If we had unlimited power all the other problems are probably solvable through application of more power (for noise reduction, for instance, some sort of active noise-cancelling system, like a giant pair of Bose headphones). It would be a pain in the ass to maintain, and it would probably cause nasty environmental problems in the colder parts of the world (barring further application of our hypothetical unlimited power source).

Today's XKCD strip seems appropriate here. Granted, there's no guarantee that Microsoft actually plans on implementing this ever...

Part of it is fixed costs - it's expensive to roll out fiber to the home, and that expense doesn't change whether you're buying the 15Mbps tier or the 150Mbps tier. The other part is naked greed; Verizon is a telco, after all.

I think they mean "supply" as in upload or originate, which they clearly didn't do in this case. They do supply some of their own content in the form of stuff like YouTube Live or various partnered offerings, but they're not directly responsible what users upload, which is most of the content on the site.

Considering prices for FiOS went up this year to $55/month for me, Verizon definitely does have the requisite testicular fortitude.

Support for flash is available under Android 2.2, as is running apps from external storage. External storage has always been accessible for media, caching, etc. It would be pretty hard to find a modern phone chipset out there that doesn't support 3D acceleration of some sort, particularly on something as high end as a 2GHz chip. Can't comment on the document editing - there's definitely apps out there for it, but I'd rather work with something closer to a full-sized keyboard.

Basically, it sounds like there's two things here. Blocking P2P software that interferes with other P2P software in a malware-esque fashion, and enforcing clear notifications that shared files are, well, shared. Seems dumb, but a lot of folks out there don't realize that if they share "My Documents," everything from their tax records to their secret porn stash is going to be on the web for all and sundry to download. This hits home particularly hard for gov't employees, considering some of the sensitive stuff that's leaked through LimeWire and the like over the years.

Just wanted to note that Microsoft does actually have a 'Microsoft Update' system that will update other Microsoft products (Office, Visual Studio, etc) installed on the system. I don't think it's available for pre-Vista systems, and it's a far cry from apt-get and the like, but it's a step in the right direction.

...or that it was publicly available from his account (in the form of email address or homepage link) at the time.

I think I remember Slashdot being forced to turn over details in a Scientology case, but I don't remember any others.

...Jim Davis? Really? I can see making an argument for the first three on that list, but Davis has long since given himself over to hackdom. The best thing he's done recently is let the "Garfield without Garfield" book be published. I can remember some ingenuity in his early strips, but he has largely been recycling the same joke templates for years now, and his characters rarely if ever show any interesting new facets. Why not Schulz, or (if we're not limiting ourselves to American cartoonists) 4-koma master Kiyohiko Azuma?

There's an unauthorized play with the Peanuts characters called "Dog sees God" that does rather a lot with the theme of Charlie Brown's hopefulness. Some of it's just for shock value (Linus has become a stoner, Pigpen develops a nasty mean streak), but the show is worth it for the ending, where CB's hopefulness is, after sixteen or seventeen years of repeated disappointment, vindicated just a tiny bit.

Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.