Uhm, nobody bought one. Google gave them away for free to anyone that pre-ordered them.

I can't speak to breakage in Windows 7, but Windows 8 flat-out removes the IFilter technology that older version of Windows provided, which allowed third-party software to extract text from various file formats to do things like build desktop search technologies. From here:

So, "created properly" really doesn't guarantee that it will work on future versions of Windows unless you assume that "properly" means that you have a crystal ball and can tell which technologies Microsoft will discard in the future.

Well, student loans are virtually impossible to discharge through bankruptcy, which is presumably not the case with these loans, so they are a great deal for the student that doesn't plan to actually pay the money back (probably less great for the lender).

That's one reason to go public. Other reasons would be so that owners can more easily cash out their shares, or so that employees can be given stock/options with some liquidity and established value. I've seen stories like AK Marc's before -- it's called a reverse takover.

Equally important, it doesn't require f*ing Flash to view.

A teaspoon of sugar is about 16 calories, which is nothing compared to a can of non-diet soda. It's hardly worth making your drink taste like crap (making it more likely that you'll to give up on your diet completely) to squeeze out every last calorie.

NIH = Not Invented Here

This is follow-up to this story from a week ago.

Way to miss the point. I (and other readers) would happily fix the problem for them if they provided any means to do so, but they don't. Instead, they provide an illusion of wanting feedback when they won't bother to actually read it, which is worse than simply not accepting feedback at all since it wastes the submitter's time for nothing. Other sites, like the PHP documentation site, manage to handle user feedback, but Microsoft can't?

Also, whenever function arguments are of some #define'd type (e.g. DWORD, LPSTR, SQLHDBC), those type names should all link to some explanation of what they are and how to appropriately generate and use them (e.g. how to do conversions between all of the different string types) so developers don't have to go on a long expedition to find out how to set up the inputs for a function.

Minor rant, but look at the "InConnectionString Argument" section (which I can expand/collapse [useless] but can't link directly to, which is annoying) of this page. Try to read their grammar for a connection string. Confused yet? There are line breaks that have completely disappeared, causing words to merge together (e.g. "connection-stringattribute" should be "connection-string" with "attribute" being on a new line). I filled out the little "did you find this helpful" thing at the bottom of the page explaining the problem a year ago, and it hasn't been fixed. Dumping half-assed documentation on the web and not fixing (reported!) errors wastes the time of each individual developer that has to read/decipher it. The PHP online documentation is one of the most useful ones I've found, largely because it allows users to add comments/examples that make things clearer. Microsoft does the opposite -- not only can users not add to it, but the improvements that users suggest (through the "did you find this helpful" thing) are ignored. Perhaps all of the useful information is on StackOverflow because Microsoft doesn't allow it to be added to their own documentation.

More generally, it should be easy to bookmark pages (URLs should NOT break, even when new versions are released!) and sections within pages so it is easy to refer back to important things, as you could with paper documentation. Documentation for each function/object should link back to an overview that explains how it fits into things, and it should link to examples that show how all of the arguments (not just one special use case) works. Documentation should explain any differences between new/old behavior of any function/object because not everyone is developing for the latest version of the OS or development platform. And, just to beat a dead horse, users should be able to submit improvements/clarifications that actually get used.

On the other hand, if someone says "the price increased tenfold" would they mean the price is now 10p or 11p? Taking the words literally, as you have for reducing tenfold, it would be 11p, but I would guess that most people intend 10p -- not that it's right, but people tend to use such language in a very sloppy manner.

Except that the exchange rate for Bitcoin may not be as well established as other currencies (I don't know that for sure, but it seems a reasonable guess), making it harder for your employer to defend the amount they paid during an audit.

I don't think you understand how a futures contract works (or you're just wildly speculating). The futures price is not the price of the underlying asset -- it takes into account the appreciation of the underlying asset that is expected to occur over the life of the contract (and some adjustment for interest rates). So, the expected payout (ignoring interest rate effects) of the contract is $0.

Also (this is more a reply to the parent), futures contracts are "marked to market." You pay nothing to enter into one (although you'll need to have cash in your account). Each day money is added/removed to your account based on changes to the future price, so the value of the contract itself is zero. Hence, if someone pays you in futures, they've paid you nothing -- you may gain/lose money in the future due to fluctuations, but the expected value of those fluctuations is 0.

If anything, I would expect visible="hidden" to be worse since: "With ‘visibility’ set to hidden, however, processing occurs as if the element were part of the rendering tree and still taking up space, but not actually rendered onto the canvas." I don't have time to verify that at the moment, but maybe I'll test it later and post an update.