Microsoft knows exactly what they are doing. Nokia had the hardware and the software to evolve and at least be able to push the market around enough to make a place at the table. Now you have a software company without the hardware and the biggest issue was lack of patents in the mobile space. So they let the word out that they are going to take the market seriously and buddy up with Nokia to get it done. They toss a few nice things Nokia's way and tell them to stop bothering with the software. Let them go on a diet and sell off their software division to feed the CXO's. Now put out a few dud's and wait for the company to get desperate and when the price is right and buy them out.

We all knew this was the way it was going to go, some maybe disillusioned that Nokia didn't pickup on the whole thing but alas here we are. Microsoft can throw duds for a couple more years until Nokia beggs to be taken. By that time Windows Phone OS will be mature and they will likely have a better foot hold in the market.

Will Microsoft be able to "beat" Google and Apple? Not likely, will they integrate the tech into similar devices and lock you into it? Of course they will. Discount PC's with locked boot loaders, cellular modems and some form of portability will be the norm. Eventually the tech will just naturally shrink in size and power consumption, the transition between ARM based software and X86 will be null and you will just carry your PC in your pocket.

Developed Cypertext recovery of all encryption systems to date.

Hard disk reliability is mostly linear. The drive will work untill it doesn't anymore. Web/Cloud services go up and down based on many factors rather than the few that affect mechanical drives. Mechanical drives can fail if one or more of their components fail or the system that accesses them fails. Web/Cloud services have the same set of factors (they still use mechanical drives and systems connected to them) but now you have to factor in the transport of data through various Intermediaries (service outages, political situations, lack of provision). Much of this as seen from Amazon AWS and others comes with out notice.

Also in the fine print many providers of any SaaS will outline their lack of responsibility if their service goes down and your account is no longer accessible, which would be classified as "catastrophic".

TL;DR

Can you say Cloud systems are more reliable than physical medium? Not really.

Think of it like this. You decide to invest in a mom and pop shop, lets say a convience store. You of course ask that all is on the 'up and up' and they of course tell you it is. You pay them their price and take over the business.

First day on the job someone comes in asking for drugs. You of course have no idea what they are referring to and the patron shows you the back room wich is full of said drugs. You facilitate the purchase of the drugs and send the person on their way.

Google owns the store but the people still come in looking for drugs and keep going away happy. I am pretty sure before Google acquired Motorolla Mobility (Google being into data and all) they did a very indepth audit of the data being stored and what was going over the network. It would be kind of hard to miss hundreds of thousands "call ins" from products in the field with and entire infrastructure to facilitate this data harvesting.

So as far as saying "How could they know?" just be considerate to us all and accept they definately know.

What are you going to do with millions of video feeds without the infrastructure to sift through them?

I think the idea of using this infrastructure to charge batteries would be useful. If the power provided would serve to power the car and enough surplus to charge the battery you would never need to stop at a fuel/charge station again.

I agree there are too many problems that this could cause (putting the machines on a 'timer') than they would benifit from security. If any company is having mission critical hardware / software handled through the internet you must have engineers or at least senior support staff present to make sure all goes well, after all when are you going to ensure the equipment is running properly, Monday morning 8am?

Have the connection closed with a metal case and a key, when the time comes the company doing the update will contact you and you pay the support staff / engineers to be present. One of the support staff has the key to the lan jack and plugs the cable in, over the phone you cooridinate the service and test the equipment when the work is done. Once all is done disconnect the LAN cable and lock the housing over the jack.

This ensures the right person allows access and is present when the equipment is operated on.

As a bonus you don't find out first shift Monday that production is down.

It shouldn't be that hard proving the house and car are yours.

Try to organize a group set that allows for specific goals but incourage inter-communication. For example encouraging people from all aspects of education you will get awide range of interraction, add in a few people of high / advanced Linux skill sets to educate on different Linux skills.

Sofware Skills

1. Installation and maintenence
2. LFH (Linux FS structures) and working with devices (block and character)
3. Scripting / editing / debugging

Hardware Skills

1. Serial and parralell communications
2. PCI(X)/MSI/USB/I2C/GPIO
3. Hardware modding and reverse engineering*
4. Electronics(capacitance resistance, voltage, current, amplification, ICs)*

* Whle these skills don't necessarily pertain to Linux/GNU directly, in many cases LUGs will lead to custom solutions to intresting problems, even more so if you include people across the educational spectrum.

Development Skills

1. Compilers / Interpreters
2. Kernel / Low level programming
3. Libraries

Make sure you have lots of terminals, work bench, a are parts, a few soldering irons, a dremmel and a drill.

I guess it's a good thing that Google is the only online advertiser and no other ad company would be willing to pick up the slack.

Because as they said you don't NEED a constant internet connection but you will likely have to have one.

At first most developers won't give this cloud thing a second look. Maybe some cut scenes will get some crazy effect. Then a few games that sport Cloud Edition(TM) will come out and sport some nice eye candy when you are online but fall back to local render when you are offline. Now the bar gets higher and higher until basically your Xbox is a thin client and with out a rocking internet connection you mine as well be playing Pong.

These companies want the umbilical cord, they need the umbilical cord.

It's not like almost every major software company doesn't already have data centers and it's not like they aren't planning newer and bigger ones as we speak. So why not? Once the big number crunching is done for one level then cache it and never do it again, tell the end user it's fresh every time.

What about setting up a bucket with a simple circuit in the bottom that would make it easy for the ants to gather? Put a one way valve on it to keep them in. Once the bucket is full, dispose.

Maybe you think your order of 10,000 light bulbs was significant but consider that Walmart, Target, Apple, Foxcon and many, many others buy and sell that before the greeters put on their vests. Your a small fry my friend and you got the bussiness like a small fry. 10K of something might seem like a big deal to you but you mean as much to them as a basement dweller does to Intel.

If you think China has some kind of mailing list that covers exactly what they are doing you have got to be the most naive person on the net. Personally I don't know of any uber projects they have but sitting behind a computer and saying they are 40+ years behind tech and still fight with bamboo sticks you are really giving yourself a disservice. I just realize the likely hood that China really doesn't like the west all that much and they would love you to think they are just training their troops in a new kind of Kung-Fu.

China has an emmense population of genius level citizens and have basically perfected mass production. Hell most of the top talent in the US is Chinese decent. As for the money spent on defense you have to remember China is basically Communist, they don't have to pay your ass to build shit. So just because you heard a news wire that China just built a prop plane pull your head out of your ass and wake up to reality. If this shit does get serious it will become overwhelmly serious quick. The Middle East has problems with the US, the far East has problems with the US and your dumbass is sitting back just playing these guys off.

That my friend is a dumbass thing to do.

That is pretty much what it is. They only went the exta mile and set up thresholds which beep.