It's also about fame and power. Being noticed, having people rely on you, and being able to directly affect the lives of so many... these are like a drug.

And even if it starts out unselfishly, I've seen a few politicians get a taste of the drug and change ways. It sucks when I voted for them and feel the need to apologize for my support.

A solution to this problem is to organize decisions and action items into a centralized repository that can be viewed and tracked by everyone.

Email is best used for quick communication, not for project tracking.

Ballmer's best-before date was before he became CEO. He rode the monopoly train well past the station. The fact that he allowed the company to finally take risks with new product is pretty much the only twinkling of worthiness he had during his tenure.

And they should lie in it. Microsoft's monopoly in IE was one of the principal causes of stagnation in the industry during the mid 2000s.

Then again, that stagnation arguably led to some great innovations by others in the industry, which is why we've witnessed the mobile revolution and downfall of IE since.

Actually this brings up a side point... I would really like to have a good/standardized way to leave a voice message that works as you describe email, allowing the recipient to respond when you can get around to it. The problem with voicemail is that I have to call you to leave the message.

Calling interrupts you and you might answer, since you can't tell whether it needs immediate attention. So to leave an unimportant message, I need to type a text message or email... both of which are suboptimal in many situations (walking, driving, etc.).

Sure the web is decentralized, except for IP address assignment and DNS.

No, I'm pretty sure it is exactly unfathomable to any of us.

This is like saying Google is just a massive number of bits with a diverse range of activation functions finely tuned by evolution and experience.

While the statement is true, it bears little practical importance.

Whose reality? This is reality for many people.

Besides, if you take the "per GiB" out and just talk about a 500 GiB drive for $250, that is exactly how it works.

It's called money. Learn it.

I suppose, once you know when the bot is going to say that line, just preemptively ask it:

Then when it says

They almost certainly wouldn't have a leg to stand on.

I was thinking of this thread again (the tug-of-war definition) and thought of another interesting thing to calculate: What if I swap Pluto and Charon in the equation? Would it indicate that Pluto is also more influenced by Charon than the sun at times?

The answer is yes, meaning Pluto does not have a concave orbit either. The tug-of-war value focusing on Pluto as the primary body is 337.3 at perihelion, but focusing on Charon as the primary body it is 39.3. Since both are greater than 1, this means Pluto and Charon cause each other to have an occasionally convex orbit.

So perhaps this definition would still find Pluto/Charon to be a binary planet, but in a different way than the Earth/Moon are. Compare the numbers above with Earth/Moon: Earth-centric has a value of 0.45, Moon-centric has a value of 0.006. Both being less than 1, Earth and Moon always have concave orbits around the sun.

Add proper salting and an adequate number of iterations over the hashing function, and the attacker's computer will be necessarily slowed as well.

That definition would reduce the problem to the relationship of their masses.

There is no such thing as "Windows 9 developer preview". There's speculation that it will be called "Windows 9". There's speculation that it will have a developer preview. There's speculation about the system requirements. But that's all it is, speculation. No announcements and to my knowledge no leaks about any of those specific points have been made.

Until we see leaks or at least strong rumors by sources that have been correct in the past, nothing is "known". (Remember how many rumors we've had about Apple's iWatch and for how many years? Some even by credible sources? Yet we still don't have an iWatch.)

They could let the host venue determine whether to blackout. Some might, others wouldn't, and eventually the better outcome would become the most popular.