Maybe it's Microsoft's new OR-V framework: Object Relational Vagina (ORV)

I am not sure what you mean. The .NET Express IDEs are truly, 100% free. Software you write with it is yours and can be sold or made open source.

Okay, wanking about whether or not people have entitlement issues is missing the core of the situation.

There are developers that will be new to .NET development, and there will be developers that have already been developing desktop applications against the Express versions of the software. If we have learned nothing from the gaming console or phone platform wars, it is that you want to encourage application development. Any barrier to entry or project sustainability, even one that is merely perceived, will cause some number of people to pick a different platform to learn and grow on, and the .NET ecosystem will shrink. There are plenty of other languages and IDEs to turn to that are free, easy, and reliably maintained without having to worry about version-ed crippleware.

I am a full-time .NET developer. I'm an MSDN subscriber and so am utterly independent of the Express versions. Yet I feel very strongly that incidents like this hurt me and hurt .NET development on the whole. As a developer community we're already hamstrung by the lackluster (or totally absent, depending on how you look at it) cross-platform availability for the .NET framework and culture that leans more corporate/enterprise. The least we can do is provide a basic, sustainable development tools for learners and free/open projects.

To be clear, they are not being ordered to implement the new strategy in 90 days, they're being ordered to implement the new strategy in 12 months. The 90 day requirement is to have a page publicly documenting their progress.

That said, I'm still curious whether agencies can move fast enough to get something like this done in even 12 months. =P

Anecdotally, everyone I know from college still has the same political leanings they had.

More importantly, we're fooling ourselves to think the differences between the DNC and RNC are how much money they spend.

Without disagreeing with the substance of your post ($1 billion does seem like a lot for what it is), in principle things like notoriety/brand recognition, patents, and existing user base all are worth money, much more than whatever time it would take for a competitor to build an identical system from scratch.

Welcome to politics!

So? That means he getting laid, which is more than anyone can say for you coward.

The ability or desire for memorization does not imply intelligence.

>>We are supposed to be believers in evolution, right? If you don't like my term of 'defect' for someone who takes themselves out of the gene pool please supply a better term. Many species have non-reproductive members that not only endure but are actually essential to the communities / species / gene pool that they are in. I suspect you might need less belief in evolution and more discernment into the subtleties of how it works in practice over large volumes of individuals and time. In a state of nature, your neighbors very likely contain most or all of the genes you singularly express, in certain configurations it would be advantageous for you to die or otherwise not contribute to reproduction directly if it allows the greater community to procreate -- spreading your genes through themselves rather than through you. Also, genetics and social policy are tangential at best.

Somewhere, Ed Tufte just puked and has no idea why. Poor guy.

Straight from the article: "The IDC and Gartner PC sales figures do not include tablets"

It depends on what kind of content, it seems like. Drawing has a lot of potential and people have been quite successful with it. It looks like music is shaping up to be useful as well. I find it very useful for short note taking and task management, though not great for something like writing a 10 page paper. Gauging from the note taking applications, I imagine making presentation decks or component diagrams is would be something to try.

There's nothing stopping you from watching porn on your iPad. Maybe what you're trying to say is that there is no native application that will stream porn due to the app store's policies?

There's a big gap between the former and the latter. I don't have any native applications on my desktop to watch streaming porn either. I either use my browser (which an iPad has) or I use a media player to watch saved files, which can be done with iTunes or other video players on the iPad. The whole iTunes ecosystem actually makes it very easy to have podcasts and porn sync'ed without any extra work. The closest thing to not being able to watch porn on the iPad is lack of Flash, but in the case of video there are apps to deal with that too.

It would be simpler if you just said "I don't like Apple" or whatever your personal stance is, rather than throwing pasta at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Right, because if Apple had everything built and assembled in the US, we definitely would have people like you instead complaining about how expensive Apple products are.