Normally I'd agree with the point you almost managed to make, which is that development costs necessarily include dead-ends and mistakes... but in this case they're including the development cost of things like smelly controllers, which should have been an obviously* stupid idea to all involved.

*Oh, the fragrance of faux-blood/gunpowder/explosions. Just what I wanted in my living room.

Well, that's not quite true. Perhaps $100M went into designing and testing all the different prototypes they ultimately discarded, and the one they used... but the one that they finally decided upon only cost a fraction of that.

It's sweet and all that you think paraphrasing xkcd shows that you have some kind of deeper insight, but you're clearly missing the point. A kernel mode exploit can do all the things that a user mode exploit can do, as well as install nasty malware like keyloggers, or worse... which in turn (likely) allows everything that physical access to the machine would have granted anyway.

So who cares? Me, and everyone even remotely versed in security.

While I agree that judging without prejudice is usually the best approach, I think in this case the liberal use of the second-person personal-pronoun (ie, "you") would have been a giveaway about who the intended target audience actually is... unless you think they are going to all this trouble to convince internal-only Microsoft employees not to use Chrome?

Designed to be "internal-only", my ass. Designed to be "leaked" is more like it...

According to this, yes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel

I dunno about you, but I'm an atheist because there simply aren't any gods... but an anti-theist because of the way faith and religion makes people behave. Small difference, perhaps, but I wouldn't want people to believe that my objective interpretation of reality is merely a response to the way those pricks behave.

Hah! Try again....

So this, don't get it. What happens after you've used up your quota of virgins? Do they magically get restored, or do you then have to spend eternity with a pack of thoroughly "used" women...? 'cause, assuming a standard rate, 72 virgins would only take a couple of months to get through, and I'm told eternity is much longer than that...

Said with all the arrogance and presumption of someone who knows exactly nothing of what they speak. Speaking as someone who spent over a decade as an anti-virus researcher and anti-virus engine developer, the truth is that it is infeasible for AV companies to keep up with the flood of (generated) malware that engulfs modern PCs... and, believe me, it's not for lack of trying. Have you ever seen how aggressively they complete over the VB100%* award?

* That award, like most AV testing is a sham (testing against a very small yet widely known sample of existing malware), but the point still holds: they really do want to catch the malware, if for no other reason than that the company that has the best detection rates can make the most sales.

When the number of items is small; when insertions and deletions are common and/or time-critical; when ordering is important...

Any of the above could alone be good enough reasons to use a linked list vs. a hash table, and obviously more than one criterion would make a stronger argument. But this is a very one dimensional discussion; in any of those cases, perhaps an array or an ordered tree would prove more appropriate... each case must be matched to a particular data structure on its own merits.

But Google doesn't try to get it completely right the first time. They release and iterate... and it is that philosophy which is (one of) the foundations of their speed.

Why are we all so busy blaming Pandora for this?

IIRC, they were just trying to save themselves from getting annihilated by these preposterous fees... and now we're giving them a hard time because they didn't save every other tiny internet radio station all at once?

Seems to me that we won the battle, but not the war (yet). So let's celebrate that instead of flagellating those fighting on our side, yeah?

Well, that's not exactly true. In the name of profit, one would annoy and imprison us; the other would happily destroy the world.

Oh, yeah, skydrive...
but isn't that a bit like Office Live
but isn't that a bit like Live Mesh

Can anyone say "Confused Product Strategy" three time backwards?