Google SSHFS

This. With all the aggregate data used in the day to day life of a trader how exactly does this one tweet become the defacto reasoning for the price change?

When you have that many people who all know the value of the all mighty dollar don't kid yourself. Do you really think some contractor waltzed in threw a number like that out for just the software and got it? It's just like any company, the CXO might not have any clue what Java, HTML or the Internet is for that reason but try asking him or her for a couple million with just a smile and see what happens. There is no way 600+Million USD was given directly to a bunch of code monkeys, it went through many, many hands before the first can of Mountain Dew was cracked I personally guarantee it.

So if the specs were open people could make their own GPU's using those specs? Well no they couldn't. The second they got to market they would be shutdown faster then the materials got shipped. So how could you take advantage of the patented spec's if they were open sourced?

Most people will take it to BestBuy/ FS where they lug their old, dusty box up to the counter. The tech smirks and waits for it.

Cust: "I want to upgrade my PC to 8!"
Tech: "OK!, I will have to charge you $40 to look at it and clean it out, $60 for DDR2/DDR RAM that hasn't been made for 4 years, $50 for a PCIe GPU (you do want the fancy desktop right...?), $150 for the Windows 8 DVD, $100 to backup your old docs and viruses, and $150 to put windows and your viruses back on!"
Cust: "Umm where is your computer dept again?"

True, but now Microsoft got what they wanted. IMHO Microsoft did what they did to get a rock bottom price. Now they can just have it as a European sattelite office and close one down somewhere else. Same payroll just different people charging the taxes.

If anything Microsoft could just leave an office or just change the name on the building. The government would just really care about employing their constituents and bringing/keeping tax money into the country.

Compressed cypher text should be quite easy to crack shouldn't it?

Most compression algorithms use a dictionary, if you knew approximately the dictionary was in the data stream it should make it fairly easy to guess the key wouldn't it?

Compressed English for example would have many similar dictionaries amongst most digests. Knowing the most common dictionary entries statically analyzing the cypher text would result in a clear text digest which in turn would be trivial to reveal the message.

Of course I welcome any insight from anyone more knowledgeable since I am not well versed in cryptography.

I would bet the farm that Microsoft has been passing some types of loans Nokias way or at least contracts that indicate Microsoft has joint ownership of the bread and butter. If anyone was to buy Nokia aside from Microsoft it would likely be for something less than table scraps and you would be lucky to get stationary and office supplies.

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.