They're given out free to people in abuse shelters and the homeless which is probably the source of almost all of the legitimate traffic and the majority of the non-legitimate traffic as well (homeless folks tend to have mental problems as the root cause of their homelessness).

As to pranks, we've had E911 as a requirement for over a decade now, shouldn't be too hard to locate the perps if they keep doing it.

Non-competes are basically unenforceable in California unless you're a principal who is selling the business and nonsolicitation clauses even against poaching clients are void in California so going after former coworker is almost surely protected. The ONLY leg they might have to stand on is if they can prove that Apple was hiring these folks to misappropriate A123's trade secrets, not merely to hire them for their skills in the arts which is a very hard thing to prove so long as Apple was smart enough not to leave a smoking gun like an email stating clearly that they wanted A123's tech.

Uh, how is this any different than when Apple ties up all the Gorilla glass capacity, or 1.8" hard drives (original ipod), or Samsung fab capacity for X months, or any other scarce resource that doesn't allow competitors to compete directly with them through contracts and offering a higher price? Oh, it involves non-executives earning a higher wage so therefore it's somehow bad. Pure BS.

my prediction is that the LED status panel on a remote solar power installation somewhere will still be functioning hundreds of years

Only if someone makes one with non-RoS solder and uses solid electrolyte capacitors or only glass/mica dielectric capacitors since there's no way regular electrolytic capacitors will survive anywhere near that long.

Yup, though I was more partial to BladeMaster since it didn't have the three turn limit on most systems (if at all, hard to remember that far back). In fact I ran a BladeMaster IP-BBS for a while, was interesting getting a WorldGroup module working in modern Windows.

It's just within the realm of possibilities that the Ballmer days of "When I want your opinion, I'll tell you what it is," are over? In more than just name?

I'm not sure about that, they had a good start menu implementation early in the windows 10 tech preview and managed to mess it up and haven't listened to anyone who has told them that the new shrunken start screen alternative in the newer builds is crap so I don't think that part has changed that much. There are other positive changes happening at MS, but that particular cultural wart still seems to be in place.

Some powerful customer will demand some interface to be supported or else

No, they're shipping IE11 with enterprise compatibility mode to support back to IE8 quirks which will be fine for 99+% of their customers for legacy apps. Trust me, most of their customers are going to be happy to have a standards compliant browser as the default, the only trick will be in the mechanism to kick user over when they try to go to a corporate site that needs classic IE within Edge and keeping that mechanism from being abused by the bad guys.

They support WebGL which is going to be the next attack vector as well as continuing to support flash with sandboxing that the hackers will tear to shreds in short order.

MS is doing exactly that with Windows 10, there will be the slow release branch that will be mostly security fixes, with infrequent but pre-announced feature changes (kind of the service pack model but more modern), and the fast release branch which will be more disruptive but will do things like keep Edge more up to date with emerging standards.

The least you can do is implement a real algorithm; but screw it up somehow

That's why the best recommendation is to not only use the approved algorithm, but also the standard implementation. Don't get cute, don't try to optimize it, just use it as is. AES was required to run on emdedded systems 13+ years ago, any modern chip should have zero problem running the standard C implementation today.

$20 is international shipping, US is $5, not every project needs HDMI, and this board includes WiFi and BT 4.0 which are expensive and bulky when adding to an rPi plus it includes storage.

Because Firefox or Chrome would run like crap on something as low end as a Desire HD, not enough ram or CPU. The best browser for something that old is Opera Classic or maybe Dolphin.

However, once you add the HDMI, it's essentially the same price as a raspberry pi model A.

But a heck of a lot cheaper than an rPi plus WiFi dongle plus BT 4.0 dongle and I'm sure it uses way less power (you generally can't run both wireless dongles without a powered USB hub. I'm working on a hub for my BT LE thermometer (ET-735) and it turned out to be cheaper to buy a Moto E or Allwinner based tablet than to add all the components to an rPi, which is just insane to me considering the non-rPi solutions added storage, a screen, a battery, and case to the BOM, oh and the Moto E would be considerably smaller.

Nope, SA is turned off even in war zones, in fact the newest birds don't even have the SA feature.

That's assuming that you haven't put your ESX hosts in lockdown mode or disabled SSH access, which is obviously a security best practice. If you have done these things then you can't script the actions without PowerShell.

You can, using vRealize Automation, it's just painful and so task specific that most places won't bother and therefore the time invested to learn it is of fairly minimal value versus learning Powershell which can be used across many problem domains and products.