Autoland has been a thing since the early 70s. The first aircraft to have it, the Hawker Siddeley Trident 3 (an aircraft similar to the Boeing 727 in layout - three engines at the back of the aircraft and T-tailed) was flying autolandings in pretty much zero visibility decades ago.

Since all modern large airliners are fly by wire, you're screwed anyway.

Airliners have multiple redundant power buses. Each engine has a generator, and there is also an APU (auxilliary power unit) which has a generator. If all three fail (for example, because the plane ran out of fuel, it's happened, or flies through a flock of Canada geese and loses all engines and for some reason the APU won't start) there is a ram air turbine that sticks out into the airflow and powers a generator. There is also a mandated amount of reserve battery power. Talking of losing all engine power, the Airbus A320 that went in the Hudson has purely electronic controls, and remained controllable after a double engine failure.

They glide much better than a brick. I think a typical airliner has something like a 16:1 glide ratio so from a cruise heigh of 11km could glide 176km (over 100 miles).

That's not how it works at all.

Airliners pretty much since the jet age have had at least some measure of "envelope protection". In the 60s this was pretty simple - just a stick pusher to prevent stalls since stalls in many airliners can easily become unrecoverable. Airbus's envelope protection is much more sophisticated than just a stick pusher.

However when there's a systems failure the Airbus systems will automatically drop to a different control law that effectively works like basic stick and rudder flying.

Boeing uses fly by wire now too by the way.

I was watching a TV show about Alaska, where some small town had their generator go out and they needed to fly in an engineer. In those tiny villages, the kind where an engineering degree means you can get a job somewhere else that can afford to pay you, remote monitoring and diagnosis is the only option they have. They had one guy in the town who had the keys to the building, knew to keep the fuel tanks filled, and could do some minor mechanical repairs to the system, but that was pretty much the limit of his capabilities.

Nobody in that town would be qualified enough to even understand those notices. Nobody there would likely know what software was being used, let alone visit the home pages of the company providing it. A town like that won't have the money to pay for monitoring services - they're going to be on a repair-only basis. And they're going to be the ideal consumers of a remote solution like the kind these firms are selling.

While this town may be a worst case scenario, it exemplifies the kinds of bad luck circumstances that would lead someone right into this risk, and CERT notices probably won't ever help them much.

I realize you're trying to make a joke in that all things are "things", but there's value in having a phrase that narrows the topic a bit. It's basically a catch-all term, like referring to the Internet's plumbing as "the cloud." The "things" in the Internet of Things are devices that aren't primarily information devices by design. A refrigerator may have a microcontroller to maintain temperature, but it wouldn't be called a computer. Adding internet connectivity to it still doesn't make it an information device, so it falls into the category of "Internet of Things".

Mobile phones, iPads, laptops, computers, these are primarily information devices that are generally not considered part of the IoT, although they may serve the user to interact with the things. And the line is very squishy. An IP-enabled TV set seems to straddle the border, and depending on context may or may not be part of the IoT discussion.

The "things" do offer benefits to people, just not giant big payoffs. A washing machine can alert you that the load needs to go in the dryer, or it can phone home for diagnostic and service information, potentially saving on repair bills. And certainly when the Smart Grid arrives, they will help people save money by managing usage. As many non-connected devices already have microcontrollers, adding a wifi chip and protocol stack may cost only a few extra dollars.

They don't have to be big benefits. As long as they deliver at least small incremental improvements, people will buy them.

I'm not saying that 50% of Americans will run out and replace every device in their house with IoT capable things. But as IoT devices hit the market, more and more people will start to acquire them as they replace their worn out goods. They will not arrive with a big bang, but in about 20 years or so, you won't be able to swing a cat in the homes of affluent Americans without hitting at least one or two IP devices. And what's the IoT going to look like then? Microsoft wants to be a part of shaping that now, because it is going to pay off big later.

Sadly, as for the people who can't afford to fix their cars let alone replace a broken washing machine, the gap is going to widen, and they are going to be left further behind. It's already apparent that they are stuck with bad choices, such as cheap-but-used energy-inefficient appliances. They can't afford to get to a managed, efficient refrigerator that could save them extra money over the long term, because they haven't the capital to spend today. That's part of the nature of an inequitable system. The only hope they'll have is that in 10 or 20 years that today's hand-me-downs can still get online and are energy efficient.

