I had to look up some of it, but knowing the internal version number can be seriously helpful if you're writing a script that needs to do different things depending on what version of Windows it's running on (such as looking for "C:\Users\Public\Public Desktop\" vs "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop\", as a simple example). Getting that version number from the command line is as easy as "ver"

What part is speculation? The internal version number isn't exactly a secret. Open up a commandline and type "ver". There's a lot of other things about Windows that are well known whether or not you have the source.

Here's the thing... those are are marketing numbers, not version numbers. If you go by their internal version numbers, they make a lot more sense, and better reflect incremental changes vs total rewrites.

Windows 2000 - 5.0
Windows XP - 5.1
Windows XP 64-Bit/Server 2003 (incl R2) - 5.2
Windows Vista/Server 2008 - 6.0
Windows Server 2008 R2 - 6.1
Windows 7 - 6.1
Windows 8 - 6.2
Windows Server 2012 R2 - 6.3
Windows 8.1 - 6.3

Before Windows 2000/XP, there were two completely separate OSes (NT and DOS), rather than simply different editions of the same OS. Because 2000 and later are the successors to NT, that's why it starts with 5.0.

So why did NT start at 3.x? Because it started life as the successor to OS/2 1.3 and 2.0, known as OS/2 3.0. When it shifted to become Windows rather than OS/2, it kept the version number.

The DOS based Windows go: 1.01, 1.03, 1.04, 2.0, 2.10, 2.11, 3.00, 3.10, 3.11, 3.2, 4.0 (Win95), 4.10 (Win98), 4.90 (WinMe)

Windows versioning numbers makes a lot more sense once you separate the marketing name from the actual version number. MS Office works the same way (e.g. Office 10 is Office XP).

If your Tesla has a gas tank, you might be doing it wrong...

The great thing about nuclear weapons is that they're most effective against cities and other surface targets when detonated in an airburst. The fallout from an airburst causes significantly less fallout of the kill-everything-on-Earth kind, and less uninhabitable-for-a-few-dozen-millennia radiation on the ground than a comparable surface-detonated weapon. This is one of the reasons why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are inhabitable today (both were airbursts), while Chernobyl is going to take... a few more years.

I'm not seeing what part of your link refutes the ability to navigate a craft up the Chesapeake without it being searched. Nor do I see anything refuting the ability to do this without making landfall (what was clearly meant by "American soil"... not American sovereign territory)

Why aren't they worth that much? What do you value them at? The value of Minecraft is way, way beyond those 50 million copies sold. Minecraft has a metric fuckton of merchandising out there - people love the merchandise more than they love the game. It would also give them control of the IP to use it in marketing elsewhere as well. Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper.

"a willfully incomplete game"

I don't know which cave you've been in for the last decade or so, but a great deal of games are now sold before completion. Developers, especially indies, realized that people absolutely love putting down $20 for a alpha/beta game that's getting new features added every few weeks/months. I have to say, having Minecraft add new features every few months gave me significantly more interest and play time than if I just started with all of those features already there. It doesn't appeal to everybody, of course, but neither does any finished game.

Last I knew, Microsoft was still the second largest developer of software for Mac (after Apple, of course). There's always hope in that direction *if* there's a market for it.

No, they want to go way past 2014 to a magical time in which no smartphone every experiences glitches, bugs, and has infinite battery life thanks to magic fairy dust.

I don't think "treason" means what you think it means. Or "arresting". Or "suggestion". Actually, I'm not sure if you speak English or just pissed on a dictionary and strung together whatever didn't get wet.

You'd have more of a point if the US wasn't so often concerned with the domestic policies of other nations.

I'm not really sure that Opera counts as a "mega" corp. Also, I believe that Chromium is still open source.

I'm on Windows 7 right now and that's almost exactly how my Chrome looks. The only difference is that my title bar has very slight transparency.

What if we're a simulation being run on a really advanced iPhone?

Siri, end program.