This is not politically viable in the US. A large percentage of the population has no problem with the government giving free stuff to companies but then get all up in arms when it gives stuff to the people.

Pretty sure campaign contracts don't have to run through the gauntlet of the governmental bidding process. That eliminates a lot of capable contractors who don't want to or can't deal with that.

Wouldn't that be an argument for a curved back instead of a curved display?

How can a blanket policy like this work for a company of their size and business and geographic diversity? Some divisions/offices will see some improved productivity while others will have destructive interference. Good luck breaking even on this. OTOH, if they want to trim headcount then mission accomplished.

The game has a stock exchange whose price movements are affected not only by your actions locally but by other players' actions globally. Needless to say, trading and obtaining price quotes requires a connection to the GTA servers. Interesting idea but you that money is locked up if you can't connect to the servers. I stupidly had invested everything in this market and couldn't pull out the money I needed to complete a mission. It did come back online after an hour but it'll be a while before I do that again.

Probably a couple of Canadian pension funds according to the WSJ. That combination would be plenty to fund this small of a deal. They don't need to bring in tech companies unless someone overpays to lock up assets and avoid a bidding war on the open market. Thinking ahead a little, patents and real assets are pretty obvious but the brand could be interesting. A Chinese OEM might think big and buy the brand (sort of like Lenovo and IBM). Maybe a little crazier, BB might be trying to force the hand of a potential white knight but there's not a whole lot of value for a strategic buyer when they can just bid on the parts without inheriting the rest of the crap.

I (as an architect/developer) and my business users love agile. For me, it's all about identifying requirement changes ASAP to minimize rework. Would you rather a requirement change before you work on it or after? The user thinks they know what they want but it's so abstract as a bunch of thoughts in their mind that they can't possibly identify every detail. But put a tangible product in front of them and a lot of what they want changes. It's inevitable.

So for me, I want the user to see the work ASAP so we can proactively identify these changes before we've wasted a bunch of time doing the wrong stuff. Our users totally bought in so it's like having one day iterations instead of the two weeks that we had before. I suppose YMMV with the user and technical team.

Which is why somebody else is supposed to step up and assume their responsibility temporarily. It's the exact same thing that would happen in any other methodology.

Two things:
1. Do you work in a silo exclusively? I can't believe that others' work doesn't affect yours and your work doesn't affect others.
2. Nothing in Agile says you can only raise an issue during the scrum. That's either a silly trumped up example or your co-workers are imbeciles.

We're not talking about the same types of attacks though. I think it's safe to assume all major governments conduct military and diplomatic espionage. However, the US complaint is that the Chinese military is conducting industrial espionage and gives the stolen secrets to their own industry.

Indeed but they have the "build it and they will come" delusion of selling tens of millions of tablets. If desktop Metro really sucks that bad then the PR uproar will force Microsoft to make it optional for keyboard and mouse.

Well if we want to go down this hypothetical path then Android could have Google + Device Manufacturer + Carrier spying. That would be three Android spies vs iPhone's one.

Battery life aside, I imagine it would be incredibly painful to use a desktop application on a tablet. In a roundabout way, maybe this will devs will make some effort redesign desktop apps to fit the form factor.

I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone but even I have to cut them some slack for the first update to essentially a version 1 product.

A few problems off the top of my head:

1) This requires large speculative investor to have a huge position in order to pull this off. We'd see at least an 8K filed with the SEC if MS were to purchase this position and a ridiculous amount of articles in the press. Also, the MS board wouldn't approve paying a huge premium for a loser company when they could just sign a regular 'ol licensing deal like with their other WP7 partners.

2) Large speculative investor would make much more money with a hostile takeover and then a breakup of the company.

3) WP7 partners would be pretty pissed if MS took an ownership interest in Nokia.