If Microsoft want to make a home media device for use in people's main living rooms, that's fine. It's actually quite a good idea. But such a device cannot be principally viewed as a games console.

I don't know about the rest of you, but aside from the occasional multiplayer split screen session, I play console games on a dedicated screen, either in a bedroom or computer room. I cannot play a game in a main living room, on a screen which in in demand by others for watching TV, films, or even browsing the internet. It's nice that this device can do so much, but flipping "channels" to whatever everyone else wants to watch is not conducive to the 4-6 hour gaming sessions I would like to have.

Maybe they're going for the complete casual gaming market here, people who will flick over to Angry Birds or whatever. But even the most passé of run-of-the-mill gamers is going to spend an hour or so playing shooters online, and are not going to be inclined to flip over to daytime TV, or browse the web in the middle of their frag session. I just cannot see this working en masse.

Some may call it anti-social, but to me playing video games is closer to reading a book than watching TV; it's principally an individual experience, and the living room is not the place to have it unless you are specifically playing co-op. I don't think Microsoft are serious about the Xbox One as a gaming console. It appears to be principally oriented around completely orthogonal capabilities.

You don't have a clue what it's like to be a billionaire and even less of a clue as to what motivates them to spend money on lawyers. If it was all about financial reward then google would simply give the government everything they wanted with a minimum of fuss and pay a few PR hacks to explain why the can't "fight city hall". I don't claim to know what their motivation is, however it's obvious there's no financial reward to be had that would outweigh the costs of their self-imposed policy.

Or professionals launching the attacks from script kiddies' compromised machines.

Problem with air gaps is, most people have an air gap between their ears.

Your conclusion is probably right, but one workaround would be for Congress to grant the utilities big bucks to fix it, whereupon entrepreneurs with solutions (and con artists with "solutions") would pop up all over. That would take care of (1), (2), and (4).

Not sure I like that suggestion, but admittedly it is in our national interest to do something about it.

I vaguely remember reading that our national grids are a mere hop and a skip of the Grim Reaper, even without cyberattacks.

And, to support Artifakt's point, the car companies initially fought like crazy against reasonable car safety measures such as seatbelts and gas bags, claiming that they'd make cars too expensive and unreliable. In reality, of course, seatbelts and gas bags are cheap, reliable, and highly effective in saving people's lives.

The line about "if the government enforced the gun laws already on the books" is decades out of date. Almost all controls on guns have been either eliminated or undermined to the point where they're unenforceable. For example, gun dealers have do background checks, unless they sell the gun from their "show" inventory instead of their "dealer" inventory, at a "gun show" (which can be two cars in a parking lot) which is how 40% of guns in the US are sold. These days the laws are so pro-criminal that it's impossible to stop even obvious straw buyers. For example, in Arizona (an extreme state, to be sure) the ATF watched a broke, homeless man buy huge piles of guns with cash, week after week. When they wanted to tail the guy to observe him selling the guns to the gangs that he was buying for, the state judge ruled that it was a violation of his rights for them to do tail him, observe the crime, and arrest him. So every week the same broken, homeless man buys huge piles of guns with cash and hands them over to local gangs, who then sell them to gangs over the border. So while the right-wing was wailing about Fast and Furious (a misguided program, to be sure), this one many flooded US and Mexican gangs with more guns, and the right-wing made sure that he could do so.

This is why over 90% of the US opposes the NRA's fanatical position on gun sales. Most of us think that it would be good if there were laws against selling guns to violent criminals and mentally unstable people, and those laws were enforceable. The NRA is happy selling guns to gangs, because it's profitable. And, even better, when the gangs shoot the rest of us, and the NRA pays Congressmen to block the gun laws 90% of us want passed, the rest of us might buy more guns to "defend ourselves". So, while it's terrible for the country and will get lots of people killed, it'll be highly profitable for the gun salesmen who fund the NRA these days. Brilliant!

Your math is wrong. The mechanism doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worthwhile - nothing is 100% effective. Heck, guns aren't 100% effective now - they sometimes misfire, etc. It just has to be effective enough that it saves more lives than it costs. That is, if it can save police from getting shot with their own guns when a criminal grabs the gun (which happens more often than you'd think) more often than it prevents a policeman from being able to shoot when they need to (which is actually fairly rare) then it's a good tradeoff.

And locks on doors. People would never accept that intrusion just to keep their stuff safe while they're away...

The problem, of course, is that irresponsible gun owners don't just endanger themselves, but also their families, neighbors, and in extreme cases (e.g. CT) large numbers of unrelated people.

That's the reason that we all have a vested interest in keeping guns under control.

Pretty close. But standing armies weren't the norm until long after the formation of the United States, and the founding fathers were vehemently opposed to the country having a standing army because they thought that it would lead to an overly militarized society because the government would keep finding uses for the army, while a government that had to recruit civilians to fight would have a strong pressure not to do so unless was a real, compelling threat.

Of course, back then wars were much slower and longer, so there was time to raise an army and train and arm them. :-(

I'm a liberal. And I was an NRA certified gun instructor, and I'm not anti-gun though I am certainly in favor of people keeping guns under control, and keeping guns away from people who shouldn't have them. And I can certainly see why people would want guns to be shootable only by the owner. Gun manufacturers have been showing off guns like this for decades. The challenge is that for this to be effective, the large majority of guns would have to implement this sort of mechanism, because otherwise it's too easy to simply ignore the few "locked down" guns. So by passing a law requiring this sort of locking mechanism, it gives manufacturers the incentive to put these mechanisms in large scale production (rather than limited demo runs they've been doing), making the mechanisms lower cost and more reliable (because competition works).

Objections to this idea sound a lot like the objections to seat belts and later airbags being mandatory in cars. Manufacturers claimed that it would make cars cost too much, would add too much complexity, would go off causing more accidents than they prevented, etc. In reality, of course, seat belts turned out to cost extremely little, be extremely reliable, and to overall save quite a few lives. So during the decades that the car companies fought the improvements in car safety, many thousands of people died or were injured who would not have been has the simply focused their efforts on implementing car safety instead of dragging their feet.

Is this challenge a difficult one? Of course. But it wasn't easy to make airbags cheap and reliable. But that's what engineers should do - solve difficult problems to make people's lives better.

When you're writing native desktop apps, the code that's actually running is also not the same as what you're writing and debugging - the former is assembly, the latter is C or C++.

Back in the real world, as opposed to movie fantasies, the most effective to stop a bad guy with a gun is to keep him from getting the gun (or ammo). There are plenty of cases where bad guys with guns were surrounded by good guys with guns, and that didn't stop them. It turns out that in real life, as opposed to movies, guns are actually only good at shooting people, not in keeping people from getting shot. That's why the actual number of criminals stopped with guns, based on real statistics rather than surveys of what people imagine, is vanishingly small.

I'll also point out that 2/3rds of the people that die from guns are suicides. Flooding the country with more guns won't reduce suicides.