I assume the group involved is at least paying Sony a wholesale price for those DVDs. (Which I didn't think had been released yet enyway)
Surely they wouldn't engage in piracy. :-)
   

Rick, what percentage of the time do you use the SP2 as a slate vs with keyboard? If's with a keyboard most of the time, you're using a lightweight PC not a tablet.

... that administrative changes at this level should only be allowable from physical access to closed admin networks and the value of having staff be able to make changes in their PJs from some hotel room is overrated?

According to Techreport, Intel's three-dimensional NAND. will enable 10TB flash drives in servers in 2 years

Today it's a discount. In 5 years no one will offer you insurance without it. (And the WAN connection to stay in touch...)

"Microsoft seems to be correcting its hardware strategy, as well as its software one, with the Surface RT flop getting the axe... "
Just wait and see how unhappy the buyers of ARM-based plain Surface RT tablets are when they find out
a) They aren't getting any new updates or UI improvements
b) App vendors are shifting to Surface Pro x86 binaries
c) They can't upgrade to Windows 10
The difference between disposable consumer appliance items like phones/(most)tablets and Personal Computers is that PCs can be upgraded (or get lighter OSes put on them when they get old. PCs are general purpose tools which allow you to do things the original vendor may not have expected or even approve of. They are not a closed,static gadget.
(BTW, if there's no Surface, doesn't it seem funny to only have a Surface Pro?)

Nonsense, the biggest fabs of the biggest semiconductor company in the world, making the most advanced microprocessors are located in the US at Oregon and Arizona sites. It's a little company called Intel.

This is easy. You architect around the most complex platform , eg this 2-in-1 in laptop mode which would have a fast Core i5 or Core i7 as cpu running OS/X. When you detach the keyboard and put it into tablet mode, it adopts an iOS skin, with emulator to run iOS apps (which you already do indirectly when you're building iOS apps on an OS/.X system now). You have the ability though, to have OS/X apps / utilities in the background, possibly providing local cloud services to the tablet layer.
It's interesting that while Intel produces the underlying architecture for both Surface Pro and this hypothetical device, Microsoft and Bershidsky resist using Intel's "2-in-1" name for this kind of platform - even though the main system architecture (processor, IO hub etc) is all an Intel design.

And your car will someday refuse to boot without them.

The issue is not that dark forces will be able to monitor your vehicle without your knowledge, it's that once the capability is common, you simply won't be able to get a license (car or driver) or insurance, without clicking "YES" to ALLOW MONITORING on the contractual EULAs. So you can't object - you agreed to it.

... how can you argue that at all, let alone suggest it has a gender bias?

... unless there's a sue-able multi-billion dollar corporation behind it. Even then, big automakers are barely able to afford recalls and liability suits now - a major wrongful death suit from a errant self-driving car will take out a smaller firm or make their insurance impossible to pay.

Same thoughts apply to hardening exploitable code. If it's common to old and new OS and easily fixed (vulnerability is lessened) then it probably should be updated.

The interesting question is: should an OS vendor be able to sell a later generation of OS as "more secure" than a previous one as a feature to induce users to migrate to it, (clearly Microsoft's position on Win 8.1 vs Win 7 ) or does it have a responsibility to make all released product as reasonably secure as it can based on what it knows to and define features as capabilities, performance, etc outside of security?
I think it's fair for Microsoft to tout improvements like more secure kernel design or other elements that are core architectural advantages of a new OS (which cannot reasonably be replicated in earlier versions) but limiting fixes to common libraries, present in old and new OS, which have been found to be insecure, that could be patched for minimal effort in the old OS, to create an artificial distinction between old and new is not a security feature difference, it's a churlish forcing function. Win 8.1 is not better on security than Win 7 if the part of that difference depends on selectively responding to vulnerabilities.
Ironically, toward the end of it's life, XP got better support than Vista, because a Vista was a short-lived, poorly received follow-on that was quickly succeeded by Win 7. I'll predict that 3 years from now, after Win Next (9.0 or what ever) has been shipping for a while, the install base of Win 7 will still be far higher than that of Win 8.x and support (Microsoft and 3rd party drivers/apps) will be much better for Win 7 than it will be for Win 8.x. No doubt Microsoft will say it's most secure OS at that time will be Win 9.x but if it stopped providing critical patches to the second most popular OS way back in 2014, there's going to be trouble. (Anybody want to bet Microsoft at some point will be providing patches to vulnerabilities in Win 7 that they DON'T bother to do for Win 8.x because no one will care about "Vista-Next" anymore?)