Not liking someone isn't a good enough reason to put them in jail.

Usually. For now.

You can also do CtrlAltDel, down, down, enter.

Or you know press the power button on your desktop or laptop or tablet.

Suppose it has a security vuln?
Suppose it depends on a certain version of a legacy DLL we need to service for other callers?
Suppose it was never localized beyond English?
Suppose admins want to enable/disable it via group policy?

(etc)

For better or for worse, it is incredibly expensive to put something in the Windows Box.

We give away VS for free, in a variety of different versions/avenues. By not putting it in the windows box, we avoid a huge # of headaches.

Your conclusion is entirely wrong.

Because Microsoft doesn't do the things YOU think Microsoft should do, you can ascertain the motivations and goals of Microsoft?

How interesting. Suppose we hire you to lead our CS education strategy. Can you promise results? Are you willing to bet your career on your prophecies coming true?

Let me tell you what IS true.

Microsoft lets me -- and many other MS employees -- volunteer to teach CS in public K-12 schools, 1 hour a day, before heading into the office for our "real jobs".

MS spends money to make this happen (volunteer matching hours), and gets less of my productive time (without docking my pay). There are full-time employees dedicated to this project. They have no other MS business function.

The program I am referring to is called TEALS (www.tealsk12.org)

It is just one of the ways that MS puts time, money, and people, into trying to build a better pipeline of students who can do CS.

I don't think stuffing GWBASIC back into windows is going to take us from where we are to where we need to be.

Relevant:

http://everythingfunny.org/wp-...

You could sound the message out in Frequency Shift Keying.

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K...

1200 baud is 120 characters per second. So you could dump an uncompressed 80x24 screen of text in 16 seconds. You'd just repeat the dump over and over again.

Software on a mobile phone would capture the FSK and submit it as a bug report.

Perhaps a less whimsical way to do it would be to write to a dump file and submit when the system reboots. E.g. the kernel could keep enough of the Bios alive so that it could switch back to real mode and use int 13h to write to reserved bit of the disk.

People with money can afford to be coke addicts, for a while at least. Give 'em a month or so and both sets of people will be 'borrowing' from the relatives to feed their addiction.

Luckily, tens of thousands of pioneers wouldn't have to be housed all in one starship. Spreading people out among multiple ships also spreads out the risk. Modular ships could dock together for trade and social gatherings

Hrmm.

http://www.urbandictionary.com...

I don't think this will contribute to genetic diversity....

60 minutes has had credibility problems for a long time.

They _destroyed_ Audi in the 1980s. They fabricated the "tests" and the results. They modified the cars and rigged them to fail in the way 60 minutes wanted them to.

Nothing 60 minutes says about cars should be considered accurate.

If there was any justice in the world, the show and the people behind it would have been in prison 30 years ago.

Funny you mention that.

Early in my Microsoft career, I built a system that provisioned thousands of windows machines on an as needed basis, differing by SKU level, language type, windows version, etc.

I'm was proficient in scripting the installs of windows machines -- even back when windows didn't natively support that sort of thing very well(e.g. NT4)

To be honest, Windows looks pretty good compared to any Linux distro I've worked with when it comes to automated provisioning and post configuration. That's a subjective comparison, of course, so I'll just say: I don't think windows was your problem.

It sounds like your management wasn't especially visionary nor technical, and that you failed to make an adequate business case to them regarding how much productivity the team would gain in the long run if you worked to automate these repetitive tasks.

That's a shame. I'm glad you moved on to greener pastures.

Why didn't you script all of the activities you just described?

April Fool Mr Baluchi! April fool!

Maybe mild autism has been associated with higher wages ever since industrialization? E.g. being a factory worker who was better adjusted to city life, earning more than your peasant agrarian non-autistics? Continuing up to today where lawyers and software developers get higher salaries? That might correlate with slightly higher reproductive success. Just a guess.

(Factory worker, lawyer and programmer are roles where limited empathy wouldn't be a hindrance, and "restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests" might be a help).

I'd had it twice. The first time raw in Japan it was okay.

The second time, seared, in Iceland, it was sublime. Like a combination of the best bits of sashimi and the best bits of high quality steak, somehow unexpectedly combined in one delicious whole.

This doesn't add up...

If the carriers currently take in $2bn in theft premiums but only pay out $0.5bn in payouts, then they're pocketing a huge $1.5bn/year difference. Therefore

(1) We can expect them to lobby strongly against anything that will reduce this free money, and attempt to water down any proposed legislation

(2) If the legislation goes through we can expect them to try to gain that money in different ways, maybe with a "remote wipe services fee"...