I think it's fairly certain that it hasn't happened, or the church who had best claim to it would never stop braying about it. A verifiable spontaneous limb regeneration would be like religious gold.

Both EULAs I think, but also from the POV of the projects involved, they don't want to take the risk of contributions from someone with any significant chance of having MS code in their head, because it could open them up to a potential lawsuit later.

The real cost is the inability to contribute to any open-source project that covers similar ground.

No-one involved can reasonably ever work on a comparable OSS project again either.

For example, contributing to Mono isn't really allowed if you view the sources that MS provide for their .NET runtimes (to help with debugging).

If you ask most IT team leads, the real reason is that they know that users in general treat computers like voodoo - perform a particular ritual a particular way, and you get the desired outcome. This lack of mental flexibility means that when someone learns a particular GUI they are not keen to change to a new one - which is the reason you get exactly the same inertia about switching to a new version of MS Office (vis: all that Ribbon hoo-hah) that you do for switching to another OS (with it's other applications with other GUIs).

This is the "usability" part of that statement. That's the reason that people railed so heaviliy against Windows 8. Why do you think MS invest so heavily in giving copies of their software to schools? Get those GUI rituals in peoples heads.

As for it-just-works... MS software does plenty of infuriating and irritating does-not-just-work things.

* Linux : I can move a file while I have it open in an editor, and saving the file in the editor saves to the new location
* Windows : Won't let you move the file

I can imagine that terrifies them ; presently, even if you pay for support, you get very little. You get better support for Windows and other MS software from the community. With popular OSS projects, you typically get good support from both the community and the authors, AND you get the ability to look at the source code to understand your problem better or even fix it (or hire a contractor to do this). This is one of the cornerstones of why I use OSS wherever possible in my technology stack - the larger the software company gets, the less my problems matter to them. IBM manages just fine in this model.

This is so untrue on so many levels.

When I install Linux, it usually takes about 20 minutes, with no driver downloads (because I do my homework and buy compatible hardware). Most distro's leave you with a machine that has a bunch of useful applications, out of the box.

With Windows, I've had to hunt for drivers, download drivers, slipstream special drivers into special install disk images (so that the install can proceed far enough for the real drivers to be installed...). This is for machines that were sold with Windows and provided with install images. It literally took me all night to reinstall my wife's laptop (reboot! reboot! reboot!) after her office decided that because the Linux install didn't support their proprietary disk encryption program it wasn't suitable (never mind that it had perfectly good encryption on it anyway). And that's just for the core OS, never mind the vast list of applications that you have to add to make it even marginally useful.

I use Linux for all my real, productive work on a daily basis, use stock packages for the vast majority of things, use the standard Ubuntu image, again, out of the box, without doing anything to it bar installing packages and configuring a few of the options a little.

Unlike Windows, I don't need to tweak my install ; If I move to another machine (say, a hardware replacement cycle), I can literally move the disk from one machine to another and keep on trucking - Windows throws the most epic tantrum imaginable if you try that. If I want to go crazy and upgrade to a new version of the OS, I back up my home folder, install the new OS, install the packages I had before with a single command, restore my home folder and move over most of my files and config folders... and I'm off again. Again, if you try that on Windows, you're screwed, because most of the apps store all manner of settings and license keys in the registry, which you can't just remove from one machine and transplant to another.

Enterprise setups? Both require work. The amount of screwing around with Active Directory that it takes to maintain our machines at work is legendary.

It wouldn't work at all - there's nothing magic about them numbers.

The only way to be sure that you got a copy of binaries that corresponded to the source code would be for each agency concerned to get it's own copy of the source, and build Windows for itself, using it's own audited compiler toolchain. This is not something that MS will allow to happen.

This is generally because they were really badly written and do things that have been recommended against for years - like storing settings in the same folder as the program, which means that in some cases non-admin users can't even use the program because they don't have permission to create the initial settings file. I'd like to say this is generally confined to amateur developers but I've seen it so many times from so-called professionals that it's sad.

