Is that the mantra? Is there some reason we shouldnt be going after someone committing this kind of blackmail: "Give us money or we put your private info (potentially including SSN) out for the world to see?" Wow, what heroes.
The SSN was never intended to be a secret number, just unique.
As for tax returns, many countries see this as public information
The United States isn't "many countries". It's the US. How much money someone makes or how much they paid in taxes is none of your business here. Speculate all you like, but unless the IRS starts asking questions, Romney's tax returns are his business and his business alone. If you don't like that, tough, because the majority of Americans like it that way and don't want to give some Internet asshat access to their tax info.
Computer programming is not such a fundamental area of study that it deserves to be elevated to the level of "math", "reading" and "writing". To a large extent this is a zero sum game. To teach programming in primary school necessarily crowds out something else. History? Foreign language? Music? Some subject other than "computer programming" is getting the shaft.
Hopefully it's religion.
In what US public school is "religion" taught? I don't know about your country (Ireland?, judging from your nick), but in the US, courts have pretty much chased any religious studies whatsoever from public schools. Instead, we spend half our time doing essential courses badly (English, Math, etc), and fill the rest of the time with feel-good nonsense fad courses, that come and go according to fashion.
Here's my prediction: any requirement for a programming education at public schools will come at the expense of the "essentials", and the fluff will remain. Which means that in all likelihood, "programming" will be as bad as many other subjects.
Then the Republicans will do an about-face and claim that Obama isn't supporting private space initiatives and they will claim to double their support for Space-X and whatnot.
Republicanism is party before country and "whatever it is, I'm against it."
Too bad he's never going to do that, eh? He's going to continue to spew platitudes about space. And nothing else. He's going to be "for it", without spending on it. Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about space, NASA or private sector either. Second, aren't Democrats always bitching about "investment" in the government? So backing NASA spending doesn't prove their patriotism, but, say, spending on light rail would?
Or, are you just another hypocrite on the Internet that bitches about how the other side is evil?
Perhaps Linux needs a minimalist leader. Throw everything out. Then step by step, bring back features and see what works, and what doesn't. In the process make sure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
Linux on the desktop hasn't happened for one reason, and one reason only: Linux is fractured. There are several desktops, window managers, package systems, even kernels. This isn't the case with OS X or Windows, where you have a single API and standard to develop for. No commercial developer is going to write software for a chameleon operating system with a half dozen desktop packages.The same thing that caused Linux to take off with hobbyists and adapt so well to the server room is the same thing that will prevent it from ever being a major desktop OS: choice to the extent of almost chaotic proportions. Apple in particular succeeded because they in fact limited choices in some spheres for the sake of consistency and unity. And it worked for them.
Everytime the Unix community... Linux included... has tried to bring things together into a single standard of some kind, the result has either been something that looks like it was put together by committee *cough*CDE*cough* or lots of end users went "Nope, I'm gonna fork it", and produced so many variants that one standard never catches on.
There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" because there will never be a single Linux.
This is silly and absolute Malthusian nonsense. It's not how many kids a country or region has, but how well they support themselves and use their resources and grow their economies. Some parts of Africa are doing quite well, thanks, feeding growing populations as they learn modern agricultural techniques and develop markets for foodstuffs that increase production and efficiency and lower costs. The United States went from a population of around 15 million to over 300 million in just over two hundred years. And even our poor people are fat. More people does not necessarily equal starvation. In free economies, it's actually the opposite case. Instead of handing out condoms, you'd be better off teaching modern agriculture and encouraging development. Economies and wealth (and food production is very much a part of wealth) are not a zero sum game.
That is what is so terrifying about the police having DNA samples on hand apriori: NO MORE UNSOLVED CASES!! Contaminate the evidence with someone's DNA you already have on hand (if you don't like them for racial, political, or personal reasons, that's just gravy), and bingo! Instant conviction by idiot juries who can't spell GUILTY without using the letters D, N, and A.
Also, isn't casting doubt on DNA based evidence also a double edged sword? You've got groups like the Innocence Project that rely almost entirely on DNA as a means of proving their client's innocence. If you can cast doubt on DNA evidence when trying to convict someone, you can also cast doubt on that evidence when trying to prove someone innocent.
