Don't vote for this kind of garbage with your money.

And nobody has...

Whatever happens with the Surface Pro series (and I'd say the odds are stacked against it), RT is dead in the water. It's sitting in the same dark, dank purgatory that the Blackberry Playbook is, and largely for the same reasons.

You do have actual evidence of this, right? I mean, you wouldn't simply be lying to bolster *your* agenda.

Sounds like scientists complaining that they're research has been misused.

And you don't think Microsoft is trying to do the same with cod services being turned on by default in Windows 8?

Dark energy is needed to explain the rapid inflation of the universe. Dark matter is matter we know is out there but can't yet identify because it so weakly interacts with normal matter. One is extremely important to explaining big bang cosmology as we currently understand it. The other in certainly is part of the big bang story, but is as much an interest to particle physicist as cosmologists because it represents the possibility of physics beyond the Standard Model.

First of all, aspects of big bang cosmology were predicted before observation, and second of all, WTF? Theories have to fit observation or they are, by definition, wrong.

H1Bs from New Jersey get a lot of grief.

If someone were to come up with a ARM-based board with at least the capability of three or four NICs and a WiFi access, and could run a decent distro like Debian, even if it cost a couple of hundred bucks, I'd snap up three right now. I've built Linux-based routers/VPN appliances using Debian, iptables and OpenVPN, and I can't complain, but they still suck a lot of electricity, and quite frankly, are rather large. I have three Asus RT-N12 routers with TomatoOS on them, and they work great but I've never been able to get the onboard ethernet switch to reliably work as two routed network segments, and they are getting a bit long in the tooth WiFi-wise.

There's a helluva lot of C code being written and maintained out there, so no, not even C has been replaced.

From an executable (if I can use the word for byte code) point of view, yes Java is the most portable. I compile once, run in many places. That doesn't really apply to Android or iOS, of course, but since I don't write mobile apps, I don't fret. But I do write apps that run on Windows boxes, Macs and *nix machines, and, as I said, as long as I'm careful to keep things version and platform neutral, my jar file can run on all these platforms. Code portability and executable portability are two different things.

Jesus. I'm running the Kepler version of Eclipse on a five year old Windows 7 box with 4gb of RAM and I'm not experiencing anything like that kind of slowdown.

Java is becoming the new COBOL. It may not get much respect with the hip young cats, but it's ubiquitous and those that know how to code well in it will always have employment.

To me, it's just a programming language and library ecosystem. There are aspects I don't like, but, providing I don't get too damned clever, I can run my code on all the major platforms, which makes it better than just about anything else out there. For portability, it remains the king.

It strikes me that the entire purpose of their pricing structure IS to avoid peer review. They're not letting anyone in the community see the data, or even some statistically useful amount of the data to actually judge what they have.

It's a scam, pure and simple.

I'm getting pretty dubious of the entire claim. Some company wants to sell its security monitoring service, declares "we've got a huge database of stolen credentials, but we're not going to let you see it without paying up first, or at least signing up for a service that will bill you after 30 days."

I call BS.

OOXML and the continued, though as yet unactioned, threat of patents over Linux both come to mind.

Microsoft is still every bit as evil as it once was. The chief difference between now and the 1990s is that its market, at least on the consumer side, is shrinking. For now that means they're forced to live with major open source projects like Linux, but I refer you back to Ballmer's patent threats. If it really goes down to the wire, you don't think Microsoft would try to litigate Linux out of existence? After all, we already know it bankrolled SCO's attempts.

Microsoft has never been, nor shall it ever be, a friend to open source. It hates it, fears it, is forced at times to cooperate with it, but you don't think there's a day that goes by that its executive don't wish open source would shrivel up and die?

There's no change in sentiment, simply in ability to act on the sentiment. The mere fact that they're sending out their latest psuedo-FOSSite quisling demonstrates that Redmond is the same as it ever was.