Once you've completely misidentified the problem, you'll never find the solution. But I'm sure it makes it a lot easier to dismiss criticism if you can pretend it comes from somewhere unreasonable.

The fact of the matter is, people love change... iff it's change with significant benefits. People like changes for the better. I've heard "I wish this worked that way" a hundred times, and people are ecstatic when you come back and give them an update that makes it work the way they said. People love change if it's a genuine improvement. People only hate change when they can't see any point to it. They may not be formal about it, but everyone runs a bit of a cost/benefit analysis in their minds, and when there's an obvious cost for no significant benefit, or to fix "problems" that they never saw as a problem to begin with, they react negatively, because that's the logical response to a change of that nature.

Irrelevant question. The important question is, "why is that even necessary?" It might have a good answer, but if you can't make that answer clear to people, expect them to react negatively when you ask them to do what they see as unnecessary things for little apparent benefit.

...and what PC gamers want is a great PC game, not a crappy console port. It's somehow comforting to know that DirectX is only an advantage for people developing games I have no interest in playing.

Bingo. Windows 8 does not belong on a desktop computer. Couldn't agree more. But, you already highlighted the problem...

...which is utterly idiotic.

I want my desktop OS to be the best desktop OS it can be, and I want my tablet OS to be the best tablet OS it can be. I don't want to settle for an ill-conceived UI which will necessarily sacrifice optimal performance in both areas by trying to find some middle ground between the two, rather than two UIs that do their respective jobs well.

I don't expect the controls to be identical between a Honda and a Cesna... what madness possesses some people to strive for a foolish consistency?

Well, they're obviously envisioning a future in which space is populated by humans. Unlike Canada...

Ah, the old "just pay the bribe, it's easier that way and really isn't that expensive" mentality...

Nope. Why would I, when nothing was said or implied that this functionality was being put in the device driver? My last AMD card said it came with some game software on the box, and I did not, upon reading that, think "games do not belong in a device driver" either. I'm quite comfortable with the notion that both nVidia and AMD can bundle software other than device drivers with their cards, and do not assume "software" necessarily means "device driver".

Probably doesn't help. My problems with AMD drivers had nothing to do with them not being optimized for x86, and everything to do with an engineering attitude that said "yeah we broke that OpenGL function with the latest driver release, but it's deprecated so games shouldn't be calling it anymore anyway so we're not going to fix it". Having to get their drivers working in the comparatively easy console market (where the environment is much more uniform and controlled) is not going to improve their inability to cope with the complexities of the diverse PC environment. They'll still be more likely to go bonkers when confronted with old or obscure titles, and still act like it's not their problem as long as the modern major titles run fine...

No. That would be COBOL running on machine code. By the time it's running, compile time (the only time C was involved in the process) is past...

Neither action is responsible, but one is less foolish, at least from the perspective of national self-interest. The one virtue most (yes, not all, but most) mass murdering dictators have is that they tend to leave people on the other side of the planet alone.

What a remarkably foolish thing to believe. Listening to two different liars does not get you closer to the truth. The odds that the truth is somewhere on a line between their lies are extremely remote. Both points and all points in-between are probably far away from anything resembling truth. If someone tells you a man is a plucked chicken, and other says a man is a garden slug, constructing a chimera from them to try to create a real man doesn't get you something any more man-like.

s/change/chance/
(Silly mistake -- "change" we don't receive in.)

To be fair, those of us still calling him a hero aren't in fear of our lives. We simply have zero change of being published or heard in any major media. We don't have death squads in the US because we don't need them. Our methods of censorship are so effective, we have nothing to fear from the dissidents. We happy to let them live and be ignored.

There are no "good guys". Well, actually, there are "good guys", but none of them get elected, or manage to climb to power in places where they use other means of gaining power.

Expect more of this. When the nature of an industry means it doesn't really depend on local geography, resources, or much in the way of population, so you can really locate it anywhere you can get power and a data trunk... suddenly some otherwise undistinguished location in the middle of nowhere becomes a perfect location.

That would be true if they didn't have other important non-fuel uses, and if using them has no environmental impact. Alas, neither of these things are true.

Not if better alternatives become more widespread. I don't know about India, but the Chinese are starting to scream about environmental issues loud enough that even a totalitarian government can't ignore it.