Mod parent up - this guy gets it.

While one may complain that the profits from from a small number of areas, the fact remains that MSFT simply shits out money from those two product lines, and is likely to do so for the foreseeable future. MSFT's financial metrics, see this indicate that they are firing on all cyclinders as a money making machine.

Way to mess a perfectly good diatribe with critical thinking and research. You must be new here. ;-)

Please elucidate your theory as to how this evidence suggests the existance of a creator. I hope it's something more than, "I don't understand how the world got here, so God must have done it. "

Or, as you imply here, that religious people are happy to be "ignorant."

Without meaning to be abusive or disrespectful, I will gently suggest that the core tenet of atheism is that it is impossible to be religious if you are a critical thinker. So, while belief in God may not prevent critical thinking, it IS evidence that there is one area of your life where you are actively NOT critically thinking.

The evidence is that religious people are in indeed happy to be ignorant/deluded.

I know, my world view versus yours and all that. But that is what the dynamic is.

Yeah, Dell has done pretty poorly.

They also pay a huge amount in the Business and Occupation tax, which every business pays in Washington.

If the IRS finds an error in your favor, they will correct your return and issue you a refund. This is true in audit situations as well as in the simple processing of your return.

To the main point, I have used turbo tax for close to 20 years, and can't imagine why someone wouldn't want to use a cheap and usable application like this. You have to be really cheap to not spring for the 34 dollars that you can get Turbo Tax for at Costco.

Somebody mod this guy way up.

Then why not just ask that directly?

One reason is that it's usually better to use an open ended question than a more directed question in interview situations.

Ticket prices are the same because the studios mandate the minimum price for ticket prices. The standard agreement between the theatres and the studios specifies what percentage of the gate receipts the studio gets (can be as high as 90% of the ticket price) and that the theatre will charge a certain minimum price. There are exceptions to this, but that is a default situation. Ticket prices therefore don't float in response to market demand because the enitity charging the prices, the theatre, is contracted to keep them fixed above a certain minimum.

Theatres would give movie tickets away in some circumstances if they could, in order to get you to come in and buy the concessions, which is where they make the bulk of their money. Studios counteract this behavior by mandating the high prices in the film rental contracts.

I know this because I used to support a software system that managed theatre accounting for a chain of movie theatres.

If there were enough of a market, the bare machines would be available. The fact that they aren't strongly suggests that there isn't much of a market for bare metal machines.

Absolutely none of that explains why they can't refund you the cost of the license if you wipe the drive.

Duh, it's because it's a pain in the ass and only about 17 people in the whole freaking country would want to do so and get the refund. PC manufacturers have no obligation to set up a special process to attend to the desires of the vanishingly small % of the population that wants a bare metal PC. For the segment that actually has a significant number of users that want bare metal machines, the server market, there are plenty of machines available. See my favorite white box provider, here for an example.

It's not free for a company to process refunds. Companies have clearly decided there is no money in offering bare metal machines. The segment of the market that actually cares about not paying the windows tax is small enough that it can be ignored. If it wasn't, you'd be able to buy bare metal machines, because someone would think they can make money doing so.

Sorry, but it's just a reality that there aren't that many people who care about this issue.

About 51%? (I'm not a statistician). You have one boy, so the odds are whatever the odds are for a random child being a boy, which is slightly greater than 50%. Do I get the prize?

He shrugged and said, without any sense of irony whatsoever, "I don't really know how to handle exceptions. I find it easier to just write code without any bugs in it."

Exceptions != bugs, as anyone who has programmed to a database connection would know. Not saying your friend isn't much better than I am, but there are a lot of areas where exceptions are part of the normal dialog between program units.

I know several people at Google, many at Microsoft, and many in other companies. The guys at Google are generally pretty good, but no better than MSFT or Amazon, both of whom value degrees much less than Google does.