I actually wrote a fair amount of UI code interfacing with Microsoft Agent as part of a research project, AutoTutor. While the L&H TTS engines were indeed the default for Agent, that's just because they were the default ones installed on Windows (2000 and XP) at the time. Agent allows you to load the TTS engine of your choice, so long as it supports the Speech API. Because the Speech API includes callbacks for phonemes spoken, Agent can synchronize lip movements of the character to what's being spoken by the speech engine regardless of its creator.

Ultimately, the poor quality of the L&H voices led us to SpeechWorks and AT&T's NaturalVoice products. Sadly, both the TTS and voice recognition fields went through major consolidations in the early 2000s, and now SpeechWorks is dead (acquired by Nuance). NaturalVoice is still available, more or less, from Wizzard Software.

The SkyDrive and other Live APIs are indeed opened -- for Windows Phone, iOS, Android, and Windows.

While I would agree that this is a sign of something curious in Firefox's code, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x4d2c09s(v=VS.100).aspx would seem to disagree with you on the MSVC compiler. In at least VS 2010, there's a x64 native versions of cl.exe.

Doesn't matter due to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Incorporation Doctrine.

Except for this:

...which is completely not true. If you serve up ActiveX controls, then yes, you need IE; however, there's nothing inherent in IIS or ASP.NET that requires IE on the client side.

Given the existence of the placebo effect, in what way do you suppose that the market -- consisting of individuals who operate on limited information -- will be able to tell the difference in efficacy between a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory and acupuncture? Especially given that so-called "alternative medicines" such as Zicam can effectively compete against science-based medicine even with FDA regulations in place? Do you propose we go back to the patent medicine era?

The reason we have the regulations we have by the FDA is because we tried working without them and, unsurprisingly, people died and a lot of unscrupulous hucksters made a lot of money. We have the same thing going on now with homeopathic medicine. What we need are good, functional, and smarter regulations, not merely fewer or more regulations.

Oh, and for what it's worth, FDA trial costs aren't even remotely the largest cost of a drug. Check out this study and its references. Marketing, in fact, is the largest cost of releasing a drug. Trials are considered R&D costs, which marketing dwarfs -- and bear in mind that according to this study and its sources, 13.2% of those R&D costs are in marketing-related trials. Please check your facts before posting; this took me all of a minute with a search engine to find in PLoS.

What's funny about this is that we *already* have this setup. SIPRnet, JWICS, and other networks running on the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) are already segregated from the public Internet by an air gap. This is actually required for any classified data. Information can sometimes enter a classified network from the outside world, but the mechanisms for doing so are extremely circumscribed and a massive amount of analysis has to go into making such systems "provably secure." In practice, NIPRnet and SIPRnet require different physical terminals. That's why we have things like the presidential Blackberry, which is essentially two Blackberries in the same case with a physical switch to swap between the unclassified and classified systems.

As for utilities and the like, sure, you have two options. One is to airgap the communications network, which is what I'd advise given the shoddy quality and poor security record of SCADA systems. The other is to use secure communications from the transport layer up and using defense in depth principles. Of course, that requires building security into the system from the ground up, and very few companies and people are willing to do that. In light of that, an airgapped network makes sense. If a truly independent network isn't needed, every backbone provider is more than happy to provide MPLS virtual networks for the right price.

In the end, though, I think the problem is that utilities don't want to spend the money on what they feel has no deterministic ROI (cf. trying to get a company to buy a disaster recovery system). This is rational self-interest, especially when you consider the explicit guarantee of insurance and the implicit guarantee of the government for critical infrastructure. The solutions are simple: enforce proper controls through regulation or nationalize the infrastructure so rational self-interest is removed.

ABAP is sufficiently similar to COBOL that I think it'd be fair to call it a relative in the same language family.

And if you think the SAP user interface is bad, may I introduce you to BAAN or Daly & Wolcott, both of which make SAP look like god's own gift to UIs?

My company runs SAP as its ERP system, and the project was only a little late -- but on budget and met its initial goals. We were migrating from Daly & Wolcott on an AS/400. Then again, we only have about 260 employees, and we did a fair amount of the work using our own people. We didn't just foist the whole thing off on consultants, as is most often the way.

As someone who writes integration code with ERP systems, I can say that for all the problems SAP has, it's not nearly as terrible as others. I've worked with CORRIDOR, BAAN, and Quantum Control MaxDB, and all of them are terrible, horrible monstrosities that barely work, are wildly oversold, have terrible user interfaces, are mostly undocumented or improperly documented, and are apparently designed to be as difficult to interact with as possible. Add to that stupid programming decisions (CORRIDOR uses materialized views for all DB work as opposed to stored procedures; Quantum Control loads DLLs by reading them into memory as data then jumping to their entry points, causing massive issues with DEP and weird crashes periodically) and it's amazing anyone buys these pieces of crap. By comparison, SAP is a thing of pure beauty, with its (usually) correct documentation, rock-solid stability, and actual supported interface points (RFC and IDOC).

The problem is that ERP systems all stink. SAP just happens to stink the least.

You write the code that actually does the queries as stored procedures in the database, then write a DAL that essentially works as a database driver. Your code does nothing to the DB other than requesting that it execute an SP, and the SPs can be tuned for the specific database server.