Well, in a way, yes. Because Steve Jobs, after years of experience with the first Mac and at NeXT, decided that maybe Big Brother existed for a good reason, was actually necessary, and that he was doing the world a favor by being a better Big Brother, and that the world would love him for it. And you know what? After billions in sales and millions of devices sold to adoring fans... the vast majority of which had never purchased an Apple product in the pre-comeback era... the world proved him right.
Also stay away from people who have all the certifications.
I wouldn't say that. What I would say is "stay away from people who have certs but not much in the way of real experience". Really, it's not that hard. Ask for references and work history. Check on those references, and call former employers. Ask "does he know his stuff?" If he does, and has a good work history that satisfies you, hire him. Anything else is minor. Despite all the mockery here at Slashdot, most Windows admins aren't dummies, and do a good job and know their stuff, and they know stuff beyond Windows. If they're good, they'll learn everything they need to know about a mixed shop soon enough.
Even paying for first class is nothing like that today.
The fact is, when something becomes cheap and common, then it loses its glamour.Flying was glamorous preciesely because only a few could do it. Space tourism is much the same way right now. If it ever becomes common and affordable, in 100 years you'll read stories on Slashdot's MegaNet page about how much the Space Travel Security Agency sucks, and how they groped grandma and held up her sub-orbital flight to Europe, and what a ripoff it is to charge for blankets and Tang on a 15 minute flight.
Obama's place of birth is an actual Constitutional issue. Ryan's cliques in high school are not.
It is a Constitutional issue only because he is black. Nobody gave a shit that McCain was born on a military base in Panama or that Romney's father was born in Mexico when he tried to run for President. But Obama had to have been ineligible. It is a double-standard and it is racism. And it is also factually incorrect. So fuck you for bringing it up again.
American military bases are considered sovereign US territory for reasons of birth, just like the Navy's ships and American embassies. Anyone born there is considered to have legally been born on US soil. This isn't new or noteworthy, this is longstanding United States law. Also, a candidate's parent's birthplace has zero consequence in the Constitution. And you'd know that if you'd bothered to take 30 seconds to Google an answer instead of sounding like a fool.
That wasn't true of the US from WWII to about 1960. Truman and Eisenhower were modest people. Truman ran a hat store. Eisenhower was a night supervisor at a creamery before he got into West Point. That period was probably the most successful in American history.
It's easy to be successful when the rest of the world is still digging out of the rubble, and you live in the only place that went both untouched by the war on your mainland, and also had the last major center of industrial production intact on a large scale. You're giving people credit for all the wrong reasons here.
You've got it all wrong. People are actually inherently good, and their altruistic motives are mostly hardwired.
And just what proof of this do you present? Because I present, for my case of man being inherently flawed and evil unless taught not to be and enforced with laws and social codes, the entire history of the human race. You're essentially using Rousseau's "noble savage" argument, that man, until corrupted by civilization, is inherently good. But it fell out of favor because common sense triumphed, and we re-discovered that, shockingly, savages tend to be... savage.
This seems to be the political equivalent of Microsoft's forthcoming release of Windows Vista 2.0... Pretty, but dysfunctional... sleek but pointless, rich but morally and ethically bankrupt.
Dysfunctional? Are you that much of a hypocrite?
Ryan worked for a long time on a budget, with a real plan, with actual numbers that he'll argue and defend. He has ideas. His opponents on the other side of the aisle... they don't even have the courage to produce an actual budget. How long as Congress gone without a budget? How long has the country been running on "continuing resolutions"? Four years now. Where's your criticism of that. I don't want to hear about "morally and ethically bankrupt" from such people. It's like getting a lecture on ethics from a mugger.
Bush Junior inherited a budget surplus from Clinton's term.
Dubya inherited a phantom surplus built on a tech bubble that went bye-bye, all on its own. The "surplus" was always smoke and mirrors... fake money created by a fake boom built on fake promises. Remember how much the stock for VA Linux... which owned Slashdot... went for? Remember how it dropped like a rock when investors realized there were no profits to be had? Yeah, that's your "surplus" in a nutshell. The "surplus" went away for the same reason that instant dot com millionaires were pouring lattes at Starbucks for a living shortly afterward; there was no "there" there.
