You can short the loser side and get an immensely bigger payout if you are right. Options are pennies on the dollar compared to a bet or actual shares.

And in any event, unless you buy in at the IPO, you don't "help" a company or technology by buying their stock since the said stock is owned by some other dude and the sale does not bring a single more dollar to the company; if anything there is administrative overhead for them. The only marginal impact you may have is that by buying or selling you have a tiny influence over the stock price, which may please or displease other shareholders, who can reward or punish executives accordingly.

The dude says: "A stranger approaches a company like Microsoft holding two envelopes, one containing $1,000 cash, and the other containing an IE security vulnerability which hasn't yet been discovered in the wild, and asks Microsoft to pick one envelope. It would sound short-sighted and irresponsible for Microsoft to pick the envelope containing the cash — but when Microsoft declines to offer a $1,000 cash prize for vulnerabilities, it's exactly like choosing the envelope with the $1,000".

That's wrong. To have access to $1,000, Microsoft has to earn maybe $1,350 on account of the federal, state and local taxes. But that's not enough because they also need to pay their staff (and their office space), plus the lawyers and accountants who process quarterly for the earnings reports, plus banking fees, and lots of other stuff.

So paying a $1,000 bounty requires them to forfeit a $1,500 income, while getting a $1,000 cash payment means a $750 profit. Even if the bug is a big one (which rarely happens), what is going to happen? People flocking to OSX and Linux? If you ask the shareholders, taking the cash is a no-brainer.

This being said, I still don't understand why Microsoft bothers with IE. What do they have to gain? They should take a small chunk of their IE budget and fund Firefox.

Citation needed

Also the amount, 12 millions, is retail price. With the large number of computers they have, the IRS probably gets the Public Sector Discount, which means at least 3x the retail price (plus mysterious fees), and to make things easier they probably rounded up the number to an even 200,000 licenses.

At the moment the GAO can't even give a ballpark figure for the money wasted by the IRS. Therefore, the amount of money wasted on XP does not matter, at least it goes back to an American company so they can stash it in Ireland or Benelux.

Yeah confidential data is never compromised in the private sector because companies are careful not to use XP, except Target. That includes Experian. Or Adobe. Or Sony. Or Apple. (etc.)

People who want to store their own projects on their own servers instead of having Crapware bundled with their downloads on SourceForge or who don't like the tedious process of publishing on Github can use this thing and SEO or twitter their way to the mainstream search engines - or maybe they just want to use it internally and don't care about people knowing about their stuff.

As for a federated register, if we look at the existing models (Wikipedia, Apple App Store, Google Play Store) then THAT is the end of OSS. When a small clique decides what is acceptable and what is not then the outcome looks good but that's just because the people or projects that are crushed are lost in the background noise.

Those links are posted by the Praetorians and hide a secret portal leading to a mysterious backdoor. Thanks to CyberBob, I know how it works: hold the left shift key on your keyboard then click directly in the middle of the top loop of the "8". If you do it correctly, you will get to the backdoor and it will be wide open.

Be careful.

They said 'unmanned', not that it did not carry ennemy combattants waiting for a place at Gitmo or in Yemen torture camps.

Now let's see Stallone escape from that one.

I wish I could take back that google search I just did and live in the blissful oblivion of not knowing from what movie that quote came from. Now I'm tainted.

The real "Placebo effect" is me clicking on the dislike button in Pandora.

What is the problem with VMs? I use one all the time when I browse some areas of the internet that I don't want to appear in the history of my main browser.

... lives in Bangalore and is a big fan of Russel Peters. Unless you consider that banking systems are not critical (*cough* RBS)

Wishful thinking.

You can also get a free tattoo in prison, but the available designs are limited to a specific subset based on the color of your skin and/or the number of your street.

That's the difference with Apple customers, who don't admit they're getting royally screwed over on price.