At this point the IE brand is so tainted that it's basically an albatross around MS' neck.

Because Spartan is a long-overdue pruning of the Trident codebase (which has been gathering ugly cruft for 17 years) rather than a clean sheet rewrite, it'll still carry a slight IE odor no matter how much they cut out. Even the name Spartan is ripe for jokes about it's feature implementation.

How about Bang, as in developers' heads against their desks?

Regardless of who's answer you believe, they would never drop it on Israel, and the reason why is simple. It is against Islamic law for a Muslim to cause harm to kill another Muslim.

Israel is surrounded by water and muslim countries. If anyone dropped a nuke on them, the follout is guaranteed to be blown over at least one muslim country regardless of wind direction (there's the simple answer), if not five or more. This would cause harm to or kill thousands of muslims, and any muslim country who did that would face an uprising that would make the Arab Spring look like a game of hackeysack.

Exactly. The NSA will use them.

It's pretty clear from anyone in the community that Arduino(TM) should belong to Arduino LLC. Massimo Banzi is the one person most associated with the name, arduino.cc is where everyone gets the IDE from and where the brand guidelines are, and a simple whois lookup shows it was created 26 October 2005.

But this is going to get very dirty and will drag out for a while.

I don't see them selling 3MM watches per year. That's probably why they did the stupid expensive versions, to recover the research and development costs via insane markup on very limited sales volume rather than the usual merely ridiculous Apple-expected markup on large sales volume.

Plus, the Swiss watch industry caters to an established, conservative market which doesn't have anywhere near complete overlap with whoever Apple expects to sell watches to. The Swiss guys will be just fine.

I just want a watch that has a cool face layout; if that means it has customizable TFT or e-ink, so be it.

However, a smartwatch that is tied to the manufacturer's phone devices is crippled by definition. Apple, Samsung, Sony, whoever... I don't want any of their smartwatches.

And we all know that when the next iOS comes out, it won't support these first gen iWatches.

Buy /. a staging server, obviously Dice took them all away.

MS has been trying to break into mobile for a decade, all while Apple, Google, and (for a while) BlackBerry did.

The Windows brand is tainted, even without the debacles of Vista and 8. Windows is everywhere else, and people are either tired of it (even subconsciously) or don't consider it a thing... it's dangerously close to becoming a generic trademark like Kleenex or Band-Aid, except that no one refers to their computers by the OS, if anything they refer to them by the OEM.

MS doesn't know how to connect with consumers for anything other than XBox. Consumer purchases are driven by emotion, but MS tries to sell to consumers with the same tactics and strategy that they sell to business: dispassionate and cost-driven. Hipsters and college kids don't care about that shit.

Also, MS still seems to do product feedback only to validate their own agenda.

Can we infer from this that the Federal government doesn't consider "suicide by two bullets to the back of the head" capital punishment?

Because we all know that (or something similarly underhanded) is going to happen.

Don't do it, Ed.

Yet another phone without a full QWERTY hardware keyboard, so I'll be keeping my Epic 4G even longer.

Thinness is an anti-feature. If people really wanted their phones to be paper thin, there wouldn't be a market for phone cases.

Standards compliance.

Seriously, all the solutions to those plans have been staring them in the face for 20 years. Ironically, MS's own desire for a monoculture on the web prevented them from seeing that.

You accidentally your links, but if one of them was SureWest, go with them.

Did you post this comment from 2010?

I've been following this rather passively, but all of this talk seems to only mention specific internet access methods: broadband and/or mobile broadband. However, we know there are a myriad of parallel methods, from satellite to dial-up. Unless all US Internet access is brought under Title II, the market will attempt to shift toward whichever methods are most exploitable for profit.