A delayed reaction to the financial meltdown which, again, happened on his predecessor's watch.
But don't let facts get in your way.
Blaming it all on Bush certainly isn't letting "facts get in the way". It's downright dishonest. At what point, pray tell, does Barrack Obama ever become responsible for his own actions, ideas, and proposals?
Nope, he rejects her because she was an atheist. He's always rejected her, didn't you know? All those words of praise in the past never happened, we all imagined it! We've always been at war with EastAsia!!
This is the kind of dishonest argument we see on Slashdot all too much. One can agree with some of a person's positions and not all of them. Thinking that Atlas Shrugs is an important book doesn't necessarily imply that you agree with Ayn Rand on every single thing she believes. I'm fond of saying that Rand got many things right for the wrong reasons. I certainly don't agree with her on her anti-religious beliefs, and I have some serious misgivings with Objectivism. But that doesn't change the fact that I think she made a lot of important arguments in her books. You seem to be arguing, however, that to endorse one idea is to be forced to endorse all the ideas of the writer. This simply isn't true. Do YOU endorse every single idea of the writers that you read? No? Then why do you expect others to do so?
No company in their right mind is going to adopt Windows 8 for their business workstations if Microsoft forces the Metro interface on everyone.
If businesses were given a choice, they'd have surely vetoed the ribbon interface in Office 2007. But they weren't given a choice. They were told "tough, the ribbon stays". And businesses bought Office anyway.
Conclusion: when they bitch about Metro, Microsoft will say "tough, Metro stays", and sooner or later, businesses will adapt to Metro anyway. Microsoft always wins with these things.
Yes, and while this forced Microsoft to extend XP's life... we've been using it for ten years now...ultimatey, Vista "won". Because 7 is basically just an improved Vista (especially in the 32 bit case). All the people that hated Aero Glass? Tough. 7 kept it.
If there's a lesson here, it's that Microsoft knows that they can wait out any public outrage over Metro. If they insist on customers using it anyway, then customers, sooner or later, will cave and do so. If history is any guide, Windows 9 will still have a Metro interface, after a few years of 8, people will have gotten used to it. Those that refuse to buy 8 because of Metro will surely cave in the future when their hardware gets old, and they need new PC's. They'll almost surely buy 9 with Metro.
I remember when innovation meant jumping from 16 colors to 4000 colors, from a sound chip that went "beeeeep" to near-CD level music, from single task word processing to multitasking dozens of programs at the same time. While in a live chat online. With a mouse.
Now "innovation" is just changing the screen from a desktop with icons to a desktop with brightly-colored icons. (Man. Computers have become so boring.);-)
Whether or not Microsoft is right or wrong on the virtues of Metro, changing a UI can be a huge innovation if done right. The Mac's whole existence, it's Raison d'Etre was the fact that it's interface was human-friendly compared to the "un-natural" command line. Color had nothing do with it, either. Recall that the first Macs were black and white screened machines.
That is not true. Every version of Mac OS X for 10 years now was faster on the same hardware than its predecessor. Windows 8 is not even the first Windows to do that — Windows 7 shrank to match the tiny, underpowered machines that Windows ships on today now that the Mac has the whole high-end.
OS X's first four iterations were faster because of improvements in the code. That ended with Leopard, which ran like a dog on older PPC hardware. And from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, OSX hasn't really been increasingly faster. Apple has been cutting code from the last three releases, and that speeds things up in some cases, but that's not because the code is improving, but because Apple has stopped supporting legacy hardware, as well as adopting a 64 bit only approach. If your Mac is five years old (or older), you're pretty much out of luck if you want to run Mountain Lion. It's not that 10.8 is slow on those machines, its that Apple prevents you from even trying to install on them. Maintaining speed and stability is easy if you force customers to use only recent hardware from a very narrow list. Windows 8, on the other hand, will run on a 10+ year old P4 computer as long as the graphics card meets the minimum requirements (and runs surprisingly well). I'm a Mac user, but when making arguments comparing Windows to OS X, be honest and include the point that Microsoft is much more supportive of a much wider range of hardware. The parent poster was wrong about 8 being "one of the first", but it's certainly one of the first Microsoft OS's to be faster than a previous version on similar hardware. As far as 7 goes, only the 32 bit version was faster than Vista's 32 version, but that's largely because Vista 32 was an unholy mess. Vista 64 performed well out of the gate, and 7's 64 bit version wasn't really an improvement, performance-wise.
