You do realize that once you have a sufficient number of apps, the iPhone app panel works just like the Kin one right?

I've read quite a few articles on this thing. Interestingly, the Kin 1 (egg shaped one), is getting all the good press and the Kin 2 (candy bar) is being derided as just another blah blah smart phone form factor. While I too am more attracted to the Kin 2 form factor, I think MS really did their homework and the Kin 1 will prove to be more popular among the devices target audience. Somebody here doesn't get it, but it isn't MS.

Theres two reasons with that:

Foremost, because MS has more then one type of customers. Kin is aimed at the younger social network junkies who want a lot of social network and multimedia stuff build in and don't really care about having an open development platform; these users likely don't have or want andriod/iphones and the Kin isn't meant to compete with those platforms. Conversely, Windows Phone 7 will be the full on development platform for power users that goes head to head with iphone/android.

Secondarily, winmo 7 was having some time-line issues last year, so the Kin ended up using some of the older, tried and true, technologies to reduce the risk of depending on winmo7 and to be able to get to market faster. I suspect in future iterations the kin will more closely resemble other Windows Phones in the backend.

My strategy is to just not worry about it. I post whatever I fee like on the internet and if my employer decides to fire me over it, tough shit for him. I'm an awesome employee and there's plenty of companies that would gladly hire me with full knowledge of my dirty liberal ways. Of course my stance is made easier by the fact that the software industry tends to be pretty relaxed about ideological stances or weekend indiscretions that don't effect job performance.

Microsoft employs a lot more Chinese developers then Google (or most anybody for that matter). MS pays those developers about twice as much as other tech companies and 10 times as much as the average labor in the area. Perhaps they are doing more good by spurring economic development in china. That development leads to more people being able to have internet access. More people will see the censorship and really no filter can prevent everything from getting through.
 
I suppose they could still employ people in China and just not offer their software there anymore, but that seems like a poor way to conduct business given a lot of the Chinese employees work on China specific stuff

Awhile back I read another similar article. In the article the smallest PE created is a bit larger (97 bytes), but a little more standards compliant. More interestingly, however, the author crafts a program that downloads and executes another program in only 133 bytes.

MS employees don't get anything free. They get steep discounts on MS software (85% or so off), but only a small discount on on hardware. I have, on occasion, seen xboxes for sale commercially for less then in the employee store. I did a year long contract for MS in the mobile division and I never heard of upper management discouraging iPhone use. The FTEs on my team used a wide range of mobile devices and I think it really helped to broaden people's horizons. I think management understood that. That said, MS is a very large creature and I saw only a little corner of it.

People care because textbook manufacturers try to create copies that appeal to the largest markets possible. Thus when Texas, a very large market in and of itself, cooks up a crazy curriculum for itself, the textbooks used nationwide get sucked down with it.

I think most slashdotters would be cranky if PF was trying to make it so the end user wasn't able to split the album up for private mixed tapes and whatnot after it had been purchased. In this case, PF is just trying to sell a product they created under terms to PFs liking. The end user can then buy or not buy it according to his/her whim.

Honestly I'm not rooting for html 5 to replace flash/Silverlight for RIA. I don't like having to have 5 times as many tests in my matrix (one for each browser). I don't like having to write ajax shims whenever I want to use the db from the client. I don't like how hard it is to make reusable html controls that can't break other parts of the site. I don't like how javascript scales up for larger projects... the list goes on. I'm welcome some improvements to html+javascript and for using it to display documents. That said, It simply isn't designed for RIA. Flash/Silverlight are.

My problem goes a step further. I like to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for like 10. I spend the same amount of my life sleeping/awake as a normal person, just in longer chunks. Trouble is, left to my own devices, I effectively "stay up" 4 hours later each night untill I wrap back around. Before I had a job I could actually live like that. It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up.

I've had 70+ teachers over the years. Maybe 4 of them were "bad". On the other hand, I've had to be in class with hundreds of lazy, disruptive, and/or stupid students who waste the entire class' time. If we got rid of the dead weight students, we could improve as a whole.

It ocurrs to me that the numbers I gave in that post are misleading. The failure rate is for an average woman in the first year. I suspect the average woman has a lot more sex then just once... All the same, my point about many women getting pregnant through no real fault of their own remains valid.