F# officially supports Mono.

Try writing a compiler in it, and you'll quickly see what it is good for.

The main thing of interest there is actually ADTs and pattern matching on them. For some tasks (often ones involving trees), this leads to very concise yet natural code.

Did you miss the major announcement about official partnership with Xamarin a month ago or so?

This can only work with precompilation if dynamic assembly loading is disabled (so that the complete set of instantiations is known in advance). This may be feasible for Store apps, but many desktop apps need extensibility.

Castro wasn't even a communist when he started. He went that way because US was supporting Batista, and soviets were the only ones who'd give him support.

In this case, US didn't tell them anything. Rather, it gave them a tool to discuss it between themselves. What's your beef with that?

Dynamically compiling code has some advantages unrelated to security or portability. For example, try efficiently implementing generic virtual methods without a JIT.

(Coincidentally, .NET Native doesn't support this feature of C#)

.NET JIT always compiles, it doesn't have a bytecode interpreter at all. That's why it has to be faster than Java's, and why it doesn't optimize as well.

.NET apps compiled for "AnyCPU" will, technically, run just fine on Windows RT on ARM. The reason why you can't actually run such desktop apps is because it is blocked by signature verifier (any desktop app must be signed by MS to run on RT). It's a DRM thing, not a technical limitation.

Oh, and huge parts of Office use .NET these days, alongside the older native code. Ditto for VS, and many other products.

I suspect that country of origin would fall under the various anti-discrimination laws.

If you buy online, sure. In brick & mortar stores, the vast majority of laptops that I see on display have touchscreens.

H1B applications (both granted and denied) are public record, actually. Here is one source for the most recent numbers - you can drill into any specific company for more details.

(There's probably some govt run website somewhere that has all that info, too. Haven't really looked.)

Try to buy a non-touchscreen laptop these days.

Satya is the right guy. He's an engineer, not a salesman. He knows how things actually work, and not just inside the little (in modern realities) Microsoft bubble.

(case in point: he knows what node.js is - not as a buzzword, but the actual tech details)

There's one more thing. Not many people seem to have been paying attention to what other changes there have been under Satya, but one noticeable change is the skyrocketing rise of Scott Guthrie. Why this matters? Well, Scott is the guy who, for the last 7 years or so, has been heavily pushing for F/OSS inside Microsoft. In particular, open sourcing ASP.NET MVC was his testbed project, and all the other .NET bits that went F/OSS after that were also under his guidance. Oh, and jQuery.

And now this guy is being rapidly promoted - first stepping in to take Satya's place as the latter goes CEO, then becoming an executive VP of Cloud+Enterprise. Now this is the division that's basically responsible for the entire MS server-side stack - SQL, Exchange, Azure etc - but also all the developer tools. I'll let you draw the conclusions from that.

Oh, and one other telling thing was the recent renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, with the justification of "we do more than just Windows there, and don't want Linux users to feel unwelcome". This sort of casual dismissal of the Windows brand was unthinkable mere months ago.

Why do you believe that MS under Satya will retain the lock-in? One very noticeable thing that came up shortly after he came to the helm was a renewed talk about F/OSS, both using it and shipping it. Heck, I didn't think I'd ever live to see the time when a Microsoft lawyer would use the words "copyleft" and "cool" next to each other in a single sentence, and yet it happened a week ago.

Things change.