The majority of Americans support the provisions, as long as they don't know it's actually Obamacare. Just like Windows Vista I mean "Mojave"...
The majority support some provisions, not all of them. It's not just a matter of marketing and branding. That same majority is also very much opposed to some other provisions in it.
With a popularity poll. A significant portion of that 54% of Americans, when read the Bill of Rights, believe you are describing an antithetical, Socialist manifesto.
I very much doubt that. Now, I'm pretty sure that you could shape your questions in a manner that would twist the bill of rights into something like a Marxist screed... polling organizations are rather infamous for "shaping" questions... but if you just read the bill straight out to people, there's no way they're going to see an "antithetical, Socialist manifesto" unless they themselves are deluded. The ten amendments have clear statements about very un-socialist things... religious rights, rights to have weapons, and property rights. So you're either exaggerating or seeing things skewed through your own lens. Considering that your sig line is "The invisible hand of the Market is a pickpocket", I'd bet you're among the later that tends to see things from a red perspective anyway (red in the traditional political sense, not in the recent American red-state, blue state sense).
Slashdot Mirror
Is that the mantra? Is there some reason we shouldnt be going after someone committing this kind of blackmail: "Give us money or we put your private info (potentially including SSN) out for the world to see?" Wow, what heroes.
The SSN was never intended to be a secret number, just unique.
As for tax returns, many countries see this as public information
The United States isn't "many countries". It's the US. How much money someone makes or how much they paid in taxes is none of your business here. Speculate all you like, but unless the IRS starts asking questions, Romney's tax returns are his business and his business alone. If you don't like that, tough, because the majority of Americans like it that way and don't want to give some Internet asshat access to their tax info.
Computer programming is not such a fundamental area of study that it deserves to be elevated to the level of "math", "reading" and "writing". To a large extent this is a zero sum game. To teach programming in primary school necessarily crowds out something else. History? Foreign language? Music? Some subject other than "computer programming" is getting the shaft.
Hopefully it's religion.
In what US public school is "religion" taught? I don't know about your country (Ireland?, judging from your nick), but in the US, courts have pretty much chased any religious studies whatsoever from public schools. Instead, we spend half our time doing essential courses badly (English, Math, etc), and fill the rest of the time with feel-good nonsense fad courses, that come and go according to fashion.
Here's my prediction: any requirement for a programming education at public schools will come at the expense of the "essentials", and the fluff will remain. Which means that in all likelihood, "programming" will be as bad as many other subjects.
...come out and endorse doubling NASA's budget.
Then the Republicans will do an about-face and claim that Obama isn't supporting private space initiatives and they will claim to double their support for Space-X and whatnot.
Republicanism is party before country and "whatever it is, I'm against it."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtMV44yoXZ0
--
BMO
Too bad he's never going to do that, eh? He's going to continue to spew platitudes about space. And nothing else. He's going to be "for it", without spending on it. Obama doesn't give a rat's ass about space, NASA or private sector either. Second, aren't Democrats always bitching about "investment" in the government? So backing NASA spending doesn't prove their patriotism, but, say, spending on light rail would?
Or, are you just another hypocrite on the Internet that bitches about how the other side is evil?
Perhaps Linux needs a minimalist leader. Throw everything out. Then step by step, bring back features and see what works, and what doesn't. In the process make sure that everything has a consistent look and feel.
Linux on the desktop hasn't happened for one reason, and one reason only: Linux is fractured. There are several desktops, window managers, package systems, even kernels. This isn't the case with OS X or Windows, where you have a single API and standard to develop for. No commercial developer is going to write software for a chameleon operating system with a half dozen desktop packages.The same thing that caused Linux to take off with hobbyists and adapt so well to the server room is the same thing that will prevent it from ever being a major desktop OS: choice to the extent of almost chaotic proportions. Apple in particular succeeded because they in fact limited choices in some spheres for the sake of consistency and unity. And it worked for them.
