Proven revenue stream for Microsoft has been:
1) Get computer makers to include windows preinstalled.
2) Encourage enterprises to buy Microsoft Office, Exchange and Windows Server.

The "proven" android style stuff is not going to sit well with many large organizations. And in fact may negatively affect their proven revenue stream.

If Microsoft starts requiring enterprise desktop users to have a Microsoft account they're going to get a lot of resistance. Especially with the NSA debacle.

I now understand... you are making shit up and have no idea what you're talking about.
Ok, I'll leave now.

It isn't the "progressives" that mandated e-verify, that was all conservatives trying to keep the brown people from working and voting.
And if the progressives had their way and there with universal health care (instead of the republican RomneyCare plan) then the hiring and firing employees would be that much simpler; a whole category of paperwork and costs... gone.

Stop doing things that seem illegal or immoral to your employees. Stop lying. Stop cheating. Stop cowering behind secret courts.

As people say about the data collected by the NSA: if you haven't done anything wrong then you have nothing to hide. The NSA was hiding this program because they knew it was wrong.

Well, if the OpenBSD project releases patches like this, there is a huge cryout. Of course, it doesn't happen all that much.

Do you bruise easily with that thin skin of yours?

Lighten up, Frances...

Explicitly marking sarcasm and irony as such is rather defeating the point, isn't it?

I'm sure dispatch systems are a different animal entirely, but long ago I worked at a place with a centralized walkie-talkie repeater; it had two units and rotated which was master every 12-24 hours so the backup was always tested. It was a Motorola system.

Thanks.

I don't have a ton of experience with native English speakers outside of Americans so I didn't want to claim that problem for anyone else.

The lack of third person plural is an interesting thing. The funny thing is in some places in the USA y'all wont do it either. Y'all has become second person singular and "all y'all" is the plural.

Of course every language has it's oddities. I do think getting a functional command of English is pretty easy. I think that part of this is that English speakers are used to hearing it used in so many different ways. I'm trying to learn Hungarian and let me tell you, aside from being intrinsically difficult, native speakers are not used to hearing it from any one but other native speakers who all use it in pretty much identical fashion. (There is one small group that have an 'accent' sort of but I think that's pretty uncommon.)

The really nice thing about having more than one language at your disposal is that you can use the one that works better for the situation. When I'm talking with a Hungarian in English and I'm not sure if they are saying 15 or 50, I just switch to Hungarian numbers and there's not an issue any more.

Feel free to knock yourself out with wxPython - but I really recommend taking a good look at PyQT if you haven't already. It is a joy to work with and just a very, very nice way to build good Python guis.

They have great tools for building the interface if you want to go that route. Though of course you don't have to, you could code it all. And there are a ton of really good guides out there to help show you how to get started. The new Python plugin for KDevelop includes a nice template that will give you everything you need to get started right out of the box.

Anyway - just a thought.

I bet he still believes he didn't actually win a badge either.

Also any faster and the NSA won't be able to keep up... ;)

I've had taxi drivers tell me they didn't want to go where I wanted to go. They're taxi drivers not slaves.

Maybe they think there'll be a bad traffic jam where I'm going and they won't make as much money. Or they're finishing their shift soon and want to be in a different area when they do. Or they want to head to another area which they think will make them more money.

Our wii is region locked. So my son's friend brought over a game and they couldn't play it. I've seen that the new xbox and playstation wont have region blocking so that seems to be moving in a good direction.

A lot of stuff on the web is region locked - I run into it on youtube constantly. The vpn I use gets me around a lot of stuff but misses on youtube a lot. (It only routes traffic for certain things so that I don't take the performance hit when I don't need to.) In fact google is horrible about this. Often when they release new Android apps they are US only. I can't even go to the Nexus 7 sales page without being on the vpn.

That's mostly it. There are the things that are just different - but that's not the same. It is annoying how much stuff the US does differently than just about everyone else. It would be nice if my home country got on board with everybody else in terms of the metric system for example. Coax connectors in Europe are different. The power system of course and so on. My son's bicycle might have a leaky tire, so I'll be finding out if wheel sizes are the same. I know valve stems are different so it will mean a new pump. But the longer I live here the less stuff I have where that matters.

I would say that so far in my travels and living in Europe my experience hasn't been that these schemes enforce higher prices in the US. I'd guess the US is in the middle, with developing nations lower and developed nations other than the US paying higher prices. Though this can be tough to judge. For example here the sales tax is higher and the manufacturer has to honor much longer warranty terms per EU law.