Yeah, he looks great if you have your head up your ass and only pay attention to SEC filings.

However, since the time that he took over, he sold the future to pay for the 10Q filings of today. Microsoft is now a barely-player in the mobile space that they were in before Apple (sans Newton), Google, or RIM; their operating system that ran the world is now diminishing in importance, and Office isn't even the vehicle for vendor lock-in it used to be. They have a family of game consoles that may have turned a few bucks in profit somewhere after a decade, but I doubt it because of the massive hardware failures and ill-will caused by the RROD fiasco, and their amazingly short-sighted ideas for the current generation. They've tried the connected TV thing about half a dozen times and failed every time. They had the "tablet computer" for 10 years before Apple showed them what they should have been selling, and why they weren't selling.

At the end of Ballmer's tenure, Microsoft is basically the same company it was when he took over - a company that makes all it's money from Windows and Office. He did nothing to change that, and Windows and Office aren't nearly the must-haves they used to be. The Internet now runs on *nix, front to back - Apache serving the pages, Android / iOS consuming them. Not a line of Microsoft code to be found.

Oh, but yeah, he was a great CEO.

You're forgetting that Slashdot now has corporate overlords, and corporate overlords like click-bait. Any time they can entice people to post comments about sweaty monkey-dancing, off-putting chants of "developers developers developers", or chair throwing they are going to.

I LOVE THIS FRANCHISE!!! YEAAAAAAHHHHH!

And this explains Microsoft's "lost decade" perfectly.

And in no way was he making a joke that charged right past your defense.

And somehow, this administration finds these stories and situations to be perfectly fine; but "walling" someone (and leaving them alive) is somehow morally reprehensible.

I find both to be repugnant, but let's get serious: The Obama Justice Department finds killing innocents that happen to be in the same area as a suspected bad guy to be okay, but smacking around known assholes to get information on other known assholes to be a prosecutable offense.

The auction house has been wholesale deleted, and the loot system overhauled to not be a ridiculous farce. 90% of the items that drop have your current character's primary stat on them, and there is a facility to be able to reroll one stat on an item for a handful of junk items and some gold, so you can make that almost-perfect item into a perfect item with enough resources.

The loot system was the reason I stopped playing D3 about 2 weeks after it launched, and the new system is the reason I started remembering the game exists again.

The 2.x version of Diablo 3, even without the expansion, is the version they should have released in the beginning. They did away completely with the ill-advised auction house, and gave the loot system a bit of smarts as to how it rolls the stats in order to give a much better chance of finding useable items.

It's actually worth playing on a continuing basis now, where before it was "okay, I played the story through, now what?"

Cheap people demand free.

There are people out there that actually pay for things, when they find them to be of value.

So, just like Google then. Coincidence?

Horse shit.

Ohio minimum wage: $7.95/hour

5x Ohio minimum wage: $39.75/hour

Annual gross salary (8 hour day, 5 days / week, 52 weeks): $82,680 / year

Median 3 bedroom house price for Cincinnati, OH: : $120,000

Yeah, you're full of shit unless your "many cities" remark is restricted to the coastal states, and even then you're pushing it.

My office is situated in a suburb where the median real estate pricing is above what I'm willing to spend. I'm not putting myself under a horrendous mortgage to buy a giant house I don't need (and don't want to pay to heat / cool / maintain) just to save myself 20 minutes of driving each day.

How's that for sustainable?

If only the government would get off their ass and approve a pipeline to ship that oil, then we wouldn't have rolling fuel-air bombs going through switching yards in major cities...

You do realize that we're talking about nuclear weapons production when we talk about Hanford, right?

The only waste from commercial power generation at Hanford is the actual reactor vessel from the Trojan Nuclear Generating Station that was barged there and buried when it was decommissioned.

Largely, spent fuel remains at the generating station that spent it, because Congress is filled with fuckwads that don't know how to actually progress with dealing with it.

Yes, there were reactors. Yes, the generated electricity. But, it was a byproduct of the primary reason for the reactors - creating plutonium. They used a short fuel cycle in the purpose-built reactors specifically tuned to create the most Pu-239 possible.

The facilities there were never intended to be efficient at commercial electrical generation. They were meant to create stuff to kill people. It just turns out that the people being killed by it is our own citizens because of the incredibly poor way they handled the gigantic mess they created.

If this crap was only uranium, it would have been dealt with decades ago. No, this is a concoction of the most toxic, caustic, and radioactive shit ever produced by mankind. In a liquid form. Underground, predominantly in single-walled tanks. Which are corroding because of the contents.

This crap has been transferred, pumped, and mixed so many times that they don't even know what is in half of these tanks, and in what concentrations. Just mixing up one of these tanks could cause a prompt criticality because they might disturb the settled metals in the bottom of the god-awful compounds floating on top, causing a concentration of daughter products.

It is the worst environmental disaster that humans are capable of creating - we're lucky it's still as contained as it is. And this is right here in the US where our State Department likes to get all high-and-mighty with environmental offenders elsewhere in the world.