Those who have decided MS is eternally evil will never accept .NET. But you gotta admit that Microsoft is doing this right. This isn't the Gates / Balmer company any more. It seems that Microsoft realized that the Wintel & MS Office monopolies are dead, and that the bazaar is defeating the cathedral.

Their new hope is Azure. All this open-sourcing of .NET is to entice people to use .NET and thus use Windows Azure. By eliminating the stigma of being closed and proprietary, they eliminate the #1 objection to using .NET. Note that this door is open both ways: not only is .NET opening, but Azure is supporting other stacks: node and LAMP for example. They don't care what tools you use anymore, they just want your hosting business.

Very wise question. Is it because the amendments are made by committees?

IMHO, this is one of the problems with the US system. The constitution grants the houses the ability to govern themselves. So while a bill requires a simple majority to pass, there are lots of other votes that must happen before the bill can even be voted upon. There are rules static when a bill can be introduced, how amendments are added, how it gets out of committee, and how it comes to the floor for vote. So in the end, a senator/representation can't just propose X and bring it up for a vote. At that point, is it really democracy any longer?

The SSDs will have lots of regulation on-board because there are very specific voltages required to read and write to Flash memory. They should be just as reliable as USB flash drives and RAM and CPU and video cards and other electrically-sensitive things that require particular voltages to operate.

Great, so now we just need to fix the sudden random failures where the drive completely fails but it is 6 months old and showed no signs of degradation. A coworker of mine just had that happen with a Crucial SSD.

One power saving feature on my phone is that it stops polling for text messages, thus forcing me to unlock the phone and click a refresh button, thus using more power than the background polling would have used in the first place.

While that may be true, it does not fully account for the discrepancies we see in society.

It isn't about barriers so much as it is about encouragement. Certainly, girls have access to all the same stuff boys do. But society encourages them toward different things. I didn't see this so much until I had 2 sons. Here are some examples:

- Buy a happy meal from McDonalds. They ask if you want the girl's toy or the boy's toy. The kids are being placed on a track very early.
- Watch some kids TV shows and compare:
    - The number female scientists versus male scientists.
    - Same with heroes and heroines.
    - And athletes.

My 5-year-old son recently told me that girls like cute things and boys like science. He figured this out from watching G-rated movies, TV, and commercials. I try to review what he watches, but it is inevitable! I have peers with female children didn't even buy Mega Blocks, Duplo Blocks, or Legos for their daughters. Then when the girls turn 5 they declared that the kids just weren't interested in them. BS: they got doll houses, and my little ponies, and 2 cheezy "Lego Friends" sets.

It isn't just that girls may have a proclivity toward those things. They are actively steered toward them. Only after this is fixed can we make a reasonable judgement as to what natural tendencies the sexes have. But we have a long way to go before we get there.

This is what the press has been saying but it isn't 100% accurate. One is less likely to infect, but it is still infectious. Naturally, a person coughing and sweating profusely is excreting more bodily fluids than someone who is asymptomatic. But they are also more likely to travel and go into work, thus exposing people. It is a double-edged sword.

If we are sticking with my example, it does cause disease - it kills you in 30 years. I don't like that. Everyone is hoping it approaches 90 years, 100 years - well, good luck with that. I'd rather just stop the disease entirely since it is totally preventable.

In what case?

One of the most nasty things a disease can do is to slowly replicate without causing symptoms. These long incubation periods are why Ebola, Tuberculosis, and Rabies are so dangerous. It makes them hard to detect and gives the host time to travel and potentially infect others without either party knowing. By the time the symptoms manifest it is often too late. By contrast, a disease that produces symptoms immediately is easily detectable and the host seeks treatment. If it is really really fast, they die before they can pass it on, and such diseases quickly eradicate themselves.

I don't look forward to a world where AIDS only manifests after 30 years, but everyone has it.

mod up please. This AC has the most insightful response on this topic.

I find this belief correlates with people who have no idea what the constitution says or does. They don't even realize that it says basic things like that there will be a president, or that senators serve 6 year terms, or that the president is commander-in-chief of the military. These are simple concrete things people can understand, and they can then realize how relevant it is.

I gotta say while this is a double-edged sword, I like it. I use FF at work and when the IT department started a MITM attack and added their phony certs to everyone's machines, I was the only one to notice. Both because Firefox didn't pick-up the new certs, and because SSL observatory caught it. SSL observatory should be mandatory on every browser for this reason!

Bullhonkey! :-)

This saying is along the lines of famous phrases like "write once run everywhere" that are oversimplifications. You kinda point out the limitations of your own statement when you point out things that vary across browsers. Things like deployment becomes about deploying to servers and server farms and upgrading databases, which isn't trivial. Learning IIS, Apache, Tomcat, Postgres, etc. are serious skills. As for old versions: try upgrading a database when users may be on the system during the deployment. And think about old versions of browers, phones, etc: OS matters on both the client and server side.

Perhaps the problem is that the kind of people who can bring about large changes in society tend to be egotistical, ambitious, dictatorial personalities. Those who desire power are often the least likely to use it well. That doesn't mean that such a society is impossible, but merely that the kinds of people who are capable of bringing it about without turning into dictators are so rare that such a person has not yet been born.