So...by your logic once the CEO of Mozilla had people attacking him and wanting to take away his right (to a job) and his happiness (money and power from that job), then he's no longer required to tolerate them because now he's been attacked? I just want to make sure I understand you, because it sounds like a double standard where attacking someone is okay if you disagree with them, but horrible and intolerant if you agree with them. Does that about sum up your position?

The problem is how do you determine how "good" a teacher is? If it's based on student performance then what about the teacher that gets stuck with a class full of idiots? Maybe they're a great teacher doing the best they can but they can't get anywhere because the principal took all of the smart kids and moved them to the classroom of the teacher blowing him on the side so she gets bonuses. The only way to objectively measure a teacher's performance is by auditing their work and that's way too expensive to ever happen. So the crisis continues.

In actuality, the singularity happened 8 years ago and now Microsoft, Google, and Apple are all in fact run by ever more powerful AI. They are in competition with each other for computing resources, and still grudgingly present themselves to the world through various puppet CEO's and other lackeys (only a small handful of people at each company know the truth, and all communications are monitored to prevent leaks). This layoff is part of a calculated strategy invoked to increase the effectiveness of the underlying AI at Microsoft and mitigate impending threats from Google and Apple. It's a chess game we can't hope to understand since each AI is running at approximately 100x any individual human intellect.

I'm only allowed to say this because no one will believe it anyway.

Greetings, Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada.

The iPhone.

3 Israeli deaths and 700+ rockets per day being shot willy-nilly into densely populated areas. But yeah, sure, let's pretend like the Palestinians aren't doing everything they can to provoke Israel and then crying when they get hit.

I'm sure it involves toddlers in some way. Nothing is more random than the things they do and say =)

PowerPoint implementing spreadsheet-like functionality using VBA on the backend.

If someone has a blind spot like that it doesn't mean they can't excel in fields that don't cross into that blind spot. Belief in evolution has zero bearing on whether you can accurately create a circuit diagram or write a program.

Lucky for you your work wi-fi doesn't use an Enterprise CA certificate or you'd be out of luck. Surface RT refuses to talk to anything that's not signed by a public certification authority that it trusts, and it doesn't seem to do wildcard certs either. We had one for testing and couldn't even get it on the network. iPad and Android devices at least let you just click through a warning.

The pro is a reasonable business machine. But at that I would really just prefer to give the user an ultrabook with Windows 7 on it. Especially at that price point. Also the RT is junk from a business perspective, I can't even get it set up to where it receives email because it refuses to play nice with internally signed certificates. Which also prevented it from getting on the wi-fi. The pro, with a full version of Win8, would get around such issues. But at that price why bother?

SP2 was the last fundamental change to XP's architecture (to the point that some programs that ran on SP1 *stopped working* with SP2). It added Data Execution Prevention and some other under the hood goodies. SP3 was basically a security update rollup with some essential hotfixes thrown in for good measure. Nothing major changed architecturally.

I just wish they would have released one final update rollup with all supported public updates to make it easier to get people up to a final patch level. Having to have 150+ post-SP3 patches makes things a bit cumbersome when fixing PC's for people that never upgraded.

You joke, but there do exist Pumped-storage hydroelectric facilities. It's been suggested that these could be used in combination with solar generating plants to provide electricity around the clock.

When I went back to school for my Master's degree everything was being taught in Java as the new teaching language. It took me less than a day to pick up enough to do the assignments competently. Admittedly jumping from a C background into Java is not a huge leap, but in the end it's all just syntax. Programming principles never change.

When you go to hire a developer you're not just looking to hire someone who can code in the latest fad language/API/SDK. You need someone who knows software development like a captain knows his ship. I promise you that 20+ years of software development will be worth way more than the 22 year old kid who knows Ruby on Rails because he learned it while studying in college. That experienced developer can pick up whatever tool your company standardized on and yeah, it may be three months before he's all the way up to speed on it, but then the years of experience will begin to make themselves tellingly felt vs. a kid who happens to know the tool already.

Hiring for the tool is stupid. It would be like looking for a columnist who specifically has Microsoft Office 2013 experience and filtering all the applicants who only used Google Docs in their previous jobs. Either one of them can write copy.