Everytime the Unix community... Linux included... has tried to bring things together into a single standard of some kind, the result has either been something that looks like it was put together by committee *cough*CDE*cough* or lots of end users went "Nope, I'm gonna fork it", and produced so many variants that one standard never catches on.
There will never be a "Year of the Linux Desktop" because there will never be a single Linux.
... they'll all die of starvation anyway.
This is silly and absolute Malthusian nonsense. It's not how many kids a country or region has, but how well they support themselves and use their resources and grow their economies. Some parts of Africa are doing quite well, thanks, feeding growing populations as they learn modern agricultural techniques and develop markets for foodstuffs that increase production and efficiency and lower costs. The United States went from a population of around 15 million to over 300 million in just over two hundred years. And even our poor people are fat. More people does not necessarily equal starvation. In free economies, it's actually the opposite case. Instead of handing out condoms, you'd be better off teaching modern agriculture and encouraging development. Economies and wealth (and food production is very much a part of wealth) are not a zero sum game.
That is what is so terrifying about the police having DNA samples on hand apriori: NO MORE UNSOLVED CASES!! Contaminate the evidence with someone's DNA you already have on hand (if you don't like them for racial, political, or personal reasons, that's just gravy), and bingo! Instant conviction by idiot juries who can't spell GUILTY without using the letters D, N, and A.
Also, isn't casting doubt on DNA based evidence also a double edged sword? You've got groups like the Innocence Project that rely almost entirely on DNA as a means of proving their client's innocence. If you can cast doubt on DNA evidence when trying to convict someone, you can also cast doubt on that evidence when trying to prove someone innocent.
Apple has just become Big Brother in their 1984 Superbowl Ad
. The irony.
Well, in a way, yes. Because Steve Jobs, after years of experience with the first Mac and at NeXT, decided that maybe Big Brother existed for a good reason, was actually necessary, and that he was doing the world a favor by being a better Big Brother, and that the world would love him for it. And you know what? After billions in sales and millions of devices sold to adoring fans... the vast majority of which had never purchased an Apple product in the pre-comeback era... the world proved him right.
^This
Also stay away from people who have all the certifications.
I wouldn't say that. What I would say is "stay away from people who have certs but not much in the way of real experience". Really, it's not that hard. Ask for references and work history. Check on those references, and call former employers. Ask "does he know his stuff?" If he does, and has a good work history that satisfies you, hire him. Anything else is minor. Despite all the mockery here at Slashdot, most Windows admins aren't dummies, and do a good job and know their stuff, and they know stuff beyond Windows. If they're good, they'll learn everything they need to know about a mixed shop soon enough.
Just buy a ticket for business class.
This is basically what it comes down to. If you don't wanted to be treated like freight, then don't pay freight prices. All that glamorous air travel of the past? Hey, I romanticize it too... especially the flying boats that worked Pacific routes. But when the article says that it was expensive, I dont' think you get the picture of just HOW expensive it was: "In 1939, a one-way ticket from San Francisco to Honolulu cost $278, and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong cost $1,368. In 2010 dollars, these were $4,317 and $11,803.
Even paying for first class is nothing like that today.
The fact is, when something becomes cheap and common, then it loses its glamour.Flying was glamorous preciesely because only a few could do it. Space tourism is much the same way right now. If it ever becomes common and affordable, in 100 years you'll read stories on Slashdot's MegaNet page about how much the Space Travel Security Agency sucks, and how they groped grandma and held up her sub-orbital flight to Europe, and what a ripoff it is to charge for blankets and Tang on a 15 minute flight.
Obama's place of birth is an actual Constitutional issue. Ryan's cliques in high school are not.
It is a Constitutional issue only because he is black. Nobody gave a shit that McCain was born on a military base in Panama or that Romney's father was born in Mexico when he tried to run for President. But Obama had to have been ineligible. It is a double-standard and it is racism. And it is also factually incorrect. So fuck you for bringing it up again.
American military bases are considered sovereign US territory for reasons of birth, just like the Navy's ships and American embassies. Anyone born there is considered to have legally been born on US soil. This isn't new or noteworthy, this is longstanding United States law. Also, a candidate's parent's birthplace has zero consequence in the Constitution. And you'd know that if you'd bothered to take 30 seconds to Google an answer instead of sounding like a fool.
