They had been threatened a few times before implementing it. It's about time we stopped to play this game and make it clear stuff like that won't be tolerated at all.

It wouldn't have been better for Microsoft. They know very well that each product they establish as a monopoly increases their chance of coming back as an all-around industry leader. Actually, I'd be willing to bet this wasn't a "technical error". I've never seen features just unexpectedly disappear out of any piece of software.

Same goes for reviews on Google Play. No reviews for anyone, then.

Your sound like an executive too, putting emphasis on well-researched words, and mentioning things like capturing inspiration.

As far as I've seen, there is little inspiration involved in most programming environments, just a lot of thinking.

I'm going to assume this was meant to be insulting. A lot of that is going around on HN these days. It's really too bad.

I'll just leave it at this. Isn't inspiration often the end-result of careful thought?

I don't see what about an office makes it the right place for the thinking you see in programming environments. I've solved more hard problems in the shower than I have at my desk.

Sorry if you found that insulting. I guess I got used to this aspetic cold language you see on HN to make emotion invisible. That's one of the things I miss from Reddit.

I know there are many people like you that somehow intuitively capture these abstract concepts, and I respect that. I just find it amusing that you can notice these things even when the person is out of work. That's when you differentiate the manipulative managers from the true ones.

My point wasn't particularly focusing in offices. Being pragmatic and rather emotion-less, I find programming requires more logic and method than feelings.

enjo is absolutely right. I regularly require inspiration in order to solve difficult problems. This inspiration generally never happens when sitting in front of a computer screen - most of my ideas come when I am walking, swimming, cycling, etc.

Certainly there are many dull development jobs that require no inspiration or even much thinking - I worked in many of them before I got bored to death and started my own business.

If you are in one of those dead-end jobs, you're not the kind of person that enjo is talking about.

>I too was unsure what to call it, but if they listen to the feedback, I think "whatever it's called" is really awesome and could be a legitimate substitute to the ppt platform. At least I would be interested in making a few presentations with it.

Agreed, I like it. It looks like the stuff that goes on in futuristic movies, with a lot of things happening on the screen and no one is really looking at anything particular but it's impressive. This has a potential. Who's up to make this WIC software?

Both work for me.

Well, yes. I think this particular censorship was in place over a decade ago and I doubt it's still active.

And this is exactly how we generate random values with a certain distribution.

It's not actually ASCII, there are many more characters used. It is however "ASCII art", in that the characters are used to graphically represent places and objects.

Why would you go through that when paper is much more comfortable to write on?

Isn't it obvious? When you have your stuff stored digitally it

(a) takes care of the organizational aspects of note taking and

(b) makes notes reusable.

The payoff as a student is exam prep: Now you sit at a powerful desktop computer with, say, 2x 21 inch screen estate at your disposal. You have a file explorer, a layout document editor (I use Pages and/or Keynote for this) and a good pdf viewer open (with your exported notes). Now it's a matter of copy & pasting all the information from your notes, the official class notes, literature, etc. onto your layout document which then becomes your summary.

This is of course doable by hand but it's a lot more work and it's not as easy to extend it - you can't just make room for new information on a full piece of paper (and summaries, especially the ones you can take to exams, tend to be very full).

You're thinking of referendums. A petition is a small number of people pissed about something that not everyone may be interested in. I'm sure my grandparents have never heard of Aaron Swartz and don't know what "jailbreaking" means, so it makes no sense to make them take a decision.

my post was tongue-in-cheek...

We have elections. Demanding that a petition from 100,000 people override the results of an election is ridiculous. The administration is responding to the petitions with their position -- I think that's about all they have the right to expect.

The last two sentences you wrote are incompatible.