This story is about collusion with publishers, not about market share. Read the article, there is a part where they discuss Amazon.

It's called the Jack Bauer principle

Ok I'll call your BS on shorting BC.

First of all to be able to short something you need a broker that will lend it to you. There is no broker out there that will lend bitcoins on signature, so IRL you'd need to provision a fairly high amount to cover your position. But let's stay in your fantasy world and suppose that because you are blowing the brokerage firm's CEO at will they lend you 10,000 bitcoins.

So you go on the exchange and sell them at their market value of $100 each (of course in your fantasy world there are no brokerage or exchange fees, and there are always buyers lined up to pile on virtual currency). Then you give a call to your mole in the DHS and ask him to crack down on a random bitcoin exchange. The market falls and you buy back the bitcoins at $50 a piece (since all other people in the market are morons who will sell when the price is low), making a nice $500k profit after giving the bitcoins back to the broker. Wonderful.

Of course there is the unlikely scenario that your DHS mole cannot deliver, or that the DHS is unable to shutdown a bitcoin exchange, or that the market will not react with a panic and wipe half the value of bitcoins. In that scenario, for each $1 increase in the value of bitcoin you will lose $10,000. Depending on how nervous the broker is, once the value reaches $110 he may very well knock on your door to recall the loan, at which point you have to not only give him the $1 million you made when you sold the borrowed bitcoins but also re-mortage your house to pay the extra $100k you owe him.

See, when a scheme is described in more than simplistic bullet points it often loses its apparent cleverness.

Anyone claiming to be able to perform market manipulation or use a government agency to trigger a series of predefined actions that will end up in making millions is either severly misinformed or outright stupid. There could be other explanations but they fall under the "diagnosis" category and legally require a medical degree so I'll leave them out.

If your explanation for this situation was part of a list of 50 explanations where the 49 others are redacted and I had to gamble every dollar I have, I would definitely pick at random one of the other 49.

Yes, that's how bad I think your explanation is. It's like a bad plot for a Steven Seagal movie except instead of being a former Special Ops operative trying to save an orphan from a ukrainian pedophile ring he would be the owner of an indian-friendly BitCoin exchange that throws a fit when he finds out that a retarded intern at the DHS has added the name of his exchange to the no-fly list in order to damage his business and make money. The movie would end with no explanation as to how exactly the retarded intern was planning to make money with this scheme because even while they were high the writers could not find an explanation that would make sense to their undemanding audience.

Well we'll have to postpone this fascinating discussion as it seems Microsoft is planning to revert some of the design decisions in Windows 8, making the thread irrelevant.

Silver lining: If they bring back the Start button but still require Metro apps to be deployed from the Windows Store only we'll know the idiots have won.

The two big evils that prevents simple and effective systems integration are:
1) Using point-to-point integration (instead of something more flexible like SOA) to "save time"
2) Using custom shared libraries and/or a in-house framework to "save time"

The second one is counter-intuitive for a lot of developers who worship libraries. But the reality is that the economics of building internal frameworks are usually weak because most languages and platforms evolve before the alleged productivity gains for developers have paid off, kickstarting a round of upgrade (or rewrite) on the library. I've seen a lot of integration projects where the bulk of the cost was linked to internal libraries requiring systemic upgrades.

Those are very good points. I boycott the mods system because fanbois use it to bury relevant comments otherwise I'd mod you up.

Now proven wrong, you adjust your complaint from "non-existing predictive text" to "non-intuitive default options". Basically you don't have an actual issue, you are simply going out of your way to bash Windows 8. Very brave to do so on Slashdot.

For the sake of discussion: default options in Windows 8 are a mixed blessing. As an example, in previous versions of Windows one could pick the timezone during the setup; now like a lot of options it's set by default (silently), which can be annoying. It looks like Microsoft decided to make the setup a lot more straightforward, and this design decision is also reflected in the very basic and user-friendly "PC Settings" page. It has the same feeling as on other OS where a lot of stuff is hidden under the hood. Computers for dummies.

However there is a minor benefit to that approach: since user settings are stored in the cloud, when an option is changed on one device it is changed on all devices where the user logs on. This is no innovation as this was already available on other devices (like Google Nexus) but it makes the issue of default options a bit less annoying; it can actually be very convenient not to have to answer to the same questions every time a new machine is configured.

Windows 8 has two modes: Metro and Desktop. On a tablet, the Metro (RT) mode offers more or less the same experience as other tablets like the iPad or Nexus (all swipes and gestures), but with less apps in the Store. It's not unpleasant to read news, watch movies or keep an eye on the stock market on Metro apps; it is very smooth, it's visually interesting and the context-aware Charms bar is convenient once you get the hang of it. The biggest issue on Metro is that there is not a lot of high-quality apps in the Store; even those from big names like Amazon are often incomplete and require a visit to the website to do anything serious. But it's getting there, and since it's possible to write a Metro app entirely in HTML5 and Javascript I guess the Store offering will grow over time. I disagree with the way Microsoft is handling the Store (it's very similar to Apple, very restrictive and flaky) but I guess they were afraid of all those VB people taking the Metro wave.

