I'll be the first to admit I enjoy a bit of give and take with snarky comments on the Internet, but for a person in his position I though his condescending Twitter comments regarding people who dare to live in places such as Wisconsin or Virginia were a bit shocking in their arrogance. I can't say I'm surprised at all at Microsoft letting him go.

Sorry for being unclear, indeed I did mean places like KC.

Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I know KC has it, I used to live there. My point was why does it have to be a "tech city" in order to have it. Again, sorry for being unclear.

"Why not San Francisco or Austin or somewhere where all the tech is?"

The better question is why not a place like Kansas City where the front lines of the consumer broadband battle are being fought? Isn't the main point of all this to expose what a farce typical broadband service is like in the US? How do you do that convincingly in a place as saturated with tech?

"Disclosed to the user upon installation"

Again, what you've described is users as a software warden, in which in the context of the Dynabook vision are "children of all ages".

This is a target-specific device (gaming console), not a traditional desktop. It doesn't bring Linux any closer to the desktop than the explosion of Android phones did.

One way to think of all of these organizations is to realize that if they require a charismatic leader who will shoot people in the knees when needed, then the corporate organization and process is a failure. It means no group can come up with a good decision and make it stick just because it is a good idea

On the contrary, without a leader to challenge people by setting the bar high, organizations may run with ideas that should've been shot down, and even if the idea has some merit there might not be enough incentive to improve upon it.

FTA:
"Apple with the iPad and iPhone goes even further and does not allow children to download an Etoy made by another child somewhere in the world. This could not be farther from the original intentions of the entire ARPA-IPTO/PARC community in the ’60s and ’70s.

Apple’s reasons for this are mostly bogus, and to the extent that security is an issue, what is insecure are the OSes supplied by the vendors (and the insecurities are the result of their own bad practices — they are not necessary)."

How is it an OS issue if a user downloads an app and grants an it full access to an iPhone and the app takes a copy of the contact list and the entire archive of phone calls and messages and beams them to a host somewhere in Russia without any further user interaction?

If the answer is the user must act as the software warden, how is a child supposed to guarantee this Etoy won't do any harm to the machine he or she is using?

In short, if the wall garden isn't the app curator then who is? The OS? The app developer? The child?

What could possibly go wrong?

Cliff Notes version: Modern OSes should adhere to the principle of least privilege.

Not entirely true. The 30 to 40 inch range size of TV screens are great for bedrooms, are cheap enough now to be purchased easily, and make games so much easier on the eyes to see things with than squinting at a mobile screen despite the mobile having better resolution.

Yes there are issues that need to be addressed, but there's no need to throw the entire console concept out of the window.

Some sort of proximity color sensor to detect the color scheme of your wardrobe and adjust the screen settings accordingly.

The new iTunes already does this with album art in album view now, it's subtle at first but pretty striking.

People pass on iPhone because they don't want to jailbreak it to make it useful, and therefore they go to an Android phone so they can jailbreak it and put Cyanogen on it to make it useful?

I don't follow.

Really, really big wings then.

Could you nudge my DNA so I can grow wings? It would make the commute to work much quicker.