Except you are not simply talking about government. You are also talking about HOA's and similar communities.

For instance, one of my friend's bought a house in a community 15-20 years back. The CableTV companies didn't want anything to do with the community; so they ran their own lines to everyone's house. It was simply an HOA that did the work and the residents split the costs. Same thing has happened in many communities around the nation only to have the big players (especially the Cable companies) come in and shut it down.

So no, this doesn't necessarily mean goverment run; but it does mean citizen run and organized in some manner - with or without help from their municipal government.

Except in this case where the "voting with your wallet" essentially means sell your home (if you have one) and move elsewhere if you don't like the one or two options available to you; but the problem is no matter where you go you basically will only have those same kind of one or two options (with possibly the same or different entities being your options).

Typically the choice is: Cable Internet (Comcast, Cox, TWC/RoadRunner, Charter, WindStream, and may be a couple smaller players) and either DSL (AT&T, Verizon, and numerous resellers due to Title II status of copper lines over which DLS runs) or Fibre (AT&T uVerse, Verizon FiOS). And all the players mentioned try to keep community broadband services - which run either Ethernet, Fibre, or Coax to your residence themselves - from being an option by claiming "unfair competition" and "contracted rights".

So yes, in this case you actually have a bigger impact by voting in elections - municipal, county, state - than you will ever have with your wallet.

True; but so it being able to make the device do what you want. And Windows has too much overhead to really be useful on a Pi or even the Pi2.

Seriously, when is the last time you tried to run Visual Studios on a sub 1GHz system with only 1 GB or even 2 GB of RAM? VS is practically unusable in those environments; yet a compiler is a must for the audience that the Pi and Pi2 are targetted at.

So is device driver development and access to low level hardware in a timely manner. Yet the performance of Windows will not be sufficient for that.

Realize, this is Microsoft trying to soften the bleeding that is happening; but it will probably only show just how badly they meet end-user needs in the environments where the bleeding is occurring.

To Microsoft, it's not about choice. It's about survival and they don't have something that can compete.

True; however, OLPC never had as big an audience as Rasberry Pi has; so the momentum will likely continue with Windows being an "also ran" that was "late to market" kind of thing.

Agreed. I'm on G+ daily, post occassionally (both public and privately), and almost never go on Facebook. G+ just developed better communities and people tend to use the communities instead of blasting everything out to everyone; perhaps because G+ has a higher technical userbase than others, but nonetheless it works well.

Though, thinking about it more, G+ by design is community oriented. Blasting out to the everyone doesn't really stuff very far; while sending it to one or more communities does - that is, unless you're a big celeb and have lots and lots of followers, but that's just not typical in G+.

One word: Liability.

Corporations would very much care because of liability concerns - both domestically to the US and foreign to other countries. It's already becoming enough of an issue that companies are taking to hosting data regionally instead of centrally just from a legal liability perspective.

For instance, suppose there was conversation going on regarding what to disclose to the US government over the operations of a foreign subsidiary between the execs and their lawyers? Regardless of the topic, matter-at-hand, or end result that is protected conversation regardless of medium, and the existence of the VPN would mean they expected it to be carried out in private.

And you can certainly bet the lawfirms will fight it too.

Java is a bad language to teach programming with. It's a good language to show off some theory with, but that's really about it.

It's also one of the reasons why Android doesn't have as good of performance as it could have.

A decade ago, I would have used JavaScript or VBScript to start teaching - in part because of Windows Scripting Host; but now, I'd use Python as an intro to get students going; then transition them to C and C++, Pascal/Delphi, and others.

The VB Compiler is most likely written in C, C++, or C#, and not VB. In part, because there are many things that one must actually drop to a lower level language like C/C++ to do in order to even implement some of the functionality of VB. So it's a mix - some portions are definitely written in VB, but the majority and certainly the core are not. This, of course, applies to VB and not BASIC in general since those lower levels would have been written in other languages (namely Assembly) and would have changed over time; where as VB came after the advent of C; even then its lower levels may still have been written in Assembly for some time due to performance needs.

Likewise, Python is written in a mixed-mode, with C covering some of the core functionalities to "bootstrap" the language and provide high performance in certain areas; with most everything else written in Python itself.

Sure you want to get sued by Microsoft over the use of some of the keywords and their related patent filings.

Even the agreement that MS signed with Novell didn't cover VB, only C# and what they published to EMCA and ISO. Everything else was still open for lawsuit. Of course, even that agreement has now expired, and Miguel's new company doesn't have a new agreement either.

So good luck there.

One of the team members forgot to wash their hands after changing their kiddo's diaper.

Inadvertently, they might have spread Hand-Foot-Mouth to the entire team...

The problem is that there are a lot of people that are like "well, you had 20% more candidates of group X, so why are you not hiring 20% more people from that group"? Failing to realize that just because you have 20% more candidates from that group doesn't necessarily mean that they are (a) qualified, or (b) would fit in.

And honestly, no company should compromise its hiring standards just to try to fit a certain percentage. Some may like it, but it's not good for the company - both in terms of performance, and employee moral. People that get hired because the company needs to fit a certain profile (racial, etc) quickly get known for that, and that one thing ends up getting attributed to them as why they were hired in the first place.

Simply put - you have to find the right people (regardless of race, sex, etc) for the position, and hold them all to the same standards.

Exactly; which is contrary to Microsoft's position that they don't fix something unless there is an exploit in the wild...

What you mean all those patents that the Chinese outted and nearly the entire tech world found to be not relevant save about as many as you can count on your hands? Yeah, that's really going to stop Android...

The problem is that by putting things in the same code base, it encourages them to be inter-dependent to the exclusion of all else - which is exactly what everyone that doesn't like systemd complains about.

Separate repositories encourage being stable APIs that everyone has to work against; thus encouraging more things that can be switched out with each other, as well as standards, etc.

There's a reason behind it.