn't ask for more.

My company got access to Windows 8 two months ago (the RTM version that everyone else is getting tomorrow, not some preview - we're a software assurance customer) and I installed it on my laptop and a couple of HP Slate Tablets we had floating around.

I strongly dislike it on my laptop. It's jarring to be bounced back and forth from Metro to the Desktop as I do day-to-day tasks, and by the time I finally got it configured how I wanted it, it was basically Windows 7 minus Aero and Start Menu.

On the Slates it was marginally more functional. The on-screen keyboard is about a billion times better than Win7 for tablets, and the touch gestures make a *lot* more sense than they do with a mouse. However, the same jarring transitions are still there, and in all honesty, doing regular Windows stuff on a tablet is still just a pain in the ass. Just slightly less so with Win8. But I'm rather have an ultrabook or an HP Mini or similar for any "real" work in Windows.

That's *always* the case. It's the classic pigeon hole problem. In order to encode absolutely every possible string of bytes there must be some encodings which use at least that many bytes to do so. You see this readily with lossless image/audio compression algorithms. They make everything smaller in the average case (normal songs, spoken audio, landscape pics, family photos), but shove a randomly generated mess at them and they almost always produce a file larger than the original.

Look, as a sysadmin I can tell you that it isn't just "change" that makes me dislike Windows 8. Setting this thing up for a user's desktop is a grade-A class 1 pain in the ass. I finally got an image that at *least* keeps all the standard shortcuts and displays them in Metro across all profile, but if I install something else it doesn't show up at all until I get the user logged in and step them through how to sticky it in the Metro list. And the only way to do that for them is in the base image when you sysprep it.

Now, yes, people can figure out how to sticky their apps, but it's a retraining issue and it just flat out gets in the way of them doing their job. If they'd just kept the damn start menu I wouldn't be complaining (even if it needed a reg-hack to enable), but instead they're forcing this cruft down our throats, and as enterprise users we don't appreciate it.

For the home user it's actually pretty close to ideal. You can spend most of your time in "tablet mode" and sit their consuming content and writing the occasional document or Facebook update. You don't need anything remotely related to added complexity. Fine. And Microsoft's overarching goal of getting people used to the UI so they'll be more apt to buy a WinPhone? Sure, I get it. But alienating corporate customers in the process? That's just shooting yourself in the foot. At least the Enterprise Edition should have a more serious interface.

Ctrl-INS / Shift-DEL / Shift-INS *still work* (Windows 7) and I use them instead of the ctrl-c / ctrl-x /ctrl-v combos because when I try to use the ctrl combos I hit ctrl-c instead of ctrl-v and have to reacquire my text. The old school way is much easier to do without looking and less error prone (for me at least).

Now get off my lawn.

You generally make good points, but I wanted to address this one. Whenever I build a Windows XP image here at work, I always format the box with Win7 PE first, with an align=1024 on the partition to set it on a megabyte boundary. Conveniently, this fixes the boundary issue that one would typically experience with SSD's. You're right that WinXP is not natively aware of how to properly handle SSD's, but the fix is fairly trivial and, at least in the enterprise, something that any competent image builder should have fixed long ago.

Strictly speaking, we have that now. Sapphire glass is used in all kinds of things (including, but not limited to, the camera lens on the iPhone 5). True it's not really "glass" but calling it such makes it more understandable as to what it's used for. Interestingly, it's also used in bullet-proof armor (vehicles and people).

Welcome to the future!