who knew, Greenspan was a proponent of what is essentially "soft-slavery".

Bill, we've been over this before. Snowden tried the legal channels, informing his superiors 10x, and got nowhere. If you bothered to closely follow the story, you'd see your suggestions were tried and failed.

Armchair critics are stupid. "Why couldn't Rosa Parks just ask the bus driver for permission, did she really need to get arrested?"

hey, you, paid Russian web-propaganda dude! You're on the wrong thread. This is the thread for the paid pro-Nuclear web propaganda team. The Ukraine thread is about a page and a half down.

Every time I come on to one of these threads about radiation, usually dozens of very knowledgable people come on and say that this kind of radiation is less than a bannana, and therefore, safe. I can't imagine what could possibly be causing such observations of slowing decay. Maybe those scientists are part of the world coal-burning conspiracy who are trying to raise the earth's climate to make it more habitable for the aliens, and are spreading false stories to discredit that clean, clean, safe and reliable nuclear power.

as in meatspace, language is still a powerful barrier. Though at least there are tools to try to address that.

this implies a hijacking.

I hope this "king" dies of dysentery too.

They can surely make Nuclear Devices fairly rapidly. I doubt they will be able to weaponize them within a reasonable time-frame. (reasonable being: the time it takes Russia to steamroller the whole country and seize any facilities).

Zune wasn't rejected because it was late to market.

It was rejected because Microsoft refused to give up on their lockin, and make the system open so that users could play any non-DRM'd format. Like it or not, the enforced DRM presents a serious usability issue for non-technical users. (Technical users don't care about usability problems - but they appreciate "slick" when it's there, and they appreciate ways to work around "only plays protected .WMV files"). When grandma's Zune won't play the files that little Johnny ripped off his CD or Napster, they don't give a fuck who's rights are being violated. All they know is "shit's broken".

Add to this; Microsoft was far-behind in terms of technical capabilities, compared to other players. (video, audio quality, etc - and later, iPod touch with apps and all that). Microsoft could have sunk enough R&D into Zune to do all that. But I think MS never really believed that they could succeed.

The worst part about metro is that it's straight-up ADWARE. Right there on the main screen of the computer, delivered by the OS developer.

You can remove it, you can change it, but by default, Microsoft decides what "tiles" are on your screen, and what gets displayed. The user wants an application-picker. Metro is like a billboard, when the user needs a dashboard - and it's no surprise that drivers go careening into the guardrails every time they sit down behind the Windows 8 wheel.

Gates was too meek to have ever fired Ballmer. And too powerful to let him come to harm, no matter what he did.

In general, CEO's are the "rock star" of the business world today.

But I would say that MS was an exception. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer founded that company. They were executives because they were there at the start. Not because they were charismatic, or even technically competent. All they did was oversee the OS's pillaging of IBM's former market dominance. (look at IBM now, lol!).

If you look at Microsoft's products, "charisma" is not a factor in the equation. There's lots of "attempted charisma" that falls far short of the self-scrutiny that is required to attain real charisma. Here and there, Microsoft does shine, technically. (like Active Directory). But the business-side of it was run basically like organized crime (lockin). And that put a nasty stink on everything that came out of Redmond. Ballmer was pretty handy with the gangster stuff. But that's about it.

"inherited" is right.

The only reason he was ever employed at Microsoft in the first place, is because he was Bill Gates' card-playing business-major friend in college. He was a co-founder of Microsoft. If Bill Gates didn't know him, I am pretty sure that this obtuse, bullying gangster would never have had the technical chops to get in to such a position. I have to say one thing about Microsoft is that they were so successful, even Ballmer's intimate involvement could not sink them.

"laser based" is irrelevant, except as a way to get the quantum effects.

And even if those effects are real, I'm guessing that 'quantum' is not able to provide stronger encryption, only to make it easier to *break* encryption.

Tell your boss to spend the money on a new yacht instead.