As for the Desktop mode, I agree that it is not well-suited for a tablet (unless is comes with a physical keyboard, but then it's a netbook not a tablet). The keyboard is not the same and won't activate automatically; using the touch interface for right-clicks is awkward and having to mess around with thin scrollbars is unpleasant. In my opinion it's a poor way to slowly migrate people towards Metro.

But the worse of it all is that Office is not available in Metro, only on Desktop. Same goes for all the big Microsoft applications (Visual Studio, etc). It feels like Microsoft is trying to have it both ways with Desktop and Metro but it's not working, it's confusing.

At the end of the day Windows 8 is not a bad OS and does not deserve all the misinformed bashing it gets. It is pretty stable, has a decent firewall and antivirus built-in, has very effective file versioning features and does a good job of storing settings (and files if desired) in the cloud. But the bashing is typical; every single release of Windows has endless floods of people who don't know what they talk about come out and complaint endlessly. These people are like those commies who keep predicting the fall of capitalism or Baghdad Bob claiming victory on tv with american tanks driving by in the background. It's almost cute.

Of course he gets it. This approach is typical Microsoft: embrace, extend, extinguish.

Apple has been growing too fast and keeps trying to wow the market to maintain their overinflated stock price so they started pushing products that are broken or at the very least not fully ready, and they even endanger their existing high-quality ecosystem (Adobe, etc) to make 99 cents games like Angry Birds available on their laptops without requiring a different build. Meanwhile Microsoft is working hard to repeat their success recipe: sell something that mostly works for 90% of the needs of 90% of the customers, and strong-arm OEMs in pushing their stuff. What is very likely to happen in the coming years is that people will end up thinking that a tablet is something like Surface, a convertible laptop, running the same Windows that they have on their laptops and PCs and possibly phones.

To anyone who thinks Bill Gates "does not get it", I strongly advise to watch the excellent movie Pirates of Silicon Valley (not the documentary). Especially that scene where Steve Jobs tells Bill Gates that Apple products are better, and Bill Gates replies this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgSYF0QIcCw

This is the same kind of flawed logic that is used by people who say that allowing same-sex marriage opens the door to adult-minor or human-animal marriage. Technically they are right (changing the definition of marriage is a requirement for those alternate scenarios) but it's stupid all the same.

Unfortunately I dropped out of school early to go earn moneys but I'm sure in college they teach about this typical logical flaw and even have a name for it. Otherwise college is worthless and I'm happy I did not go.

When you say "Windows tablet" do you mean Surface? Because there are a lot of other products out there that run Windows 8. In any event, predictive text IS available in the vanilla Windows 8, you just have to enable it in the "Ease of access options" app. Here is a video that shows how: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60zFkIOzvTo

In Windows 8 there is a small eye icon in password fields when they get the focus, if you click on it you can see the field content in clear text.

Seriously, WIndows 8 has plenty of issues but people who can't STFW for basic tutorial information are just adding noise to the discussion.

A few explanations:
1) Those posts are not from people. They are from buggy bots.
2) Those posts are cleverly encrypted messages sent to/from secret agents (or terrorist or pedophiles or bronies), hiding secrets in plain sights.
3) Those posts are ASCII-encoded mp3s and Slashdot is used as the backend storage for muzofon.com
4) Those posts don't exist, you are hallucinating.

No need for that. The police just has to call the crime lab at CSI Miami or Chloe down at the CTU. If all the moles have been properly smoked out from those organizations it should be possible to get 3D pictures of both suspects.

"The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that he did not exist". A trick that was also used by Keyser Söze and apparently now God.

Saw the same thing once. I was setting up an intranet web server for a client (big telco in North America) and the IP address I was given was a public one. At first I figured they wanted to setup some kind of DMZ so I asked the network guy if they were planning on doing some kind of NAT but he said: no, it's internal only. Out of curiosity I ran a whois on the address and it belonged to an APNIC public block. I then noticed that my laptop was also getting an IP address in that range via DHCP.
I was not there long enough to rock the boat and I never had an explanation but I came up with two theories:
1) they bought a router on eBay, it came from China and was pre-configured with those IPs and they just went along with it.
2) they had to setup a VPN between offices and they kept having subnet addressing conflicts so they just randomly picked numbers for the LAN to be done with it.

This sounds silly but this kind of thing can definitely happen in heavily ITILized environment where nobody is looking at the big picture, they just focus on the tickets they have to close and sometimes things fall between two seats and nobody cares.