It seems like you really have no grasp on the concept of the Internet of Things. You're inventing ridiculous strawmen to slaughter to make your point. Nobody but you is talking about adding IP to showerheads.

The IoT is recognizing the idea that there are millions of IP enabled devices out there today, and the number is growing rapidly. The most visible examples include replacements like Nest or Honeywell thermostats, but other devices are entering homes, too, such as garage door openers, smoke alarms, light bulbs, and even washing machines. The most popular devices include entertainment systems that now can connect to Netflix or Hulu. Some of these will be successful, others won't. But the numbers are ever increasing, and people are buying them.

The market for them is also poised to go up rapidly. Today, they're primarily owned by early adopters, who are always willing to pay a premium. But there is something unusual about the IoT in that, by reporting back to a cloud, they provide valuable data to the manufacturers. More data gives them more value, so they have incentive to increase market penetration, and that means aggressive pricing and increased competition. This will result in more rapid adoption.

So with these diverse things entering the home, the demand to integrate them will increase. Microsoft has a large portion of the home PC market, and is perfectly positioned to provide that integration, even if it doesn't happen on Windows Phones. That is, as long as they do it well, and handle all the random error conditions that a diverse set of computers can generate. If it's not seamless and perfect, they'll fail again.

ARM didn't make the ARM1/2 either, they were fabricated by VLSI (the company, not the acronym). ARM has always been fabless.

Amazon has deep pockets and they could be bullying an employee here. Many non-competes are thrown out when court challenged. This case could come down to how poorly Amazon may have treated this employee. A non-compete is not a writ of slavery.

Computers will fix this kind of thing by default.

I thought PHP meant "Pretty Hopeless Privacy" due to its track record of security flaws...

No, it's basic human nature to kick the can down the road, nothing exclusive to politicians. Look at things like IPv4 space exhaustion - we're still kicking the can down the road right now and we'll continue to do so until it becomes so painful we reluctantly start transitioning stuff to IPv6. Same for fossil fuels, "conventional sources" have already peaked and the cost of energy is just going to go up, but we will do the minimum possible and kick the can down the road until it becomes so painful we're forced to change.

Lots of people predicted it. I'm not entirely familiar with the US housing bubble, but in the UK the bubble collapse could be seen from a mile off. I remember yelling pointlessly at the radio when someone from one of the demutualized building societies was trying to justify lending an even more stupidly massive amount of money to people charging interest only "because we want to make property affordable" when it was doing the exact opposite (fuelling the bubble and making it more unaffordable). I also remember discussing it with my Dad on numerous occasions who had got caught up in all the hype. The problem is people got so greedy (both banks and customers alike) with the banks breathlessly falling over themselves to give people mortgages on ever more unsustainable and ridiculous terms, and customers falling over themselves to take them including lying on mortgage application forms, it was obvious that it would only take a slight upset in the economy to make the whole thing come crashing down. It was so blatantly unsustainable. Anyone who wasn't one of the breathless banks or customers could see it coming. The only thing that wasn't entirely predictable was the timing of the burst or the cause of the burst. That upset at least here was skyrocketing energy prices causing all the people who had got mortgages so big they were living paycheque to paycheque with nothing left over to begin defaulting as increased fuel and food costs demolished their non-existent reserves.

No, Microsoft's domination is down to pure luck.

If Compaq hadn't cloned the PC BIOS, or the IBM PC been a flop, Microsoft would have been just a page in history now along with Lotus, Ashton-Tate and various other software houses that got borged by IBM and other large companies. With no IBM PC, MS-DOS would never have sold much, and would never have been the "Microsoft tax" that bankrolled the first versions Windows and Microsoft Office. Even Intel might be a secondary player today, it may have been Zilog who became Chipzilla as they became the preferred supplier for CP/M machines and their 16 bit (and later 32 bit) follow ons, with companies like NEC or SGS or possibly Mostek being where AMD is now as they were Zilog second sources. And Digital Research (CP/M vendor) would be the big bad monopolist instead of Microsoft.