That wasn't true of the US from WWII to about 1960. Truman and Eisenhower were modest people. Truman ran a hat store. Eisenhower was a night supervisor at a creamery before he got into West Point. That period was probably the most successful in American history.
It's easy to be successful when the rest of the world is still digging out of the rubble, and you live in the only place that went both untouched by the war on your mainland, and also had the last major center of industrial production intact on a large scale. You're giving people credit for all the wrong reasons here.
You've got it all wrong. People are actually inherently good, and their altruistic motives are mostly hardwired.
And just what proof of this do you present? Because I present, for my case of man being inherently flawed and evil unless taught not to be and enforced with laws and social codes, the entire history of the human race. You're essentially using Rousseau's "noble savage" argument, that man, until corrupted by civilization, is inherently good. But it fell out of favor because common sense triumphed, and we re-discovered that, shockingly, savages tend to be... savage.
This seems to be the political equivalent of Microsoft's forthcoming release of Windows Vista 2.0... Pretty, but dysfunctional... sleek but pointless, rich but morally and ethically bankrupt.
Dysfunctional? Are you that much of a hypocrite?
Ryan worked for a long time on a budget, with a real plan, with actual numbers that he'll argue and defend. He has ideas. His opponents on the other side of the aisle... they don't even have the courage to produce an actual budget. How long as Congress gone without a budget? How long has the country been running on "continuing resolutions"? Four years now. Where's your criticism of that. I don't want to hear about "morally and ethically bankrupt" from such people. It's like getting a lecture on ethics from a mugger.
Further to his right, basically, you have the fascists/ultra-nationalists. Which is where the GOP is.
You had some decent analysis until you got to that part. And then you just blew your credibility right out of the water.
I fine this particularly lulzy. I don't think he could have picked a less likable running mate.
Plenty of your "fellow Wisconsinites" keep sending him back to office. So maybe... just maybe... the "lulzy" is just with you.
Bush Junior inherited a budget surplus from Clinton's term.
Dubya inherited a phantom surplus built on a tech bubble that went bye-bye, all on its own. The "surplus" was always smoke and mirrors... fake money created by a fake boom built on fake promises. Remember how much the stock for VA Linux... which owned Slashdot... went for? Remember how it dropped like a rock when investors realized there were no profits to be had? Yeah, that's your "surplus" in a nutshell. The "surplus" went away for the same reason that instant dot com millionaires were pouring lattes at Starbucks for a living shortly afterward; there was no "there" there.
A delayed reaction to the financial meltdown which, again, happened on his predecessor's watch.
But don't let facts get in your way.
Blaming it all on Bush certainly isn't letting "facts get in the way". It's downright dishonest. At what point, pray tell, does Barrack Obama ever become responsible for his own actions, ideas, and proposals?
Nope, he rejects her because she was an atheist. He's always rejected her, didn't you know? All those words of praise in the past never happened, we all imagined it! We've always been at war with EastAsia!!
This is the kind of dishonest argument we see on Slashdot all too much. One can agree with some of a person's positions and not all of them. Thinking that Atlas Shrugs is an important book doesn't necessarily imply that you agree with Ayn Rand on every single thing she believes. I'm fond of saying that Rand got many things right for the wrong reasons. I certainly don't agree with her on her anti-religious beliefs, and I have some serious misgivings with Objectivism. But that doesn't change the fact that I think she made a lot of important arguments in her books. You seem to be arguing, however, that to endorse one idea is to be forced to endorse all the ideas of the writer. This simply isn't true. Do YOU endorse every single idea of the writers that you read? No? Then why do you expect others to do so?
As always, we support the provisions that give us stuff, but dont support the provisions that pay for it.
That could describe the American electorate in a nutshell, yes. I want X or Y, but make that other guy pay for it.
No company in their right mind is going to adopt Windows 8 for their business workstations if Microsoft forces the Metro interface on everyone.
If businesses were given a choice, they'd have surely vetoed the ribbon interface in Office 2007. But they weren't given a choice. They were told "tough, the ribbon stays". And businesses bought Office anyway.
