I like Hangouts a lot, and the kinks in the Google Voice integration on my phone are finally mostly worked out. I do think that RTC is important, MS being late to the game was able to look at the problems, and both Google and Mozilla agree, which is why ORTC is coming into play... similar to how IndexedDB came out after other implementations. The crappy part is I'm still stuck supporting IE8 and IE9... so it will be close to a decade before I can really use this for certain things.

Other issues with WebRTC not withstanding, there are some compelling ideas in there.

Easy... get one of these automated cars driving into nascar... if it makes it through a season at least placing in the top 5, and no accidents, it's safe.

See SNI and StartSSL

You can build a piece of software that will run in every version of windows sold for the last 15 years, distribute it on a disk without any source, or special compilations... you can *not* do that with even two versions of the same linux distro a year apart from eachother.

Well, in the same vein which of the dozens of versions of linux do you install? Beyond this, take a typical 32-bit windows application, and it runs in all of them without a recompile... Want to run a program in linux, is it in your distro's install system, yes, but an older version, you need the latest, but that also means updating a bunch of other stuff to an unstable release, crap, now your sound no longer works right... there goes three hours tracking that problem down.

I think that really depends on the age of hardware... just this morning, a coworker has installed a new hard drive, and windows 8.1 on a roughly 3yo desktop. Windows installed and within a few minutes had updated all the drivers... very straight forward... my last desktop install, I had installed to one drive, and after updates in ubuntu (grub did something goofy to another drive), and it wouldn't boot anymore.

OSX is a little quirky for installs, but not that bad either... in general they are all okay... Linux is the only OS (depending on distro) in the bunch where clicking the "update all" button will often break something that worked before.

It's even more broad than that... if you look at housing, even renting in/near LA, San Francisco, New York, etc... it can be much more than that to live there. Just the difference in rent between where I am in Phoenix, and the area in SF I was looking at is about 25-30k/year difference in rent alone. Let alone restaurants and the like. Sure, large chains will be very similar in pricing for common goods, but the cost of food and housing are a lions share of expenses, and can vary dramatically.

What someone should probably come up with is something between https and http.. that being signed payloads over http... for stuff that is non critical and available via cdn, it would be nice if some of these systems could be used to cache results... the payload could be signed with the private key (used on https), and have that signature added to the header... this way signed http objects could be used via https, without the warnings... the content matches the signature.... edge caching systems can still be used (if they respect the header).. maybe use httpsd as the protocol (http + signed data) and fallback to https if there isn't a signature.

So that means I won't be getting a BJ during my tryout to be an underground super elite hacker dude?

Not to mention gluconeogenesis, and the fact that the body can become *very* adept at pulling carbs out of even fiber rich sources. I'm highly insulin resistant, have removed pretty much alll starches from my diet, and am now working on getting processed foods out (which often use starches as filler).... It's rough, even with inslin, and very limited carb intake, I still struggle to stay under 200 blood sugar level.

My first thought was "but... the children!?" ... I would think that the primary marketing for such software would be for parents. Not that I condone such actions, at the very least it would be socially acceptable.

I actually like Metro UI (for phone/tablet) ... it's horrible as a desktop UI, and the metro apps are pretty clunky.. but for a phone/tablet UI it's decent. Not as nice imho as even the WebOS' UI that Palm had done, which is still one of my favorite UIs for mobile devices, and Android and iOS have adopted some ideas from.

Forcing Metro on the desktop versions of windows, and even into the XBox UI was a pretty big error imho. It is passable on a touch screen laptop but still not great. To this day, I think that Windows7's UI is one of the best desktop interfaces I've seen. I like Unity, but it's still really rough in some respects, and the menu interface for it is really bad if you're actually clicking through, for super+search it's okay. OSX is okay as well, but finder has its' own warts for power users. I'm currently running Windows 8.1 for my desktop with ClassicShell over it, and that's not bad. My laptop is OSX and I run Ubuntu's Unity on a couple machines as well.

At least MS stopped trying to shove a desktop paradigm onto mobile users, now if only they could stop shoving the mobile UI to the desktop. I think that there are some really bright people at MS, but their management style has really hindered a lot of things over the years. That's now changing (somewhat) if only because they are now trying to adapt.

If I were a company, and there were a matching stack exchange site, I'd simply have a few paid employees answering questions there...

They don't even ask for any special access to your profile. Also, if you are writing any kind of script or software today and don't have a github account, you're probably not paying attention. I know in some circles it's a little less important, but github is pretty much the common denominator for development today.

It's no less likely for their target audience to have a github account than say twitter, facebook or google plus.

No kidding... I doubt this would have issue running on a couple medium sized cloud instances for db and web... unless it's in an enterprise framework like Java or .Net designed by an enterprise architect. (Or by Oracle) ... I kid, knowing you can build fast and scalable software with those tools, but that doesn't always work out to be the case.