Putting hard numbers is kind of pointless. I'm going to go on a limb and assume most people reading this are either north american or european...

If you live in Montreal, you can make 75k (USD equivalent), have 4 kids, send them to college, and while its not gonna be fun by any mean, everyone will be fed, you'll be able to send them all to daycare, and in the end they'll all have the option of getting whatever degree they want.

If you live in Boston, NYC or London, make 75k, have 2 kids, you can probably make it? Their highschool may have a few more thugs than you'd like, your apartment's landlord probably won't give a damn about you..money's gonna be tight.

If you live in Tokyo. Lets just not.

Cost of living is just too different to give out blanket numbers.

Most rewarding to some, maybe most....absolutely not all. I personally highly dislike kids, and everyone around me knows it. The reasons aren't important, whats important is that since it is known that I hate kids, a lot of people will tell me things they wouldn't say out loud..generally out of shame.

While i fully believe the VAST majority of the population loves their kids more than anything, a small, but significant percentage are just not meant for it (I've read a few studies that say about 10%....plus or minus a bit depending on gender. Don't know if those numbers are true...doesn't matter). The amount of people who'll say things like "This was the best thing that ever happened to me!!!" in public, then turn around and whisper in my hear they wish it had never happened, is almost scary. Then there's also the people who just were not ready when they got them, or the most commons: got kids with the wrong person (more common among people who get kids when they're young).

After all, the only thing constant about human nature, is that its inconsistent :)

Follow the money trail. Do you see why Banks avoid storing data in Cloud

Err? All of the top investment banks have massive projects to move some of their less sensitive infrastructures (and in some cases even sensitive stuff) in the cloud. The biggest hurdle is legal compliance. If you're a big investment firm and you want to, let say, using Google Apps for your emails, you need to strike a deal with Google to make sure the way its all stored can be audited and is in compliance with the 6 bazillion laws to protect against insider trading and money laundering.

If it wasn't for that, they'd be flipping Cloud stuff all over the place.

Disclaimer: I worked on projects to move infrastructure to Google Apps and Microsoft Azure for one of the biggest US investment bank.

If it wasn't for wallstreet and the constant need for "growth" quarter after quarter, I wonder how long it would be before Microsoft considers the cost of doing business in the EU to be too high to be worth it.

They were convicted of abusing a monopoly and have to pay for it, but the market is completely different today than it was back then. And as much as it would make some people here happy, is a market with just Apple, Linux and Google best for customers? In world that's quickly becoming a phone/tablet world, Microsoft won't have a majority marketshare for very long, and the barrier for entry is incredibly high for another player to replace them...

About as much singing and dancing and tinkerbell as you saw in The Avengers, I would guess :)

Except Windows 8 and Windows RT tablets look very similar. The asus models look pretty much exactly the same, except the Windows 8 versions come in thicker/larger models, but aside for that they're the same. Convertible tablets with keyboard add-ons.

When the hardware looks the same, and the UI of the operating system looks the same... its easy for even some geeks to get confused.

Id say GWT if i had to guess.

Bingo. Especially in fields with high demand, your starting salary will be heavily dependent on how good you are at negotiating, and is only loosely proportional to your qualification. How hardball you can play during negotiation, and more importantly, how long you mind waiting for a job, can make a 30-40% difference easily.

If you're, let say, worried about feeding your family, you're much less likely to decline an offer because you got offered $X instead of $X + 5000, while when I'm looking for a job, I'll look at what's average in my area for someone with my qualification, and I'll just refuse offers until I get something substantially over it (assuming all positions are equal). Just because I can.

Of course, the difference in personality over things like this between genders is partly affected by gender discrimination to begin with, but that's not all of it.

WP7, not Win7. That is Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8.

That's true in the us too which I think was the point. I'm in the US and can get 300mb. 75+ is fairly available. It's more expensive than in other countries but adjusted to cost of living only a few have it much cheaper
It's still not as good as it could be but...

Control panel: get your mouse in the bottom left corner, right click -> control panel.

Want to see your documents: same place -> file explorer.

Those will work from anywhere, metro app, start screen or desktop.

The only one that im a bit iffy about right now is doing a search for specific files. I didn't see a "classic" version of it, just the metro version, and that one's on the iffy side.

Yeah, testing out the RTM from MSDN here too. At first my initial reaction was on the negative side, mainly because without touch, some of the little "tricks" to get around aren't as intuitive as they should be... they tell you most of them during install, but not all of them.

After that, it was pretty good. My only complaint is that some of the built-in Metro apps are lacking in polish a bit. The messenger app doesn't let you use a different windows account than your main account (I moved country, my msn account is from Canada, which cannot be used on the US app store, but the messenger app wont let me use a different one). The photo app won't look at network shares (while the music app and the video app do it just fine...). Little things like that.

I'm not too worried about the built in apps though since third party apps will be superior soon enough.

Aside that and a few minor glitches on the desktop, its pretty solid.

Diamonds are just as bad, but differently. Diamonds aren't rare. They aren't even particularly uncommon, except for enormous ones. Rather, their scarcity is artificially maintained by DeBeers, whose existence depends on maintaining that scarcity. Heck, synthetic diamonds are cheaply available for industrial use, so any use of diamonds as money is effectively turning tools into cash overnight.

And jewelry grade synthetics are starting to show up. The ones I've seen were still brutally expensive (relatively speaking), but since they tend to be better in every way than the natural one, are cheaper than the (extremely rare) natural equivalent.

If we're talking about SSDs in the last 14 month period, give or take a few months, keep in mind there was a huge batch of sandforce-based SSDs that, for a while, had very, VERY buggy firmwares that caused everything from constant crashes, blue screens, freezing, bad writes that corrupted everything whenever you patched the system or installed new software.... The firmware updates eventually came out that fixed the issue completely, but that took a while, and I expect most people who bought one of these (they were the cheapest "fast" SSDs for quite some time...don't know about time) to be having nothing but trouble, and resellers would replace them under warranty (which was pointless: the new one would also have the bad firmware).

We went through 3 of these ourselves until we realized it was a firmware issue, and it took 2-3 firmware updates each stating they would "FINALLY" fix it before they actually did.

Not saying that covers all the cases, but considering how common those SSDs were last year, it probably is the cause of quite a few.

Such systems do exist in the US, they're just not totally universal, depending on who you deal with.

But i totally can pay all my bills, rent, utilities, everything, via a unified system. Its not accessible from "anywhere" like the parent talked about, but it is accessible from ATMs everywhere and from my bank's website. I'm from Canada where the system is a bit more universal, but now that I live in the US, at least anything I actually need to deal with works through that system. Good enough. Everything at the end of the pipeline hits my credit card and I get 1-2% cashback on that (which adds up quickly if all my purchases not done at small chinatown restaurants go through it).

At first glance the problem in the US isn't that such systems don't exist. Its that there are -too many of them- so it took longer for standards to get accepted.