It's not just the rich people in places like Clark County. Pretty much everybody living there goes over the border to Oregon to shop for big ticket items. For example, there's a huge shopping center near the airport on I-205 with an Ikea and other big box stores right across the river. The parking lot is filled with cars bearing Washington plates. In order to combat this effect, WA passed a law years ago which allows OR residents to shop in WA sales tax free.

Local sales taxes are still pretty high in many areas of Washington state. In Seattle, the rate is 9.5% on most things, 10% on restaurants. Various special excise taxes are relatively high here too. Two examples are liquor and cigarette taxes. The liquor taxes are the highest in the nation once you figure in the markup by the state liquor stores ($16 bottle of vodka at Costco in CA is like $42 in WA). Property taxes are relatively low (although maybe not as low as California in terms of real dollars collected with the Prop 13 caps). The tax breakdown is roughly one-third for each of sales/excise, property and B&O. A lot of the disparity is probably made up by B&O, which is a particularly weird tax that's not seen outside of WA as far as I know. It's a gross revenues (as opposed to income) business tax.

A legally mandated ballot screen. http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/19/windows-7s-european-browser-ballot-screen-revealed-rolling-out/

Red Dog was basically the code name for what's now called Azure.

Bing has come a long way since the days of Live Search and MSN Search.

What you describe is exactly Windows Phone (formerly known as Windows Mobile) 6.5 and it has not done well in the market. Its main features were a massive cleanup (as opposed to complete redesign in the case of 7) of the UI to make it more "finger friendly", Windows Marketplace for Mobile (i.e., an app store) and My Phone for backup/restore/find my phone. The lackluster sales of 6.5 have really shown that Microsoft had little choice but to undertake the massive backwards incompatible rewrite that is WP7.

Actually, Microsoft generally has a policy of giving each employee their own office. In certain parts of the company there are crowding problems, but it's rare to be more than paired up even in those groups.

Three things come to mind from my years living in Germany (may or may not be applicable to other European countries):

1. Dental care
2. Accomodations for the disabled
3. Smoking (this is changing quickly across Europe though now)

The reason WM has been such a failure is because clueless management refused to recognize that iPhone was radically changing the smart phone business. Microsoft was really one of the first players in the smartphone market, going back to the WinCE PDA days. For most of its history, the business was entirely about selling to business people at large companies. iPhone changed all of that rather quickly in the summer of 2007. People like Pieter Knook (SVP of mobile up to that point) refused to change the direction of the product towards the rapidly growing consumer market. Eventually, upper management cleaned house by firing Knook et al and brought in new leadership (Terry Myerson and Andy Lees, in particular) to completely turn Windows Mobile around. The plans for the next version were substantially reset, massive reorgs happened--basically house was cleaned. Only now are the results of that being seen with the new Windows Phone 7 stuff.

Two things:

1. Many gay couples already have and will continue to have children regardless of legal recognition of their relationships.
2. Most gay couples don't have children and will not have children in the future regardless of legal recognition of their relationships.

Ballots, while anonymous, are generally public records that can be examined by anybody. For example, here's a link to a letter from the Florida attorney general answering a question about ballots in that state being public record. Here's another one in Ohio. Including ballots as part of public records means that outside individuals or groups are free to verify that ballots were counted correctly. In fact, I think several newspapers did just that in Florida for the 2000 Presidential election. Ruling that petitions are confidential would make them less open than actual votes.

Who would decide whose marriages are "in the best interest of society" and what criteria would be used?

It would be hard to nail down fair, clear criteria unless it was something very simple like couples can only be married if they are currently raising minor children. Study after study (http://www.apa.org/pi/parent.html) has shown that kids raised by 2 gay parents fare about as well as those raised by 2 straight parents. The more significant component seems to be having two actively involved parents raising a child, rather than their specific gender or sexual orientation. Even then, there are plenty of single parents who do a much better job of raising their children than many couples, even married couples who are the biological parents of the child.

Most importantly though, it's undeniable that people (straight, gay, single, coupled) are going to continue having children regardless of their ability to marry. Don't those children deserve the protections conferred by the parents raising them being able to marry?

Even taking children out of the equation, there is a clear case to be made for supporting marriage. I mean, nobody's ever worked hard to ban or dissolve the marriages of people who either could not have or chose not to have children, right? Married people tend to fare better than those who are single with regard to happiness, longevity and health.

Compared to other developed countries, it is.

Actually, an intern position cannot even be hired unless there's sufficient full-time headcount available when the student is supposed to graduate. After completing an internship, the question becomes "do we want to keep this person?" because the position had to be available in case the intern was a keeper. Hiring interns is really nothing more than a "try before you buy" way of hiring.

Then when you interned, you were a sucker.