1) Photoshop
2) Full Office
3) World of Warcraft
4) All productivity software.

Who said "Desktop" the point is to get these onto Smartphones and Tablets. The fact that it'll also run on the desktop is sort of besides the point.

Because then you wouldn't be able to use any platform specific features. Also BB didn't exactly profit from that approach. If they re-compile for the native platform they are more likely to actually add a few specific features as they go like live tiles while they've got it 'open' so to speak.

No it's 'disruptive' aka the buzzword that Silicon Valley douches use about their latest fart app.

In this instance if a bunch of payment terminals were set up, the government would just ban it and it would go back to the fringes.

They aren't replacing the local Peso with Bitcoin. They're just using Bitcoin as a transactional currency to run an unregulated currency exchange. Bitcoins in this instance are essentially a proxy for US dollars.

If I have $100 USD and I want to convert it to Pesos I can either go to a regulated currency exchange which apparently is attempting to combat inflation by keeping the peso value low or you can exchange your $100USD for say 0.5 bitcoins on the open bitcoin market. Then you find someone who wants "bitcoins" aka USD and you sell them your bitcoins in exchange for pesos at market rates.

The person who sold you pesos for Bitcoins really just wants USD (or Euros).

Now doing this is almost certainly illegal if the government has mandated exchange rates since all you're doing is adding an intermediary step but ultimately performing a currency exchange illicitly. All you've done is employed Bitcoin as an escrow service.

But as the article points out... it's really just a way to streamline an existing black market in money changing. And the reason the black market has to exist at all is because legal money changing it a bad deal.

So as soon as bitcoin actually becomes popular enough to disrupt the existing black-market it'll also be popular enough to attract government intervention as has been done to the banks.

Essentially all this article is saying is "Look at this awesome black market full of illicit goods! Look at how great it is!" Which is true of every black market until it actually grows large enough to warrant a response from the government.

So it's disrupting the Argentine Economy... but only in a way that's so small as to be imperceptible. Gotcha.

WinRT has supported C++ as long as it's existed. What they added was C++ Android compatibility.

Nokia already did that for the Nokia-X. Maybe that's why Microsoft bought Nokia.

Except for developing the mod tools and supporting the mod community.

Your last point would be my question to the Original Poster: do you want a stable phone or a phone with lots of features? If you want an incredibly stable phone then it's easy to find and kill all of the bugs. But which is worse having buggy whizbang feature or not having whizbang feature at all? If I had to choose I would pick buggy whizbang feature. Because the only thing worse than doing something poorly is not being able to do it at all.

I worked with a company as an adviser and they refused to add whizbang because they didn't feel they could do it perfectly. Well... the outcome was that people needed whizbang and they picked buggy and slow over not-at-all. And they in my opinion picked correctly. I can tell someone that I can so that but it'll take 2 days and they might pick me. If I tell someone I can't do it at all they'll definitely pick someone else. So even if I'm slow there is still a chance I'll get the job. The end result was the product died because they refused lower their standards and compete.

This is taking place in the smartphone market. You have to have feature parity. The End. Full Stop. If you can't do what someone else is doing customers will jump ship. Android has taken over the market using this strategy and customers are generally pretty happy with the tradeoffs involved.

1) iTunes, Xbox Music, Amazon and Google Play have all been selling DRM free MP3s for years so did this happen like 10 years ago?

2) You can download songs from I believe Xbox Music, Amazon and Google Play directly from the website without using itunes so no need to start up a virtual machine.

3) Tell your wife to download her own music and leave you out of it.

Government: "You may not own slaves."
GLMDesigns: "See now the government has the power to tell you that you can't own slaves and they'll be even more corrupt! The more regulation the more corruption!"

No, the Flash isn't the bottlneck. The problem is now the CPU processing the data coming off of the flash. If you have storage constrained tasks these drives are 3-4x faster than other SSDs. But loading a game mostly involves decompressing thousands of compressed textures. Your HDD doesn't help with that task.

The other problem is that poor students need more spending that isn't being provided outside of school by the parents so more of the money goes to covering basic needs and less goes to whizbang features like fancy new computer labs. If your school had no need for free breakfast and lunch then you would have another $1,500 per pupil available to buy them a brand new laptop *every year* and a subscription to a programming class. Or it could pay for a full chemistry lab set.

Then you get into social issues that generally come from poverty and you have to spend even more on social workers and discipline. And since wealthy families can afford enriching out-of-school programs the school also has to spend more on tutoring and enrichment programs which cost even more.

So we can't even just level the spending across all schools and call it done--we also have to recognize the extra needs that low income schools face and provide even more. It's easy to teach a kid who shows up well fed from a low-stress home and can focus on school and then goes back home to an environment where both parents are highly educated mentors who can provide an information rich environment.