Same happened here too. I think its quite an invasion of privacy on googles part.

Microsoft is a market leader as far as development tools go (Visual Studio, .net, etc). Don't underestimate what a couple of billion dollars and a few years worth of development and marketing can bring you.

My bet is that Silverlight isnt going anywhere anytime soon - Microsoft are still attempting to get a successful smartphone out the door. As long as they're focused on WP7, they'll continue to make investments in Silverlight to try and win developers for both platforms.

CmdrTaco if you're in the Seattle area within the next two months I can give you a tour of the Microsoft Redmond campus ;-)
Can't really see that being your scene though!

This style of advertising seems to be much more common in the U.S (Maybe Canada but I've only spent a few hours there) than in Western Europe. Our advertisers tend not to treat their target audience like retards as that means that only retards will relate and buy their products.

The one exception I'd like to make to this is Dr Watson crash reports. A full dump may contain PII due to the very nature of a process dump. These are rarely submitted and the user is made aware of the fact that PII may be contained in the report. Most of the time, in the event of a process crashing a microdump is sent containing not much more than a call stack and a report on the hardware the application is being run under.

I've seen how Microsoft does Business Intelligence and there is huge emphasis on not collecting any personally identifiable information. Things like submitting the path to a certain file is not allowed due to the possibility that the file might be stored in a users home directory and thus give out a user name/something that could possibly be tracked back to the actual user.

If you have any examples of Microsoft logging personally identifiable information I'd love to know though

Yes - security keys have patents on them and you need a license from the patent holder to produce these keys. Its a method of making sure that these keys cant be copied by just any locksmith

Thanks for the information I thought otherwise. Theyre pretty expensive on Ebay considering their actual value. When I ordered 100 trillion zim dollars for 5 euro, I was convinced it was fake. But no the country is just in so much crap that they can't even watermark their newer currency.

The Zimbabwean dollar officially died over a year ago. They all use USD/EUR now

Reminds me of what happened in my university. Some students thought it would be smart for their final 4th year projects to go onto a public forum and offer money for somebody to do the project for them. The university sent a public mail out offering for the students to turn themselves in and redo a different project over the summer (might have been capped at 40%) or else risk getting caught and not get a degree + be banned from all the universities in Ireland.

Microsoft is a very large company and to my surprise there is not nearly as much cross team communication going on as you'd expect from the outside. People behind FAT more than likely had nothing to do with WP7. Theyre practically two different companies operating out of the same coffer. While I only heard this and havent extensively used the phone yet myself, theyre doing their best to hide the entire notion of a file system from the user. How theyre doing this and what theyre doing exactly I'm not sure, maybe FAT32 wasnt suitable for what they were trying to achieve.

or arrested

Afrikaans is my mothertongue so I tend to count in that but for larger numbers I probably revert to English (First 10 years of my life was spent speaking Afrikaans exclusively, second 10 years was mostly English with Afrikaans at home). If you give me a very large number in English I would be able to visualise it a bit quicker than the same number in Afrikaans, but for lower more frequently used numbers they'd both be exactly the same. Just different words for the same concepts. As far as dreams go, it depends who I'm speaking to in my dream. If its my friends I speak in English and if its at home I speak in Afrikaans.

As somebody who is fluently bilingual (speaking one language at home and another while out with friends), my thoughts tend to be neither English or Afrikaans but rather concepts which are then translated. When I think I generally dont think in words unless I think about thinking in words. I'm sure many other bilingual people that speak both languages frequently can probably say something similar.