But now with Metro, Microsoft are telling their whole community of developers that they need to make the biggest change in the history of Windows, to completely drop their proven, decades-old development tools and habits, and embrace a radically new programming paradigm and distribution channel. This requires large investments, and investments require trust, which tends to be lost when even the leader doesn't show the way.
It's fine with any touch interface, not just a phone.
Whatever the input method, I still have to see any "legacy" desktop application getting ported to Metro while maintaining the same feature set and exposing the same functionality. Not even Microsoft themselves managed to port Office, their most important asset, to Metro, yet. Even Windows 8.1 still sends you back to the desktop for many tasks, almost two years after Microsoft officially deprecated the "desktop" development.
Were that the case you'd make some effort to not be so horribly dependent on the US for strategic military support.
That's because most european countries, those with no post-colonial involvements, do not need strategic military support. The iron courtain is no more. They have no precious resources inside their boundaries. They no longer invade other countries, nor they interfere with other countries' politics, and as a result they have no enemies. The "peace missions" that once in a while they partake of are only excuses to spend public money.
Just so the Americans can jam Galileo whenever they want with no impact on their own system.
And the converse is true. Seems fair to me.
If a proprietary project with closed source uses the BSD licensed project but add nifty functions it is just a matter of writing similar functions of your own. When a GNU licensed project grabs some BSD code and improves upon you can't just write code that does the same, because if you do then it is very likely that your code will end up looking very much like the GNU licensed implementation and people will find it less plausible that you didn't look at the other source.
What's the difference? If you didn't look at the original code, then the chances that your own code will look very much like the invisible implementation are the same, whether that invisible implementation is GNU or proprietary. If you did look at the original code, then you're deriving from it, and you should respect its license.
But then again they are broke and looking to tax anyone except their own voters.
Actually, they're taxing their voters like there's no tomorrow. Italy has a fiscal pressure over GDP of 54%, which makes it the most taxed state among the developed countries. In a time when families are expected to give to the State more money than they can keep, I can't see anything questionable in asking Apple to pay up, or alternatively sell their phones to the Irish.
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.