I think there are good ways to be involved and bad ways to be involved in the market. IMHO the anger over Solyndra's loans is justified not just by the facts that were apparently readily available about that company, but by the way the government was essentially picking winners in the market and providing money before any good was delivered rather than promising to support companies that had already proved their own value. I'd much rather the government say "we're going to start buying electric cars for our own fleets on X date, and we'll do it from whoever can make the best product" than say "we're going to give new company X some money to design and build electric cars." You could do the same thing by committing to buy green power from nuclear/solar/wind providers rather than providing or guaranteeing loans from unstarted companies. I think if we can make commitments to buy products from companies that have already worked out the details and have proven themselves to investors we can get a healthier outcome. Not only does that get them value for the money that they did spend, but it will multiply that value by adding itself to money from investors in the other startups that didn't get picked but produced second-best products or valuable new technology. If the market knows that there will be a buyer, then someone will get the investment that is needed to become a producer.

I know it won't happen, but it seems like the best way to spend this subsidy money would be for the government to defray the cost from the best and cheapest rural Internet providers (or give out vouchers that people can use to pick their own supplier). That way there will be incentive to provide good service, and there will likely be service provided by more than just the companies that end up coming out on top and getting government money. I'm sure what they'll do instead is just throw money at anyone who provides even crummy service, and as a result they'll get the lowest denominator return on that investment. Maybe this plan won't work as well in monopoly industries like cable, but it seems like the majority of the markets would work better this way.

That's not really an e-ink problem, it's not like e-ink and PDFs are incompatible

No one ever talks about revenue or spending either, just debt. Debt is the result of revenue minus spending, and any idiot could have predicted that revenue would not be doing well after the economy tanked. I'd like to see a graph of how much revenue and spending changed over the years, so that we can factor out declines in revenue from the increases in the debt.

AFAIK Android intents are push rather than pull. And that's a pretty big difference, since you have to either select the app/site you're pushing to at the time of the push or preset it beforehand (meaning you have control of who's receiving the data). This looks like it has a return path though, so it does seem like it might be risky.

It doesn't make sense that this email was a start of a suggestion that they get a license, since it seems to be the culmination of them going through "a hundred of these" alternatives to Java and discounting them all. Whoever sent the email saying that they should look through a hundred alternatives to Java (TFA says that it's Larry and Sergey) was already considering whether or not they should get a license. It seems like if they were confident that they still wouldn't need a license they wouldn't have initiated what must have been a fairly large process of checking alternatives.

I assume he's referring to this

I think they went wrong blaming the price raise on DVDs, and giving a completely bizarre narrative of how the prices changed. They claimed that most people were getting DVDs for $2 and that wasn't enough money, but most of their longtime subscribers had instead had streaming tacked onto their account for $2 (after it had been tacked on for free just prior to that). If they had just said this it would have been better: "First we gave you streaming for free while we built our library. Then we bumped that up to $2 on DVD accounts to pay for the improvements that we made to the library. Now we're bumping it to $8 to pay for the improvements that we've made since then. We realize that some DVD subscribers aren't going to want to pay for both features, so we're making them separate charges so that you can sign up for either or both."

P.S. I'm pretty sure this is the first time that TFA linked to on Slashdot was a podcast with no transcript, and I'm hoping it's also the last time

At last we'll have these in the EBook format that George Lucas always intended

USA Network does a 30-day wait on every episode past the first 2 of the season. It makes it annoying for someone to watch a series exclusively on the web, because their windows for taking down content aren't nearly as long

That's the point. People assumed that she was using this outside email service to avoid having her conversations archived, so they are anticipating finding something in the emails that she didn't want made public. Still, since 4% of the emails weren't released, even if nothing is found in this 96% people will wonder about the rest.

It was also possible for people to be investigated by PI's and have their character assassinated by too-freely-shared pictures before Facebook

That doesn't have the list of apps either. The internet is broken.

Well, if they make it so that the penalty for giving the wrong answer to "What is your favorite color?" is being thrown off a bridge I imagine you wouldn't want to go around guessing other people's answers to get into their account

For the record Netflix had a Flash player first, and then they moved from there to Silverlight. So it's possible that they knew something that you don't

The 10 Windows Phone ads that I see on my TV every day as well as an advertising intro to seemingly every single Flash video player on the internet would disagree with your assessment that Windows Phones aren't being marketed. Apple advertises a ton as always (though more often for iPads these days), but the Windows Phone ad budget seems to dwarf the combined Android marketing of all the carriers and handset makers.