While the tinfoil hats are definitely overblown - I still find your lackadaisical analysis dangerously short-sighted. It's a total cop-out to say this is 'just another industrial-military complex grab for money and nobody's going to fight a real war anyway'. Oh, there might be elements of it, but you haven't been a very astute student of history, Chinese political posturing, or your military history. Sun Tzu himself said “He who exercises no forethought but makes light of his opponents is sure to be captured by them.” Simply out-nuking someone isn't an answer. You need a whole bag of reprisal options so you can match the response to the offense. If someone shoots your satellite down or sinks a ship in disputed waters - do you nuke a city? How big a city? How many people are worth a military satellite? Or a communication satellite? Or MTV? Further, you can't let advances like this go without proper counter-measures - or you quickly become backed into a corner. And this plays out in political ways. I hope you see the problem. Just like the US has done, you know you can push without fear of certain kinds of reprisal. While I'm an optimistic guy too, just hoping that the other guy is acting in good faith is a HUGE gamble when your very country and livelihood are on the line. Even if today's govt is ok to deal with, tomorrow's china might be run by a Kim Jong-Il. Just imagine how rational THAT guy would be with the weapons China has...

Well, the first off, PAE only gets you to 64gb of memory. While that should be plenty for most people for the foreseeable future, we all know that setting arbitrary and somewhat lower limits turns you into the most quoted man in history (640k should be enough for everyone....) Also, as I recall, the 64-bit memory manager in Vista was quite a bit different (and faster) than the one in the 32-bit version. Legacy support(?) However, there is more than just addressable memory to consider with a 64-bit operating system. If you use PAE, your APPS are still running 32 bit. Apps need to be recompiled or even reworked/rewritten to utilize the new 64-bit operating system features. That's probably what they're hoping for more - to get folks to thinking and writing in 64-bit. While I don't think it was a totally cool move - if I'm not mistaken Microsoft has some features available only in the 64-bit api's. In Vista, certain secure driver signing modes didn't exist except in the 64-bit version (not that this is a good thing - they were terrible - but it does show a difference).

After all the other oil companies see the racking over the coals that BP is going to get - YOU BETTER BET that they'll start doing this exact same thing with their risky drilling platforms. Start a seperate company which you 'buy' the oil from in exchange for the amount of money needed for their bare operating costs. Then, if the thing blows up or leaks, you leave the little shell company to pay it all and you walk away with the profits. I'm honestly shocked they aren't doing this now.

How do the classes go? Something like this I imagine:
"Revenge is a dish best served cold - and it's very cold in the vacuum of space. Around 2.725 Kelvin; which is -270 deg Celcius. That is minus 27 tens, and that's terrible....ly cold."
"KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHN!"

Now that's a school I could go for...

Very unprofessional - and very, very short-sighted of Gizmodo which has now damaged tech journalism.

Thought experiment: What was gained/lost in this exchange?
People now know Gizmodo will out your name if they can find out who you were. Instead of just saying, "we know the employee's name and have verified they are in fact an employee of Apple" - that should have sufficed to add all the credibility they needed and a touch of class. Instead, they out the guys name publicly in a move that smacks of high-school nerd dramatics "SEE! We're so clever in our hackery that we can even get the guy's name and publish it all over the inter-webz!"

Results:
They look like a dangerous news outlet. If someone does have a big tech story that requires confidentiality, they'll look at Gizmodo, and possibly tech journalism in general, and think twice about talking to someone that is an outer of names. I certainly wouldn't trust my privacy to these guys now - even if it's the case that I go to them. They have come off very unprofessional and amateurish. Welcome to The Inquirer-level journalism standards Gizmodo - you just hurt your own industry.

They modded you (rightly in my book) flamebait in my book - see my above comment why. If I had mod points, I'd have modded it flame as well.

Paving the way for nothing indeed.

While I don't like IE and use firefox exclusively, stop being a troll - and a dangerously closed minded one at that. Just because it's a custom solution for a specific platform doesn't make it not a great idea. I'd welcome anyone that can speed up my browsing with the ample hardware acceleration I have in my pc. I'd love to see what innovative people do with such new graphics/hardware acceleration on the web. I think there's some clever folks out there that could come up with some very cool and new web browser features and plugins/applications. Perhaps ones that would finally allow remote desktopping or even replacing the very OS. THAT is not a dead end by any means.

Please don't knee-gerk start kicking against proprietary software. You sound like a closed-minded zealot and don't do OSS movement any good.

