MSDNAA licenses are only valid while you are a student, and only for using as part of your education. You didn't "get" a copy for $0, they only lent you a license.

I meant "confirm" as in "strengthen the suspicion". It's one of its definitions, even if not the most common one. Feel free to look it up.

It is a known fact (or well, highly guessable at least), that Microsoft's goal has shifted from selling Operating Systems, to having a mostly free platform ("free" in this case implies the user has paid the "Microsoft Tax" at least once in the life of the device), as a means to make the Windows Store as accessible as possible.

All of the new features in Visual Studio 2015 regarding porting apps from Android/iOS, all the rumors that there may be Windows 10 phones "soon", etc. simply confirm this. Microsoft's goal is to make it as easy as possible to purchase things from the Store, so that they can get their cut of the sales.

I decided to install the Insider Preview on my laptop, as a means to evaluate Windows 10 before the final version touches my desktop, and so far I'm liking it. It does have a couple of annoyances, but overall it's good, and the in-place upgrade was flawless for me.

That said, to the point: I have a handful of updates in my WU that I decided not to install just yet. All of them popped up around the same time, and all of them are related to the upgrade process between Windows 7 and Windows 10. Once I decide to upgrade to Windows 10, I will unblock KB3035583 and friends, and let Microsoft upgrade to the new OS in-place.

Actually, I think I read that they observed people getting a benefit from taking a placebo pill, even if they know it's placebo. Not nearly as much as people believing it works, but that'd give it more than null effectiveness.

That only makes it worse. Homeopathy is based on pseudoscience that is just plain stupid, if people use that name for other things, and there are examples of things that DO WORK (even if they aren't based on the same principles that make homeopathy impossible to work), they will use them as examples that homeopathy DOES work, which will only help misinform people.

They charge ME for the books, but only pay the authors if I read them? WTF kind of logic is that? If I pay, they should receive. I may have to buy my ebooks elsewhere.

The key is to really understand how closures work (and by extension, why javascript "classes" look the way they do). If you manage that, the rest of the language just comes easy and shouldn't be an issue. ;P

+1 to this. Polls are OK. *Anything* mixed into the articles is not OK, polls included.

I'd say that the fire element represents energy. Heat is the most obvious form of energy so it makes sense to use it as a representation of all energy interactions.

The other 3 elements represent the primary states of matter. Plasma wasn't discovered until much later, so it wasn't included in the list of elements at the time. Although, it could be said that the aether is dark matter, which would bring the total to 6?

Most? What is the sun but a very very large ball of fire? In the end, everything but hydrogen has been born in a star's blaze, and hydrogen itself was born in the primordial heat of the big bang. Everything in the universe has been ultimately put where it is thanks to heat and very high pressures.

...but I already have Ghostery for that, so it doesn't offset the news about ads in the default home page.

I'm all up for revealing bad secrets and showing the world the bad side of governments, but these are private emails with personal information. As far as leaking goes, this has everything of the bad, and nothing of the good.

The poster probably means implement in the sense of taking something and getting it to work reliably on a production system or corporate network.

Because Apple makes a lot of money selling proprietary overpriced cables. They are overpriced enough that they can get away with including identification systems that attempt to prevent third-party cables from working.