He wants to patent these three lines of code, and he will succeed! We are so screwed :)

So this is why there is such a big campaign against smoking in US!

Earth's magnetic field is protecting the satellites. It's much harsher in the space outside of it...

They lobby with their friends at ministry of culture and get royalties on blank media from people that have never heard of them doing backups of their data! Yay! Never have to work again!

The problem is not technical, it's legal. As long as there are the national security letters and secret courts ordering people to hand over keys and shut up about it there can be no security. All they have to do is extort one individual with access to the keys...

They learned a trick or two from hard drive manufacturers it seems... opportunity for all to rise prices at once!

And the solution to this is, of course, to ban DIY electronics right? These are IEDs, Improvised Electronic Devices they are making! Terrorists! To Guantanamo with them!

If you are top notch and making a decent living, you have so much to lose... It does not take much to threaten you into cooperation. Blackmail is cheap.

That means they spy on ALL 40,322 of the yahoo users :)

This may just mean they had no choice in the matter. Imagine NSA shows up on your door, tells you you will create a remote access backdoor into your product and not tell anyone or they will screw up you and your company, you will do it too. Any corporation will. It's not NSA writing all those backdoors, it's the poor blackmailed companies themselves, for their own money, with their own know how of their product! And yeah, we can assure the public, NSA does not put backdoors anywhere, right? It's the companies doing it! As for this being a proper place for the backdoor, it is proper place for backdoor into the virtual machines, not the OS.

Ballmer was systematically destroying potential competition within the company for years now to keep that job. He killed the company by doing it.

It is simple. They are hell bent on milking the Windows developers like Apple does with the 30% appstore cut. Since people have refused to put up with closing down the independent development and having to go thru the mandatory microsoft appstore to sell Windows apps, they are going to extract the money in some other way - in this case, making the serious development for Windows expensive.

You, sir, have a distinct lack of imagination. Let me explain: The same tools that can be used to find terrorists can be used in myriad of other ways. For example, if you are an evil corporation in bed with government, you can use this to find future competition early and derail them. If you are an oppressive government that wants to find silence potential whistleblowers, this is the tool for you. You can find potential future leaders and pacify them to keep the population paralyzed. This has simply too much power not to be misused, especially without oversight.

I doubt these old unmaintained Windows XP business apps will work better on Windows 8 than on Linux :)

Yes, but they DID buy Skype just to compromise its communication protocol so that it can be easily tapped for the Sith lord.