Does this mean MS is killing the Azure platform? Or maybe Bill Gates is returning from the hinterland? Or are employees just leaving one by one until only Steve Balmer is left to turn off the lights?

I think this speaks to the need to not run plug-ins in the browser. To only HTML/JavaScript. Ie don't allow the PDF plugin, don't allow Flash, don't allow Silverlight, don't allow Java Applets. All of these proprietary plug-ins cause all kinds of security problems. They have proven to be a bad idea. I think Steve Jobs is on the right track banning them from the iPhone/iPad.

When I was in Shanghai I could browse the Internet completely freely from my western style hotel. But if I went to an Internet Cafe, browsing was very restricted. They run a very multi-tiered system of censorship. When I was there, BBC news was censored in most places, but not my hotel.

I guess they feel they've gotten enough people locked-in that they can start squeezing the juice out of them. It's why people like to choose an open internet over single vendor proprietary locked in platforms.

We tend to like to hire programmers with 2 years experience. People fresh out of school are too idealistic and will change jobs frequently expecting hitech companies to work like they do in their fantasies. Once they get this out of their system (seems to take 2 years) then you have someone young and bright who will actually stick around for a few years.

Won't Google just enhance their search to give results for the name you are googling along with results for everyone who changed their name to the one you are Googling? Doesn't seem like this will separate you from your past. Best bet is to choose a common name like Tom Brown, Jim Wong, Stephen Smith, etc.

I think the web is browsed much more by devices other than PCs. I would expect IE market share to drop given all the browsing done by Android phones, iPhones, iPads and various other non-PC devices. I suspect this statistic is reflecting the drop in the percentage of web browsing done by Windows based PCs.

The school board my wife teaches in, only accepts marks submitted on floppy disk. The software they use is ancient and they never change their procedures. Schools are having a hard time keeping computers with floppies running for teachers to use.

Look at the GWT blog: http://googlewebtoolkit.blogspot.com/2010/04/look-ma-no-plugin.html. Here is a webkit browser running Quake II in JavaScript at 60 fps. This is what they will be competing with. Again MS is starting from behind and falling further behind. When I measure Javascript performance in IE9, I can't see a difference form IE8, not sure if this is debug code in IE9 or just the JS I'm using, but so far, not particularly impressed.

More like New York to Peuto Rico or Guam.

Or is Viacom just suing to remove the competition. After all the sneezing panda video was way more popular than any Viacom show. They don't like being beaten in the ratings by home videos taken at the zoo.

The only American company China cares about is WalMart. As long as all the crap WalMart sells is manufactured in China, the Chinese are happy. If WalMart promoted all manufacturing by their suppliers to move elsewhere (like they promoted it to move to China in the first place), then it would severely damage the Chinese economy. China is a manufacturing economy, that is what they will protect. They give lip service to the information economy, but really can't abide by what it implies.

I thought having to buy Windows was the tax. After all it allows all the malware in the first place. Why not just make Microsoft liable for its security vulnerabilities to pay for this?

Seems to me that the only possible ways to develop a time machine or starship warp drive are from manufacturing and harnessing Black Holes. We need to poke a singularity in the fabric of the universe to get around some hard limits like the speed of light. The trick then is how to arrange them geometrically to get the desired result (and how to control them to do this). Seems like really worthwhile research.