So when will Apple finally be forced to stop bundling and dang near malware installing Safari every time I want an iTunes or Quicktime patch?

That's the news article *I* want to see.

We just got much closer to a Communist Democracy today in fact.

Hope you're all out there shopping for your now GOVERNMENT MANDATED health insurance - that or you can pay 2% of your annual income as a penalty.

Land of the Free indeed - land of the free lunch

Alas - your assumption that the world will come crashing down in China is very ill-founded. Not much will happen to the search market because more than 50% of that market is already controlled by baidu. Google is a distant second. And espionage/pilfering/cracking/copying is not limited by borders. If they get behind - they'll simply launch remote raiding just as successful as local ones - it's the internet after all.

Google's caught in a catch-22. If they stay - they might be able to influence the market towards more freedom and become a dominant enough player to turn the culture - but at the cost of their own security/image. If they leave - they give free reign to the Chinese government to do whatever it want, they'll lose out on the biggest new market in the world, and could potentially be the ones on the defense when baidu makes a killing as a monopoly in the chinese market.

This is likely not over; I predict it'll awaken again in 5 years when Baidu or other engine is as big as Google and starts moving into OUR market.

People yelled about this before - but nobody seemed to listen then either - myspacing was too cool for school.

See, the problem isn't always with the fact that someone won't protect your data now - they may do a great job of it now. But you never know what will happen when the company slides to 'junk' status and then turns into a data brokerage after being bought/sold several times to less and less scrupulous people as we see myspace sliding towards now.

My CS professor reminded me that this works for governments too. Just because the government that's collecting your data today is trustworthy doesn't mean that the next one, or one in your lifetime, will be. Even if there are uber-secret repositories for voting records or even innoculous stuff like census info - if the next administration comes in and decides to do away with everyone of a certain belief, voting record, ethnic group, etc - they'll have full access to do so.

Data security includes everything up to and including end of life for the data - and should automatically delete unless specified otherwise. And I don't know of any service that can claim they've actually deleted all your data from backups, copies, mirrors, caches, etc. It's near impossible.

Don't kid yourself - there is a lot of really great engineering going on in China; and they're right on our heals if not ahead.

A coworker had 3 test prototype electronics parts on his desk - and they were made by 3 different foundries. One was European , the other US, and the final China. When asked which was which - he said it was easy to tell - the one from China would be the only one that worked the first time.

I've personally worked with their software engineers. They're amazing at copying and getting things working and to market faster than anyone else. Yeah, it's sometimes only works 'one way', and they're not as innovative, but I only give that lag about 5 more years and they'll be running with the big boys.

Remember if you're a 1 in a million engineer here, that's something; but over there, there's at least 100 of you...

China won't lose much if Google leaves and they know it - they're SAYING it.

Point 1:
Google isn't the top search engine there anyway - it's a very low #2 after Baidu - which by some estimates is 3x the penetration of Google. http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/261/china-search-engine-market-report-2009/

Point 2:
The statement that "...the internet will continue to develop in China with or without Google". The Chinese know they're the fastest growing market in the world. They know they're the new big thing and will be, and they're telling Google to play by their rules or get out. They're effectively dangling this huge carrot up for Google to see, and saying if they want a piece of it, you need to jump for it, cause there's others that will play by our rules and make a killing doing it.

So I don't believe Google has any real leverage against the government there. None. The only person that can (and will likely) lose in a staring contest is Google. For once, Google can't use it's weight on the marketplace as a tool - and it's not much fun for them. No arguments about being an 'essential service' or whatnot - there's a bigger competitor.

As for a staring contest - what could Google do? Leave? Then Baidu wins out the remaining bit of the worlds largest market and Google goes home. Chinese don't get any free search access and censorship continues. Nobody in China loses an essential internet search engine. Google is cut out of the largest market and maybe finds itself on the ropes later when Baidu or other engine pushes over into the US market with scads of money, resources, and years of development advances.

If push comes to shove, Google will get sanctioned or maybe even kicked out - but I doubt they'll let it go to getting kicked out. What makes more sense is for them to take the 'hit for the team'. The stare down until the Chinese sanction them somehow then work out a deal quietly. That way they both can claim a 'victory' and go about making scads of money.

That's my bet anyway.

Your kidding yourself. Even when our OWN government invades our privacy and rights - nobody here bothers to die for those either. \. and most of the rest of us here are couch and side-line talkers anyway. I accuse myself with this statement too.