(Disclaimer: I am a Microsoft Employee, but do-not-represent-the-company, etc. etc.)

Releasing patches does cost money in the company, and it does come out of that group's budget. I am not aware of anyone ever losing their bonus over a patch, although seeing how bonuses for us peons are tied to your performance review, if someone really messed up on a patch it could effect their performance review and thus, their bonus. It wouldn't surprise me if someone at some point managed to lose their salary (ie. fired) but I don't know of any specific examples.

Word in no way is WYSIWYG. It pretty explicitly is a layout engine, You change the margins, page settings of your document, target it to a different printer, it reflows your document. If your default printer on machine A has different page settings then your default printer on machine B then the document is flowed differently, this is *expected* behavior. PowerPoint is a little more WYSIWYG, but it's still reliant on machine-specific things like fonts. If you rely on non-standard fonts that aren't on the other machine of course it's not going to show up right. There's still other thing like relying on features that were added in newer versions of powerpoint where if you try to open it in a older version it'll do a best effort attempt to render everything correctly, but it's not guaranteed to get everything pixel perfect.

Wow. You can't even read the quote? Warners has admitted that they incorrectly asserted copyright on the song and in fact don't own the copyright. This guy has never worked with a major label, does in fact own all his copyrights, and has only licensed the song for time-limited, non exclusive publishing in the past.

Treos never had wifi because old PalmOS didn't support it. The one Treo palm made with wifi only ran Windows Mobile.

Around San Jose (where a lot of these tech jobs are) the median house price got up to 748k pre-crash, it's down to 550k now, and that'd be most likely for a smallish 2 or 3 bd house, and not in the area with the best schools.

I just moved to Seattle, another area with a lot of tech jobs thanks to the likes of Microsoft and Amazon, the median peaked out at 391k, just a tad under 400. And most engineers with families are looking for houses that are significantly above the median, more likely in that "75th Percentile" range where the public schools are better. Especially around San Jose where paradoxically the public schools in the nicer parts of town are better at academics, and the private schools are better at sports.

Which city? I live in Seattle, our city blocks (at least the part of it that is a city) are tiny. New York City on the other hand has big blocks and small blocks, and ever their small blocks are larger then ours.

I'm not sure what the value would be to Intel if VxWorks only supported Intel CPUs, I would think that would drive device manufacturers to use other companies embedded OSs/tools instead.

He's not wrong on the training. Washington State has crazy liqour laws that no one seems to be particularly happy with, but part of that is special required training for anyone that serves alcohol:

http://liq.wa.gov/licensing/mast.aspx

Not to mention a ridiculous markup on liquor in Washington (and Oregon too). I just moved to Seattle from California and most hard liquor costs roughly twice as much as it did in California, and can only be bought from State-owned-and-run liquor states. (Ex. I could often get a handle of Captain Mo for $18-19 on sale at Albertsons or Costco in California, the same costs $36 at a WA State Liquor Store)

That's why PCWorld as worst in Customer service and in practically every single other cateory as well among the 14 Top ISPs? That's why the BBB had previously warned people about Charter's miserable customer service?

Are you one of the customer support reps that LIE to people on the phone when they ask when the installer is coming?

You can resent my stance all you want, you can pretend that the constant heap of shit you pile on your customers is making them happy, but it seems like there is an awfully large amount of incredibly unhappy customers.

As a former Charter customer all I can say is that they should just sell off all that company's assets wholesale. There's a reason why this company is hemorrhaging money, it's not just because of their massive amounts of debt, it's the crappy way they treat their customers.

Charter's customer service made me long for Comcast's we-only-mildly-screw-you service. There was an entire MONTH where Charter in San Luis Obispo didn't know how to configure their damned routers so there was massive lag spikes (~2min lag spikes every 5 or so min) and about 300ms of lag when you weren't in a lag spike. They managed to get it set up in such a way that no one could directly log into AIM (it was possible through services like meebo) and if you called customer service they would first try to tell you that your computer was broken, and then that it was a "DNS issue."

They forced these miserable Moxi boxes on everyone about a year before they were available at retail. Moxi is another one of Paul Allen's ventures, and in short they were using Charter's customers as beta test guinea pigs. Even the sales people in Charter's regional office were blasting those damn things calling them "pieces of shit" in front of the customers!

Then there's also moronic city planners that don't know how to set traffic lights up and create conditions under peak traffic that have their lights timed so that there never is any space for people making turns onto the road. By the time space clears out to make that turn your light has already turned red and the space is being filled by more people going straight on the road.

I've lived in several places where this was an exceedingly common problem, but the intersection of 9th & Mercer in Seattle is by far the worst I've seen (map) It can take 10 minutes to get from Broad & 9th to make the left hand turn on Mercer during rush hour because of that. I ended up rerouting the way I get to that intersection so I could avoid that turn and shave at least 10 minutes off the time it takes me to get to work during rush hour when I drive.

This unfortunately means the only way traffic EVER moves on that street during rush hour is if people move into the intersection while they have a green light. Thanks to how the lights are timed shortly before the left turn light turns red the light ahead on mercer will turn green and they'll get to move out of the intersection. Better traffic management could solve this problem, but if the city instead decides to place traffic cameras there to hand out tickets they would be incentivized to leave it broken.

Feinstein is that special brand of Democrat coming from a state where there's almost no viable Republican challengers so she's free to give the American people the bird as much as she wants. There's rumors that Schwarzenegger might run against Barbara Boxer in 2010 though.

Assuming you have a phone that can be tethered to your computer so you can connect. It kinda breaks the "no internet access" thing. Or should it be expected that people will spend $40/month for a wireless internet plan, or $30/month on top of their current cell phone plan for provider-approved tethering. (Yes I know there are unlocked phones and jailbroken iPhones that you can tether without the approval of your phone company, but not everyone has that either.)