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Windows 8: Hate It Already? Why Waiting for Windows 9 Won't Help. Conventional Windows wisdom seems to hold that every other version of Windows is terrible and needs to be fixed by whatever version comes after that. Does this mantra sound familiar? Windows XP, good. Windows Vista, bad. Windows 7, good. That's how it's supposed to go, right?

Given the drastic changes in Windows 8, it's no surprise that some users who hate it are already holding out hope for a better Windows 9. As evidence, I submit a sampling of comments from PCWorld readers: “What Windows 8 is, is just a media O.S... that's about it. I'm here to deliver the bad news: Windows 9 won't provide salvation, at least not if you're hoping for Microsoft to alter its current trajectory. Windows Needs Change Although Windows 8 has a fair share of perks for the traditional desktop, the operating system's featured attraction is its new touchscreen interface. Instead of the pop-up Start menu that's been around since Windows 95, there's a full-screen Start page with a grid of big, touchable app tiles. When it comes to government, California is stuck in the Industrial Age but Texas is in the Tech Age.

Fox News ran a piece recently about the 1957 test of a nuclear-tipped air-to-air missile. The rocket detonated two to three miles over the heads of a few volunteers, assembled for the purpose of showing a skeptical American public that such weapons, needed to hold the communist Soviet Union at bay, were safe to use above U.S. soil. That we had such weapons in our military inventory until 1988, but don’t today, speaks of the rapid pace of technological innovation and its unforeseen consequences. It also reveals a generation gap—tell a 25-year-old that the US deployed air-to-air tactical nuclear weapons in their lifetimes and they will likely stare at you with disbelief.

Shortly after I joined the US Army in 1983, I was trained on how to determine the size and distance of a detonating nuclear weapon and its “radiation downwind hazard.” The rise of the PC came before the rise of the Internet—at least the Internet we know today. Mining Engineering Online. Molycorp, Inc. announced the start-up of its new Project Phoenix heavy rare earth concentrate facilities at Mountain Pass, CA, which will produce heavy rare earth concentrate from freshly mined Mountain Pass ore that will then be processed into high-purity, custom-engineered heavy rare earth products in Molycorp’s globally integrated production facilities.

Additionally, Molycorp announced that its on-site combined heat and power (CHP) plant will begin feeding low-cost, high efficiency electrical power and steam to its Mountain Pass facilities. Molycorp's CHP plant is fueled by clean-burning natural gas fed to the facility by a recently completed natural gas lateral supply line that connects the facility to a nearby interstate natural gas pipeline operated by Kern River Gas Transmission Co. Molycorp said in a release. For Big Drug Companies, a Headache Looms. Zynga slapped with lawsuit, accused of insider trading - Ingame on NBCNews.com. After a miserable past week of bad news piling atop more bad news, Zynga -- the giant of Facebook gaming companies -- has been hit with a lawsuit. A New York law firm has accused the company of insider trading and filed suit against the maker of games such as "FarmVille," "CityVille," and "Mafia Wars.

" The lawsuit, filed in federal court by the firm Newman Ferrara, accuses Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and other top brass of violating federal securities laws. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of only one particular person -- shareholder Mark Destefano -- but names "all others similarly situated" which means it's headed toward becoming a class-action lawsuit. (You can read the lawsuit in full here.)

And more legal action may soon follow. That is, back in December 2011, Zynga went public, selling at $10 a share. However, a group of insiders -- Pincus and other executives -- got that restriction waived, which enabled them to sell stock in April at $12 a share. Stephen Lam It certainly looks bad. Goodbye Hotmail, Hello Outlook.com. 300 Black Youths Destroy Walmart in Jacksonville, Florida. Facebook triples its lobbying spending from last year. Facebook came under fire this spring for backing the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, a cybersecurity bill that passed the House in April.

The site was one of the first Silicon Valley-based companies to come out in support of the measure, and the move took many inside and outside of Washington by surprise. Privacy and civil liberties groups warned the bill would increase the flow of American's personal information to the military and National Security Agency. Google's lobbying spending was on par with other heavy hitters such as Verizon and Comcast, which both spent nearly $4 million in the second quarter. Like Facebook, Google has faced its own struggles in Washington over its privacy policies. Amazon and eBay, which are locked in a battle over online sales tax proposals in Congress, both spent money lobbying on the issue last quarter.

Microsoft spent just over $2 million during the second quarter, while IBM spent $1 million. Microsoft reports first loss as public company. LOS ANGELES (AP) — Microsoft posted its first quarterly loss in its 26 years as a public company on Thursday as it declared a struggling online ad business a bust and prepared for one of the biggest product updates in its history. The software company had warned two weeks ago that it would take a $6.2 billion charge in the April-June quarter because its 2007 purchase of online ad service aQuantive failed to help it compete with Google Inc. The amount reflected the bulk of the $6.3 billion acquisition cost. The online ad business remains just a tiny part of Microsoft — comprising just 4 percent of its annual revenue. Most of the company's sales come from its Office suite of productivity software, Windows operating system and, increasingly, computer servers.

Upbeat business software and server sales in the quarter helped offset a flat market for personal computers, which had put a damper on Windows sales. Revenue rose 4 percent to $18.06 billion. Google I/O 2012 Day 1 keynote (live blog) | Internet & Media. Tune in to CNET's live blog from the Google I/O keynote starting at 9:00 a.m. PT. SAN FRANCISCO--Google will be kicking off its annual developers conference here on Wednesday, and the company is expected to have lots of juicy news. The Google I/O conference offers third-party developers a chance to mix-and-mingle with Google engineers. In the past, the company has used the event to highlight and announce new products and initiatives. The company will host two keynote sessions on Wednesday and Thursday morning, where company execs are expected to talk about a new Google-branded tablet, Jelly Bean, the next iteration of the Google Android operating system, and hopefully lots of other interesting announcements.

CNET will be there to cover all the news, starting with a live blog of the opening keynote Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. See also: CNET's complete coverage of Google I/O. From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory. Even now, it’s still shocking how the remarkably low distribution costs of the web can change a founder’s fate overnight. Many startups are duds, and most grow at a clip that’s just not fast enough to justify an interesting valuation. But once in awhile, a company comes along and just nails it. The right timing. The right market. I met Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger before they were working together. Systrom, meanwhile, had just come off of a year at Nextstop, a travel-oriented startup that had sold to Facebook in a talent acquisition. In early 2010, Systrom was messing around with a few ideas. So Systrom, ever the connoisseur of fine whiskeys, tested an app called Burbn.

Users weren’t exactly checking in all the time on Burbn. It was around this time that Krieger, who was ready for change after a year and a half at Meebo, came on board. They scrapped Burbn and started over. It took several months of prototyping and experimentation.

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Apple moves to block Samsung Galaxy III from sale in US. Apple asks judge for ban on Galaxy S III before US launch.