"expects arguments about whether the case is really sustainable, given that it seems designed to be easily disposable."

Disposable is sustainable. The problem is not that things are disposable, it's that they aren't disposable enough.
I get a disposable coffee cup, I drink my coffee in 15 minutes and the plastic lid is going last 1000 years, that's hardly disposable.
My coffee cup should last only as long as I need it too. A disposable coffee cup that would start degrading with in 2 days would be a fine timeframe.

Mass manufacturing means that it's usually cheaper to get something new than to fix something old, just like it's easier to pick new fruit than to fix rotten fruit.

Yep, Battery life is regulated by the operating system, in this case Microsoft Windows.

The major thing that effects battery life on a running system is the amount of time the CPU can sit at a lower power state which is based on the number of times per second the CPU needs to be awaken from it's sleeping state.
When you have a single event loop, controlled by the operating system that most applications use you can better regulate the amount of wake up per second.

Due to the cross platform requirements of firefox and safari, they'd implement their own event loops, which on a windows system would involve more wake ups per second.

They are saying it, but not in their terms of service. Thus they are actually misleading users as to their rights.
Their terms of service are similar in this respect to myspace, and a number of other web 2.0 services they are actually not different at all.

An ethical provider would limit the license you release your content to them under to only allow them to use the content in ways required to provide you with the service they are offering you. eg.
"By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."...as required to provide the twitter service to you.

...ummm so twitter has said that you have the rights that you always had.
Content you produce always belongs to you, but the terms of service do say that they have a world-wide license to do with your produced content as they will. So the only thing they can't do is stop you from distributing it again yourself.

But they can still publish a book of your tweets and not pay you a cent.

faster transfer, but the latency is a bitch.
Did they include the time required to send a pigeon to make the request?
and a pigeon to ACK to be sure it actually arrived?
what if the pigeon got lost? what is the timeout on a pigeon?

and that's a good point.
It seems that passwords are kind of a terrible way to secure things.

Needs more OpenID, client certificates, and HTTPS

"it's time to stop building burglar alarms to keep people out and go after the bad guys"
Nah, it's time to stop building burglar alarms and lock the damn house.
It's computer security, unlike physical security it's actually possible for it to be completely impassable. Just stop letting untrusted people run code on your machine.
You don't need to track these criminal down, you can just completely ignore them.

...we've already run out of IPv4 addresses.
I have so many devices that don't have a public IP address because my ISP only provides me with one.
We've been out of IPv4 addresses for a long time now.

Typing increases my ability to spell. I'm a much better speller when I type than when I write.
My writing speed is slow enough that I write and think about each letter instead of words as a whole. When typing, I type whole words and don't even notice that they contain letters. ...and why is this a problem?

Probably the same profit model that firefox has.
Controlling the window to the web is a very powerful thing.

You trust your administrators because you have to, because they either have knowledge or time that you lack.
You want to have them onsite so you can stand behind them? If you've got enough knowledge to know when they are scamming you, and enough time to stand behind them and watch, then you should just do your own administration.

You can certainly break up the privileges, encrypt your data etc. but it has a lot of downsides when your administrators can't do things they need to do.

The fact is that you trust a large number of remote parties that gain that trust based on necessity or by staking their reputation on it.
You trust microsoft, adobe, mozilla, intel, nvidia, AMD, the guy who makes you sushi etc.

- Jesse McNelis

continuously reinvent yourself?
The IT industry doesn't change as quickly as people like to think. Those who sell re-training, frameworks, programming languages and bullshit have an vested interest in convincing you of this.
World wide web:
1991 - (hypertext linked pages)
1995 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting)
1996 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting and styles)
1999 - (hypertext linked pages, with scripting and limited network access(xmlhttprequest))
2009 - (hypertext linked pages, with enough scripting available to create applications similar to previously created native applications)

Hardware gets faster, Operating systems add features, but software development and the user experience is pretty much the same.

Break the task down in to smaller and smaller pieces. Tiny pieces that can be completed fully in an hour or so.
Work on these pieces and give yourself a cookie(or read slashdot) when you complete them.

Human's tend toward least effort for most reward and short term rewards over long term rewards. You just need to apply a hack to this process. By making progress toward long term goals have short term rewards.

It's so a good idea not to tell people about what you are doing, the reward of having people already know how smart you are will decrease the need for you to actually complete the project to prove it.

Setup people that you will disappoint, make promises to other people that you have to keep, make sure that you actually believe they will be pissed off if you fail to deliver.

Human beings are motivated by the need to impress others. If something you're doing isn't going to impress your general laziness will decide it's not actually worth doing.

"argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone."
They aren't paying them to gain an education, they are paying them to get higher grades. Grades != Education, and the purpose of grades have always been about money.
People send their kids to private schools so they get better grades
Universities only accept people with higher grades so they'll hang around long enough for the university to get some money out of them
Grades in university are all about showing off to a future employer.

I've experienced plenty of chances at education being hindered by the need for better grades.

* mail.domainname points to gmail
* blog.domainname points to my blog
* roll.domainname points to my tumble log. // I can't remember why, but meh.
I also use it to point to servers I ssh to.

The best thing about it is the ability to redirect hosts when things change so I change service providers(email, hosting, social networks etc.) with out much hassle.