Conclusion: when they bitch about Metro, Microsoft will say "tough, Metro stays", and sooner or later, businesses will adapt to Metro anyway. Microsoft always wins with these things.
Don't buy it.
Deja Vista
Yes, and while this forced Microsoft to extend XP's life... we've been using it for ten years now...ultimatey, Vista "won". Because 7 is basically just an improved Vista (especially in the 32 bit case). All the people that hated Aero Glass? Tough. 7 kept it.
If there's a lesson here, it's that Microsoft knows that they can wait out any public outrage over Metro. If they insist on customers using it anyway, then customers, sooner or later, will cave and do so. If history is any guide, Windows 9 will still have a Metro interface, after a few years of 8, people will have gotten used to it. Those that refuse to buy 8 because of Metro will surely cave in the future when their hardware gets old, and they need new PC's. They'll almost surely buy 9 with Metro.
I remember when innovation meant jumping from 16 colors to 4000 colors, from a sound chip that went "beeeeep" to near-CD level music, from single task word processing to multitasking dozens of programs at the same time. While in a live chat online. With a mouse.
Now "innovation" is just changing the screen from a desktop with icons to a desktop with brightly-colored icons. (Man. Computers have become so boring.) ;-)
Whether or not Microsoft is right or wrong on the virtues of Metro, changing a UI can be a huge innovation if done right. The Mac's whole existence, it's Raison d'Etre was the fact that it's interface was human-friendly compared to the "un-natural" command line. Color had nothing do with it, either. Recall that the first Macs were black and white screened machines.
That is not true. Every version of Mac OS X for 10 years now was faster on the same hardware than its predecessor. Windows 8 is not even the first Windows to do that — Windows 7 shrank to match the tiny, underpowered machines that Windows ships on today now that the Mac has the whole high-end.
OS X's first four iterations were faster because of improvements in the code. That ended with Leopard, which ran like a dog on older PPC hardware. And from Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion, OSX hasn't really been increasingly faster. Apple has been cutting code from the last three releases, and that speeds things up in some cases, but that's not because the code is improving, but because Apple has stopped supporting legacy hardware, as well as adopting a 64 bit only approach. If your Mac is five years old (or older), you're pretty much out of luck if you want to run Mountain Lion. It's not that 10.8 is slow on those machines, its that Apple prevents you from even trying to install on them. Maintaining speed and stability is easy if you force customers to use only recent hardware from a very narrow list. Windows 8, on the other hand, will run on a 10+ year old P4 computer as long as the graphics card meets the minimum requirements (and runs surprisingly well). I'm a Mac user, but when making arguments comparing Windows to OS X, be honest and include the point that Microsoft is much more supportive of a much wider range of hardware. The parent poster was wrong about 8 being "one of the first", but it's certainly one of the first Microsoft OS's to be faster than a previous version on similar hardware. As far as 7 goes, only the 32 bit version was faster than Vista's 32 version, but that's largely because Vista 32 was an unholy mess. Vista 64 performed well out of the gate, and 7's 64 bit version wasn't really an improvement, performance-wise.
The majority of Americans support the provisions, as long as they don't know it's actually Obamacare.
Just like Windows Vista I mean "Mojave"...
The majority support some provisions, not all of them. It's not just a matter of marketing and branding. That same majority is also very much opposed to some other provisions in it.
With a popularity poll. A significant portion of that 54% of Americans, when read the Bill of Rights, believe you are describing an antithetical, Socialist manifesto.
I very much doubt that. Now, I'm pretty sure that you could shape your questions in a manner that would twist the bill of rights into something like a Marxist screed... polling organizations are rather infamous for "shaping" questions... but if you just read the bill straight out to people, there's no way they're going to see an "antithetical, Socialist manifesto" unless they themselves are deluded. The ten amendments have clear statements about very un-socialist things... religious rights, rights to have weapons, and property rights. So you're either exaggerating or seeing things skewed through your own lens. Considering that your sig line is "The invisible hand of the Market is a pickpocket", I'd bet you're among the later that tends to see things from a red perspective anyway (red in the traditional political sense, not in the recent American red-state, blue state sense).