Of course, if you use a persistence framework that makes SPs difficult or impossible to use or if you started out on a database without SP support, you're screwed. This is all the more reason to start with the free versions of DB2 or SQL Server during development and scale up to the higher performance (and cost) versions as needed. Note that I've explicitly excluded Oracle from that list, as I've never once seen a production Oracle database ever reach the performance of... well, any other database server, really. I don't doubt that Oracle can be made fast; I just doubt that getting the personnel who know how to do that and paying them to do so is worth the cost compared to easier to use, less expensive, and faster out of the box systems like, oh, DB2 and SQL Server.

SharePoint is the problem. Outlook and Exchange are actually pretty easy to get up and running, assuming you don't do something stupid like get Small Business Server.

Where I work, we're very Microsoft, but for our collaboration needs, we use a combination of e-mail, Lync, and MediaWiki. SharePoint is rightly avoided like the plague it is.

That's why WPF and Silverlight both have an entire system for handling touch events and aren't bound to the form model of Windows Forms (now deprecated, actually; not quite obsolete or attributed Obsolete(), but definitely not receiving any new development). You can, for better or for worse, pull together all kinds of strange and new interfaces in WPF and Silverlight, and some of those would be good in a touch environment. In fact, Windows Phone 7 uses Silverlight as the UI and uses the theme/skin system baked into the architecture to make controls touch-friendly.

To be perfectly honest, I don't think Silverlight is toast, nor do I think WPF is going away. Microsoft is probably just trying to seem "into" HTML5 and JavaScript. Ultimately, we'll probably see JS added as a .NET Framework language and some new library that's not ASP.NET that allows the output of HTML5 using form controls.

Relatively high risk areas for tornadoes (which, by the way, covers a substantial part of the U.S.) are far, far less risky than high risk flood zones. A tornado is a short-lived, rare event that's capable of incredible damage, but that damage is contained to a small area. Tornadoes can have long paths, but the average tornado runs for about 5 miles in a 500 foot swath. That's a preciously small area of damage. The probability of suffering a tornado hit is quite low. In cities in such a zone, there are many homes that are over 100 years old that have suffered no wind or tornado damage. I know, 'cause I live in one.

Floods, on the other hand, do severe damage over a massive area (the floodplain) and are somewhat predictable in terms of probabilities. That's why the U.S. government provides guarantees for flood insurance, why FEMA puts so much effort into flood preparedness, and why your insurance rates are sky high if you live in a high risk flood zone.

Floods and tornadoes are completely different types of risks. It's entirely possible to live in a tornado prone area one's entire life and never be within sight of an actual tornado.

In some states, you have to spend money to temporarily lift a freeze. In Tennessee, for example, placing and permanently removing a freeze costs money, but a temporary lift is free. At any rate, how much credit are you applying for that means you need to lift the freeze constantly?

A security freeze is vastly superior to a monitoring service. With the freeze, damage is prevented because the credit report is inaccessible to the creditor -- who isn't likely to open an account if they can't check the credit of the requestor. Monitoring services just let you know you're screwed, and then you have to go and determine the extent of the damage, file a police report, and try to repair what's been done. This is substantially more unpleasant than just freezing your credit file.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." If you aren't here under diplomatic or some other kind of immunity, you're subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; see 83 US 36 and 112 US 94.

Maybe; I'm not familiar with British citizenship law, but I imagine that without being born on British soil, application for citizenship under jus sanguinius would be required when he wanted to claim that citizenship. You can have dual citizenship in both the UK and the US. As it turns out, the Constitution only cares that you're a "natural born citizen," which clearly means that you're not a naturalized citizen. Being a citizen by jus soli or jus sanguinius means that you were born into citizenship (by location or by blood), which is about as "natural born" as you can be. Also, 169 US 649 would seem to indicate that he is indeed a citizen by the 14th amendment unless said parent happened to be working for the British government in an official capacity, which isn't the case.

Maybe; I'm not familiar with Indonesian citizenship law. However, in most countries, the mere act of your parents being naturalized doesn't have any effect on your citizenship, in much the same way that a child of a foreign national, born on US soil, doesn't immediately make his or her parents into citizens despite the rabid claims about "terror babies." As we've already established he's a citizen by jus soli, and US law assumes anyone born on US soil is a citizen unless a proper objection can be raised to the contrary (and in this case, that'd be that both of his parents were not subject to US jurisdiction at the time, or that the birth certificate is fake, and both of those objections have been disproven), no forms need to be filled out. I don't know where this "file a form during his 21st year" thing is coming from, since the only relevant form here to assert citizenship in the US is the notification of foreign birth, which is filed by the parents with the State Department after the birth in cases of jus sanguinius where the child is born outside the US.

Really? Because I think crazy people spreading doubts complicates the political discourse to no advantage and is essentially demeaning an institution and a person with no evidence. In my book, that's rather unethical. Would you be okay with people bringing up doubts here about your sanity, or your recent battles with drug abuse? See how easy it is to "spread doubts" that serve no purpose other than to engage in a cheap shot against someone with whom you disagree?