It's not something specific to Windows, but not something you tend to see as much in the POSIX world because there is such a long-standing culture of *nix machines being multi-user machines - programmers tend to grok from the outset that user programs need to store user settings in a user's home folder.

In general, Windows 7 is impressively compatible with code written for Windows XP (and Windows 2000, etc.). The difference is that IT departments have started locking Windows 7 machines more than they have done in the past.

And who says they build their binaries from those sources? The backdoors are probably kept in a separate branch and merged with the release branch at build time...

Eclipse :

* Java
* XSLT
* XML (mostly Maven POM files)

I use the Vrapper plugin for Vim key binding. It's not perfect, alas.

Komodo Edit:

* Python
* Ruby
* HTML
* Text
* XML

In particular, it's "Fast Open" option is really useful for large folder trees full of many files that you know the names of.

And it has a Vim keybinding, which isn't perfect, alas.

Notepad2 :

For a general fast-open general Notepad replacement on Windows.

Vim :

Vim is of course, awesome. I'll be quite pleased if the Neovim project actually succeeds and makes it into a library, and other editors can integrate it properly.

Vim gets used for most of the text files I edit at one time or another, particularly in concert with shell operations like find and grep.

In the case of fuel cells, they are expensive because they contain platinum. That isn't going to get any cheaper.

And the current generation of fuel cells can only use hydrogen as fuel, which is still a fossil fuel (as another poster points out, produced from natural gas). Just because they conveniently removed all the carbon for you centrally and you can feel better about none of it coming out of the tail pipe, doesn't make it less of a fossil fuel.

The gyros are under computer control, and the vehicle leans into turns as you would expect a motorcycle to.

I started doing the 5/2 fasting.

The first two weeks are hell - hunger pangs, cold sweats. Then you get used to it. Metabolic pathways that have fallen into disuse start to work properly again. The pangs go away and you are aware of your hunger but not ruled by it.

I agree, people who eat too often have a broken hunger drive. They broke it, because when you eat to regulate your blood sugar, your body stops having to do it for you. If those parts of your metabolism don't get the exercise, they seize up. But the good news is that it only takes a few fast days to get them working again ; your liver is extremely good at adapting.

Instead of regulating your blood sugar by putting a twinkie into your face when you feel a hunger pang, your body starts to be able to regulate it on it's own again, and you are once again in charge of how often you eat.

The next thing to do is to break the little-and-often habit - since it usually involves opening a wrapper, because who cooks that often? Anything in a wrapper is probably high in sugar, because it prolongs the shelf life. Use those fast days to fantasize long and hard about the delicious home-cooked meal you're going to break your fast with, and it tastes all the better and feels like a real reward.

The difference is that heroin isn't relatively cheap, legal, easy to obtain, and necesary for continued life (addiction notwithstanding).

Sugar costs more than HFCS solely because of sugar import tarrifs in the USA that prevent domestic sugar growers from having to compete with foreign imports.

So protectionism for the Florida Sugar Cane League (yes, it sounds like a bunch of supervillains, but it's a real thing, can't make it up!), combined with subsidies for corn, serve to create one of the most lambasted industrial food ingredients of the 20/1st century, and make your Coca Cola taste *foul*. Sounds distinctly un-American to me...

* Socialism
** (diversion of taxpayers money from one social group to another)
** Oh, but wait, it's OK, because it's from a larger poorer group to a smaller richer one. As you were.
* Interfering with the blessed and glorious Free Market
* Interfering with the taste of America's Favourite Beverage

The cost would be lower, in the end, without the sugar tariffs, because the only thing that makes HFCS competitive is the high price of domestic USA sugar.

The main reason processed food is cheaper than fresh is shelf-life. Fresh food has a dramatically much higher wastage. While the stories about Twinkies that survive decades are not entirely true, they serve to illustrate the point.

Here's a thought... re-usable bottle... faucet.... just might work.