I'd laugh if it turned out to be Dell's test boot proxy and a glitch in the windows activation has it send the request despite having a cached activation.

Dunno, but possibly huge like dark matter interaction.
It's like with radioactive elements a hundred years ago. They didn't know what the stuff could actually do, so they painted it on clock faces to make them visible in the dark.
Here they could have the key to warping space/time, and the first use is to putter along in orbit cheaply.

"With pouty lips and an amazing rack, Blow White is the naughtiest in the sack."

Nah, just E.
It will be introduced to the public via incredibly annoying commercials featuring stereotypical frat guys telling each other "Duuuude! She so wants the E!" "Ya man, I showed her my E last night and she was all over it!" and so on. Ending with them in uncomfortable silence after one of them (probably the token uncool guy) makes a homoerotic comment about another guy's E.

On a Computer, Online, In the Cloud!
Synergy!

Ok, I'm all buzzworded out...

Bah, unsustainable! Only Coal, Oil, and Natural Gas can supply the clean, affordable power Real Americans need to see.
Next they'll be wasting our tax dollars on wind, tidal, and hydro powered implants.

Niblog.

Human sacrifices! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!

No, liquid fuels don't require a lot of NEW infrastructure to store and transfer.
A lot of the infrastructure installation costs have been paid already, but that doesn't mean the tanks, piping and gobs of safety equipment isn't there.

At the dawn of the automobile industry there was no infrastructure setup for gas cars, everything was setup for horses. That quickly changed as stables went out of business and gas stations popped up. All that change wasn't free.

All in all the transition to electric vehicles would be a lot cheaper and less disruptive than the one from horses to gas cars. There are still a good number of similarities between the two technologies, if only in form. And a current gas station could fully transition to electric by replacing their underground storage tank with an underground battery/capacitor bank, no need to completely redesign their business. The first big benefit is the lack of gasoline spills/leaks to worry about, cutting down on the need for a fluid barrier underground.

The 80's predicted cable would expand to thousands of channels. Hyper specific channels so at any one time you could find the exact programming you desire and keep your eyeballs glued to the screen. And ESPN, with their multiple channels, was the first to the gate. They fantasied for twenty years how much revenue they could pull with lots of channels serving hyper specific programming.
Too bad the prediction was off by a delivery mechanism. Hyper specific info streams are the norm, but it isn't the product of TV studios.

This is them getting pissy that reality keeps diverging more from their plan. They're fighting back as much as possible trying to salvage it.

They did extensive testing with scale models and some ice cubes from the pub down the road.
Per their tests it can even survive an iceberg falling in it from hundreds of feet up.

"Stop learning so much about the world around you. Knowing why complex natural events happen makes it harder to control people through fear of our magic invisible sky ruler."

Pretty much every cop show/movie will pull this at some point.
Whether it's the Loose Cannon being tough on crime to get results, or the 100% By The Book Boyscout (who doesn't even jay walk when chasing a fleeing suspect) doing it after the badguys do something so evil it's the only alternative (or they made him snap and he goes into Badass Loose Cannon mode for the rest of the film).

Voip modified to support stream handoff.
If a handset gets a new network signal (wifi or just a better 3g/4g connection) with a higher priority, it could sign into the voip servers over the new connection without killing the other session and schedule a stream handoff from the lower priority connection to the new one.
Basically what a cell signal already does when a user moves between towers, but Over The Internet. So probably already patented by 30 different companies.

This is why I would love to see a cheap data only service. There is no reason for smartphones to have dedicated voice/text service when it could all be taken care of by a data connection and a VoIP provider.

Those degenerate insects were born in a cell for crying out loud? What more proof do you need of their criminal nature?