Even if the fees are being paid for by the merchants, forcing them to charge higher prices, the people who pay in cash at places that accept both are having to pay those higher prices just as much as a person who doesn't ever carry cash would..

More like, no back-compat == millions of mad existing users and developers (for Windows) == not happy.

5-6 levels sounds about right. I'm 7 levels down from the top right now (and don't have anyone under me), but this is the most that I ever had.

Being invited to the podcasts is not necessarily based on seniority, but even if it does, a principal dev has maybe 1-2 fewer management layers above them compared to plain SDEs.

And Microsoft will be happy to sell you an IDE for that.

The corporate strategy does not revolve around MS stack top-to-bottom anymore. It hasn't been like that even in the last couple of years under Ballmer, but that has accelerated a lot under Satya.

Even knowing that, Republicans will vote for Republicans and Democrats for Democrats and Libertarians for people who are not libertarian. Even knowing they're just putting the yin and yang into those crushing boots, they will continue to believe if they could only defeat other leg, once and for all, their lives would be glorious.

The one thing a Libertarian cartoonist won't tell you though, is if you follow those boots up to the legs, and the legs up to the pockets and the pockets up to the head, you will find the corporate wizard pulling the levers, whispering, "God...guns...gay rights...family values...free markets...climate change...Sarah Palin...Michael Moore...liebruls...wingnuts..." into the megaphone. He's a wizened little man, looks a lot like Sheldon Adleson, in fact, whose own legs have withered. He's the subject of the Picture of Dorian Gray. Call it, "The Picture of John Galt". Corrupt, suppurating and certain of his position among The Elect. Plump and parasitic.

It's so easy to blame team red or team blue, but only because The Commissioner likes to keep our attention focused on the heels and away from the head.

How about ISO standard languages? Like C#...

Five or even three years ago, you'd be correct.

But not anymore.

Look at who came to the top alongside Satya. It's people like Scott Guthrie, who have been pushing for more openness and more attention to other platforms rather than just Windows for years now.

"Open source" is actually quite a buzzword inside MS recently. I didn't think I'd ever see a lawyer giving a talk to programmers on F/OSS emphasize that "GPL is not actually bad, you just need to be careful and aware of the implication". As well as describe the historical hostile policy on open source as "stupid and harming competitiveness".

Oh, and the other day, I've seen a guy with a blue badge strolling around the campus in a GPLv3 t-shirt.

Things are changing. Fast.

What made you believe that? S&T is the division that does things like SQL Server, SharePoint and Visual Studio. More recently, Azure.

The guys that do UI were mostly in Windows (duh) and E&D (Windows Phone, Xbox) in the old corporate structure.

The fun of been a tax free charity and getting support to spread the message. One global adventure at a time.

Yes every suspicious transaction report would be automated with lower limits until every transaction is fully reported on.

Why would you ever want a cashless society?
Your payment flowing into another account can be tracked for a service.
No more upper middle class lifestyle on a wage that cannot be proved to have paid for it - that boat, RV, SUV, new car, home renovation, new home would get a bit more tricky and need semi professional help to make seem legal.
No closing accounts and getting ready to move to another country without a lot more paperwork. A digital tax wall keeps you at home.
It will be sold to counter all domestic aspects of an illegal economy and money laundering in suburbia.
Wage in, food, savings, pleasure, costs of running a home out and tracked to see how it all adds up. That new pool seen from above was paid for how?
The other aspect is microtransaction standards per use of your new card. Thats a big win for your bank for every sale over decades as a consumer.
A huge tax base, everybody tracked in real time as to spending vs wages, savings with the correct amounts flowing to support endless wars, healthcare and needed public services.
Add in new transaction related criminal issues with time in a nice private prison. Enjoy your new gov backed debit card id from any bank your with, you can keep your accounts.
So your getting Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre for all currency transactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Transaction_Reports_and_Analysis_Centre
At the back end you will have the MARKINT projects.

By that argument, everything we know about stars, quasars, black holes, and virtually everything else that isn't on our planet and relatively close to the surface is all speculative, too. Nearly everything we know about the stuff not immediately at hand is based on mathematical models, calibrated against "observations" which are often very, very indirect and themselves dependent on many layers of mathematical models derived the same way.

I don't know enough about QM and many worlds theories to know how much really is well-supported, but from what little I've read, the many-worlds hypothesis seems to provide a much better explanation of the spooky action at a distance effects we observe than the alternatives.

Likely because they ain't cooks. The pot works well if the pot is full, if not it burns food up the sides of the pot, especially those bits you leave behind when stirring. The pot has far more surface area to clean. The pot only work with gas. The catch is for those who cook you really only want your heat at the bottom of the pot and not so much at the sides, in fact optimum pot design is insulated sides and a very conductive base. Even the base tends to be better for cooking a thick cast iron in order to balance out the vagaries of thermostats. Yep he is definitely a rocket scientist and not a cook.

You seem to have forgotten that the NSA were doing a damn sight more than just gathering phone metadata. That's the only thing the US government is willing to discuss with a US agency even when the head of that agency perjured himself to the US government in a public hearing under oath. Metadata, metadata, that's now just a pretend catch cry to make it look like the government is doing something about an out of control agency.

They were intercepting everything thing they could, internet communications, email, cell phone calls, land line calls, hacking computer networks, purposefully weakening internet securing to keep the hacking easy, disrupting encryption methods and basically trying to get all the electronic data they could get on everyone . They specifically targeted US politicians and look how well that worked out for them, now it ho hum metadata from US politicians and ignore the perjury, ignore politically targeted wire tapping, pretend it all never happened, now why are they really doing that, what is the NSA keeping secret about the politicians that are meant to control the NSA.