uygtfrgtyjuhk's comments

Thus allowing you to maximize your income, skill utilization and benefit to society - hence a commie plot (apparently)

Remember that a big chunk of the cost in canada (or the UK) is for geriatric care, mental illness, addicts etc - people who need long term 24x7 care. Things which are really social services.

The cost of actual medical care for a 20-50 something is a fraction of that if you were buying insurance purely for your likely illnesses. If you are comparing what a critical illness cost/month would be for a healthy young adult you could half this figure

Note that there is R&D and 'corporate R&D'

These aren't necessarily research positions, they are often just offshored software development work and even tech support call centers.

Anything that isn't billed per widget is often counted as R&D - especially when it comes to tax breaks!

Ironically the US actually spends more $/person for health care than the UK or Canada do to cover everyone.

Simply because the insurance and billing drive costs so much higher

In the UK, or anywhere else in Europe, or Canada - or pretty much any other capitalist country - you can leave your job for a better paying one or to start your own wealth creating business. This allows the country to maximize the value of your labor.

In the US you can't leave your job to start your own business because your children might get sick and die. Even leaving for another employer is tricky because there is often a 6-12month gap before the new health coverage kicks in and anything you had treated in the past (like a broken leg in a childhood cycling accident) becomes a pre-existing condition and the new place denies you coverage.

This very effectively reduces wage costs since the whole 'importing people from africa' thing was banned.

Linux, Samba, OpenOffice etc not competing with MSFT?

They claimed they were in their market statements

The difference is that this can only increase sells of Kinect hw and MSFT sw.

Samba allowed you to replace expensive Windows Servers and expensive Client access license with free Linux boxes != Balmer being a happy bunny

Why is it that people all remember this as the golden rule of the mythical man month?

The exact circumstances refer to a particular type of team development (surgical team) form a day when you wrote OSes in assembler and you had to coordinate who used which memory address for which variable.

Yet people use the advice to avoid adding testers or documentation people to a late project to relieve the developers. We have also advanced the programming techniques and tools a little since the IBM360.

Yes adding a large number of rookie/trainee programmers to a crunch project is a bad idea - but so is saying we can't get any extra help (Brook's says so) , we will just increase the hours the devs work until they are back on schedule.

MSFT is totally happy to use BSD licensed code in it's own products - but GPL code might compete with it's products.