Actually, about 65% of what US consumers buy is made in the US. It is a myth that nothing is made here. It's mostly the clothing and consumer electronics and other cheap plastic shit which are so completely outsourced.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/20/business/worldbusiness/20iht-wbmake.1.20332814.html
"Thirty years ago, U.S. producers made 80 percent of what the country consumed, according to the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, an industry trade group. Now it is about 65 percent."

I don't have any further knowledge of the Metro interface, but I would have to assume that to be of much use or to make it look decent, you'd have to use Windows-specific hooks in their implementation of HTML/CSS and Javascript.

The same fine-grained control is also available on facebook. It is simply not as well exposed as with Google+.

If you wanna see a real arcade museum, go to Musee Mecanique in San Francisco. it's got a lot of great old mechanical arcade games from the early 20th century. They're all still playable and mostly functional, and they've modded the operation mechanisms with modern quarter slots like you'd see in a modern arcade game. They also have a few of the more classic digitial arcade games scattered throughout. Truly a magnificent place!

I've personally helped someone upgrade their ubuntu version on the same computer from version 5.04 to version 9.10, and each version in between, and ended up with a stable system. So it's certainly possible to do so, even if on some hardware it does not work out that way.

Open Office(and I assume LibreOffice) have offered a Mac native version for some time. For instance:
http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html?download=mirrorbrain&files/stable/3.3.0/OOo_3.3.0_MacOS_x86_install_en-US.dmg

So as far as I know, NeoOffice is a bit obsolete at this point, if its only goal is to provide a Mac-native version of OOo.

I'm pretty sure you mean the intersection, not the union. Your notion of union is actually more the political one than the set theory one.

I think it's just as likely that because Noor hosts the Egyptian stock exchange and several large companies, and otherwise serves a relatively small percentage of Egypt's internet connections, the government actually *wanted* to leave them on for as long as possible. Staying in the good graces of the business and financial community in the country and the world is an important part of staying in power, so it's no wonder they would hesitate to disconnect the ISP serving much of the business community through the stock exchange and such.

Now the government is in panic mode, so they're pulling out all the stops, including shutting down a nerve center of their economy.

I hate when people say they disagree just to proceed to lay out some unrelated bit of knowledge they have floating around in their head, for their own gratification...

Please realize that the fact of the Persians being the most advanced civilization before the Arabs/Muslims is in fact orthogonal to the Muslims being the most advanced later on. The downfall of the Persian empire may have enabled it somewhat, but in no way can you disagree that there was a period of superiority by the Arab Muslim civilization, nor does the fact of Arab Muslims' conquest of the Persian empire in any way diminish the Arab empire's superiority in science and engineering later on.

The reality is that the US prison system is formed around the principle of punishment. If threat isolation was the primary motivation, our prison system would look much different than it does.

The system we have is descended from the mode of Christian thought that when a sin(crime) is committed, penance.is needed in order to make the person right with God. So, the prison system is set up as a kind of forced penance through societal punishment, This is why we still have the death penalty, too, while most other developed countries do not.

Since the courts decide what is constitutional, it seems we would have a problem if the federal courts are handing out these orders.

Judging Amtrak by its balance sheet is not very useful unless you have an agenda of not promoting transportation by train in this country(in favor of automobiles and airplanes, for example).

In fact, if you believe that travel by train is useful and efficient for society, then Amtrak should be considered public transportation that needs to be subsidized by the government. If its balance sheet isn't looking good, then it needs more incentivization and subsidy from the federal and state governments. Both automobile and airplane travel are subsidized much more heavily than Amtrak, and I would make the argument that train travel has been neglected here, especially compared with most every other developed nation.

For example, I'm travelling with my wife 750 miles for Thanksgiving and evaluated the travel options. It turns out that renting a car and driving those 750 miles is by far the cheapest way to travel, and as a bonus we'll have a car to use at our destination. Why should this be? It's sort of backwards that obtaining use of a personal transportation vehicle should be so much cheaper than travelling in one vehicle with 100 other people and being dropped off at a station/airport.

To keep it on topic, the premise you're offering is different from the one I'm offering. You look at Amtrak as a failure because of non-solvency in its current state(conservative perspective). I look at Amtrak as the path to a more efficient national transportation system that should be funded as such because it burns less fossil fuel and uses less resources per person per mile(liberal perspective).

Given our different premises, both our logics work out, but our different premises lead us to different conclusions.