Yeah but we had dreamweaver and the like back in the day. It still took a designer and a lot of luck to have anything that looked decent on the couple of browsers we had. Now you have 3-4 major browsers each with several versions in use on everything from a crappy 320X480 low end phone to a multi-mon 4k setup. I haven't seen very many html conversions that were better than "readable" including written by otherwise technical physicists/computer scientists in LaTex (already a pseudo programming language) that look fantastic in pdf.

I like the ribbon but I agree fat toolbar plus crappy wide screen 9/16 didn't help. Not sure if having the toolbar on the side would have helped. Perhaps failure of focus groups but I heard talks about this choice. Essentially all that MS usage collection told them people were asking them to add features that have existed for a decade. They added the ribbon to force people to see the features that they might not have bothered seeing if it was a couple levels down a nested menu.

Wrath of Khan?

It was $40 for the upgrade from 7 - 8. It was free for 8.1 from 8. So I think MS is more likely to go the Apple model: cheap OS, allow the new shinny gadgets to sell the full (ish) price versions. Tablets and phones are likely going to be free because people are much more likely to drop a couple dollars per app for a half dozen mobile apps than they are for desktop apps (at least that has been my experience).

Creative works are one of the few remaining products where the US leads. Any wonder they are crazily protective of them?

My understanding is Aereo uses antennas inside of the US to capture the content. This has been found to violate US copyright laws. I'd agree with you if they were using attennas located in Canada/Mexico to pickup signals originating in the US and then only selling in those countries. Still there probably is reciprocal agreements between those countries to respect each others copyrights. Its a similar thing with any large industry. For example healthcare: you don't need FDA approval in Canada but Health Canada almost always waits until something is legal in the US before allowing it in Canada even if it originates from a 3rd country. Similar airport security etc. Lots of industries the US is either the dominant customer or a bully that will force you to obey their rules even in your country or be punished.

UnNintendo Consequences?

Perhaps VS users don't have the baggage of trying to save the world via their tech choices and instead realize it is just an enjoyable well paying job. Life's much easier when you aren't fighting to get all your tools to like one another. Perhaps you aren't being driven crazy when you first start trying to do something (because of canned templates that are somewhat reasonable to get you started with): you get the crap in smaller portion sizes not in an all weekend: why won't this damn git repo build shitfest you get with a lot/most projects built by vi/Emacs zealots that think it is normal the have to know where every dll lives and what version it is on your OS before you can get a Solitaire app to compile.

I agree. VS needs lots of resources. Our last boxes were 3 year old machines with 16GB of RAM. VS opening took about 40s. Compile took oh 2 min or so. New hardware (probably mostly the SSD but we do go over 16GB of ram used routinely (web service, VS, SQL Server etc all running on all our dev boxes) so having 32GB helps). Anyways, you need hardware that is less than 2 years old IMO to be thrilled with VS, but I don't want to work for any company that won't invest 2k every couple years for my tools anyways so it is a non-issue to me (I'll leave when I don't like my tools).

I do agree with some of his complaints though: how VS determines what needs to be rebuilt is a mystery to me. I've literally had the solution fully up to date and run a unit test. It starts right away. Run the next test in the list (in the same class/dll and with no code changes) all of a sudden VS decides it needs to spend 40s building a bunch of stuff before it can run. Still navigate too, find all references, intellisense etc all save me much more time and especially context switching throughout the day that I'll never go back to my make/vi|emacs days.

Make them spend months and millions to compel you to decrypt it. Then ... oh crap I thought that was the password. But I guess it might be something else.

Exactly. I routinely break a build to find errors. Want to refactor something? Remove the code it depends on and try to build. Now fix the compile errors. Much easier than trying to make all the dependent code not need the dependancy and then removing it especially when playing with >500k lines of code as I do routinely (you just can't remember to fix everything reliably even when it turns out you did know the full set of places where it was used).

If not couldn't they end up 5 years later getting a judge ordering them to return the bitcoins at whatever the going rate is? Does the government routinely sell off shares in companies they seize too?

People are just stupid that think they need 60+ hz: your eye can't refresh that quickly so who cares if your screen can? Often they are pushing high res on screens that max out at less than the framerate their GPU is pushing. So now not only their eye but their hardware can't use the frames. I get that when the system gets busy (or the game complex) frame rates can drop but I'm not sure upping the peak framerate is the best answer. Gaming rigs likely should be configured to have most system proccesses bound to a subset of the CPUs so some are always free for the game, nothing on the game drive but the games so there is no competing demand for disk access etc. Anyways before dropping 3k on a GPU I'd probably drop $250 on the GPU, about $1500 on a dual socket motherboard and a second quad core CPU, and the rest on ram and harddrives. I beat you'd get a much smoother framerate and better performance when doing other things too.

No northern Canada to Edmonton (using Edmonton as an example because I think it is the northernmost major city) is about 2500 km. Add to that whatever distance you go outside of Canadian waters the polar route is still 3000+ km. As the song goes "Canada is really big" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vxDDcTc64c&feature=kp)

Exactly. That is Canada's biggest defence from a Russian invasion: distance and climate. You can stretch your supply lines a few thousand kilometers across the artic and get hardly anything of value (in terms of industry/people, there is a bunch of mining interests up there but I don't suspect an invading army to be picking up pick axes any time soon after invading). By the time you get to population centres NATO will have spun up and be waiting in Edmonton or wherever. Then the navy pounds your supply lines in the rear (they are good at that) and you die like Napoleon.