If all of the large corporations are driven out of the US, that will leave room in the marketplace for small companies to get founded, and the US will end up with lots of small companies, with lots of CEO's, instead of a handful of CEO's with all of the money. Why is driving corporations out a bad thing?

When was the last time evil Microsoft blocked a program from running on one of its platforms.

You know, you won't have to get rid of both if you don't download the preview.

When it comes to software and research a lot of companies try that out. They tend not to be getting positive ROI's on doing so, so it's kept as a minimal footprint of their company.

I have a Nissan with a CVT and I love it. If you pay attention to it, it does sound different, but once your on the road with all of the other road noise it's too quiet to hear. I don't know if 'normal' engine sounds include the transmission, so it is odd to think about the transmission making noise.

Yeah, the current move to Store based apps is way more helpful to spreading information to multiple platforms in an open and free manner.
Down with the web.

Because Microsoft knows it can't out Google, Google. Do they do cookie tracking of ads during web browsing, sure. But when it comes to personal data (email, OneDrive, etc), Microsoft follows its privacy policy and doesn't crawl through the data. Microsoft sells the 'feature' of not crawling through the personal data as a perceived advantage over Google.

That certainly is a risk. It's one of the reasons for the big break with WinRT vs. Win32.

I'd be surprised if Microsoft cared enough to spy on you. But, by signing in with an online account your settings sync between different computers/reinstalls. Tech people like talking about "the first thing I do when I reinstall my machine is ...", and a lot of that now goes away if you log in with an existing account, and all of your settings are laid down for you.

That is so sad.

Yes. Most users would do more damage, knowing it's there, than by not knowing it's there. Programmers, should know it's there, users should not.

I'm pretty sure it was due to the fact that media, particularly Hollywood, loved to portray those institutions in as negative a light as possible. They succeeded so well that instead of trying to encourage improvements, no politician has the political capital to survive should something imperfect happen in them while they're in office. So it's easier to get rid of the institutions than risk some sort of scandal.

C:\ProgramData was around before XP. The reason why it's there is because it's a place that all users have write access to. Programs get installed in Program Files, but that requires administrative permissions. Then the program can run as any standard user and modify files under ProgramData. Programs modifying files under Program Files, when they're not being installed is a really bad idea, and forces the users to run them to be administrators. And no one should run as Administrator.

Because Windows is all about backwards compatibility. I know you probably have horrible war stories about something not working on the next version of Windows, but if you truly debugged those, you'd be more shocked that the application was ever working in the first place. The reason why the installers were created in the first place was to meet big software developers needs. Lots of programs need/want/can interact with other programs (plugins, RPC's, whatever). As a result they need to interface with the other programs, and that's done through the registry.

No. XP was the one exception, due to the amount of time it took to launch Vista. So far Windows 7 is matching the published schedule that Microsoft has had with all of it's operating system releases.