Curiously enough, you can actually have something a lot like this, right now.

We've stopped subscribing to cable/satellite, and now watch everything on an Apple TV. Through iTunes, you can rent (with a budget of $100/month) 20 movies in HD (at $4.99 each), or buy 30 TV episodes (at $2.99 each in HD, if bought individually); or any combination. You get to pick what you want, and you pay only for what you watch, so in months when you're busy with other things you can pay nothing at all, if you like.

Apple did recently remove the option to rent HD television episodes at $1.99, but you can buy full seasons ("season pass") which typically offer decent savings.

That directory also houses applications that are not usually directly invoked by the user, but from another event (apps like Installer, Bluetooth Setup Assistant, Keyboard Setup Assistant, and so forth, most of which are started by taking action within the System Preferences app.)

I'm not certain how you'd invoke Wi-Fi diagnostics, but it might be part of the troubleshooting path which also contains the Network Setup Assistant.

Yes, but they left iMovie HD 6 available for download - for free, if I remember correctly - until the new version of iMovie reached feature parity. The problem here isn't really that FCPX removed features, but that FCP7 is no longer available at all.

I agree, I'd pay more for more content. I think most of us would. You can, however, stream to more than one device at a time right now. My wife and I do it all the time, either one Apple TV and a computer, or two Apple TVs.

I doubt that. Do you actually think that if Amazon sold a book on the iPhone for $10, they'd sell the same book on Android for $7? Why would they give you the three bucks? They'll sell it for the same price on ALL platforms and just keep the extra they make from non-iOS sales.

Actually there happens to be an applicable word for that - it's called "plinking".

Your point is a good one, though. The fight to keep the meaning of the word "hacker" pure is lost, and has been for some time. I think, though, that given context and knowledge of who's using the word about whom, we'll still be able to use it the way we always have ("Put a 3.2 GHz Phenom into your Linksys router? What a hack!") and let the rest of humanity use it however they will.

My wife doesn't know any of my passwords, and I don't know any of hers. However, I do have an escrow file which she can open in the event of my death which contains them all.

She will need access to banking sites etc. when that happens, so privacy until then, and full disclosure after.

One small issue with moving everything to https is that you need one IP address per domain. That puts a pretty big wrinkle in the many, many servers out there that serve up multiple domains per IP. (Technically, you can do so if you utilize unique ports on the same IP for each served domain, but that breaks the "just works" aspect of port 443).

It's not insurmountable, but it does put more pressure on the already shrinking IPv4 pool. Another reason to hasten the adoption of IPv6, I suppose...

It's just an alternative suggestion. You're obviously free to approach the problem however you like, and as I indicated, I think Click2Flash is a great plugin.

I think you might be surprised, however, how many sites will provide working versions of their sites that don't have Flash elements. Looking at the browser share of all the iOS devices, it's not hard to see why.

Increasing the number of Flash-less browsers will only encourage more web developers to produce sites that don't require Flash, or at minimum, will gracefully degrade when it isn't present.