What, they haven't found a subtle and quiet way to sneak in like the N-S-A does?

If done right, such animations can be helpful to newbies, showing the relationship between the icon and the newly opened window (versus say a randomly popping message or spam). But after a while such "training wheels" get annoying and slow you down.

Linux back in the day looked like hell, but it worked.

Now it's reversed

When you open a new window, it flies out on to the screen...

The Ballmer "Chair" interface, eh?

Seriosouly, though, I hope there is an option to switch that animation off. I like quick response, and switched off the XP and Win7 animations on my PC. Please, don't take that away, Mr. Nadella.

and last 30 minutes on a charge.

Is there somewhere in Vegas I can bet on its failure? Finally my chance to get rich...

Or to start from the bottom as a manager who's studied essentially management

Oh Gawd, those are often the worse: idealistic, clueless about the domain, and experience-free

If you are making $80k a year, you should not have to bank $30k a year into savings in expectation of it spontaneously going to zero on a regular basis...

Welcome to IT: you get to do a high-dive off the fad board sometimes, but may land face first.

Let's say you were right. If companies can comb the world for the top 10% of IT talent (skipping the 90% you say are junk), then roughly 90% of the IT work in the USA will be from those cherry-picked foreigners.

Thus, the 90% should die in the street? (Since by the same logic, the Walmart greeters and burger flippers will also be cherry-picked from abroad.)

Perhaps this mentality is why income inequality is increasing.

I'm I following your view correctly? Feel free to clarify.

Maybe as a society it's better to value jobs over stuff rather than torture and discard 90% of the population so that 10% can have $5 lawn chairs. That's a political choice, but at least voters should know what they are up against. Some conservatives claim "trickle down" works (rich spending trickles down to poor), other conservatives don't care if there is no trickle-down and want a hard-edged Darwinian meritocracy, Ayn Rand style.

How does this fit into my worldview where H1-B Visa holders are taking all of our jobs and lowering all of our wages? I'm just lucky I am easily able to ignore evidence that I don't like, or else this article would be troubling.

Simple. IT has proven to be highly cyclical based on past events. Good times today don't necessarily mean good times tomorrow. The H1-B program has no guarantees that the visa workers will go home if bad times hit.

The H1-B program is not based on any objective measurement of "shortage" and does not significantly respond to changes in demand. (I've personally lived through this after the "dot-com" crash.)

Further, it has harmed those trying to get into higher-demand IT specialties from glut IT specialties. Companies typically prefer younger visa workers to older citizen vying for glut transfers.

Isn't a big iPad just a big iPad?

No, it's an iTable

Rumor has it The Feds played Yoko at the Waco TX Standoff in an attempt to irritate them out of hiding, and it may have been what triggered the suicidal outburst. But I've yet to verify that rumor.

so the "Dept. of Don't Be Evil" can plot their evilness growth curve.

Why the hell are we still stuck using Javascript...

Because it would take a large group of organizations to cooperate and work together, which rarely happens. Closed source wants to lock out competitors and open source wants to each be their own kings of their own little hills for bragging rights. (Almost nobody really works for "free", they all want either money or credit/status.)

I'd loooove to see a GUI-friendly markup language that is either far less dependent on any scripting or application code for the common desktop-like GUI idioms, or at least is not heavily dependent on ONE language, like JavaScript is per DOM.

But it's probably too big a project for a small group of geeks to get right (or to make good enough to gain traction). Rich GUI kits are not easy to implement. Plus, it probably has to be backward compatible with most of the existing HTML stack. The separation of applet and HTML page is part of what killed Java applets.

Great, until the robots get the e-b0la computer virus.

There's a secret Yoko Ono tune on the buried ET cartridges.