...if it can be done for android, why not PC?

Is that a rhetorical question? I'm not quite sure. I'll play along and assume it's not.

The answer is: DRM. The reason various set-top boxes and iOS and Android devices can do Netflix without Silverlight is because those platforms are locked down enough that they don't need Silverlight's DRM to discourage copying.

Sure, they could make their own dedicated "app" for Windows, and implement DRM in there. I bet under Windows 8, they will.

The way unions control things here, they'd probably be sent to jail for 20 years and not be fired... and continue to collect pay.

Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.

Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.

Why should they be fired, unless they're billing by the hour?

A third of them might be taking longer to do the same work because they're taking more breaks, cleaning up after a kid, answering the door, whatever -- dealing with more interruptions. But if they're doing the same amount of work and being paid the same amount, why should anyone care?

(If they're paid by the hour and billing more hours, then okay.)

Unless we find intelligent life living on Saturn, they're going to be a very long ways away. Far enough to be extremely useful in the "stop being solar-centric, stop thinking some magical God invented man, everyone grow the fuck up" kind of way. But so far there's no plausible possibility of external risk at all. I'd be more worried about the religious zealots (of all denominations) and how they're going to react to having their minds forcefully opened to a bigger world.

The three scenarios you listed have essentially zero possibility of happening. Science rules the universe, not science fiction.

Not to nit, but 98% is unheard of in Vegas. CT requires close to that, in aggregate, but Vegas is WAY less than that. (Its been a while since I looked, but IIRC it was in the 70%'s.)

And the Italians used to rule most of Europe and the Middle East. Your point?

Russia's space program hasn't done anything but produce small incremental improvements on *Soviet* technology. Technology built by a country under the auspices of its military that *no longer exists*. Technology built using quantities of labor and resources that are no longer available to it.

If you believe for an instant that the current space program in Russia could do something like this, you're completely ignorant of the reality of the existing space program in Russia or its history. (You'd be equally ignorant if you thought NASA could do it either -- it couldn't... not even close. Technical ability has no bearing on the political or economic realities of a program like that.)

Russia is a 3rd world country that managed a historic semblance of technology and industry through near slavery of its population, and is in perpetual decline, run by criminals with delusions of grandeur.

This has as much reality behind it as North Korea claiming they're going to settle Venus.

They're not screwing over the little guy. They're taking advantage of the greed of the little guy, the exact same thing the little guys are trying to do. It was no different with the housing bubble. Greed (and absolutely nothing more) drove the middle class to suck money out of their houses to live lavish lifestyles VASTLY beyond their means. Did the banks profit off that greed? Sure, but the trillions of dollars that were lost in the housing market were spent by the homeowners on vacations, $40k cars, flat screen TVs and other such things that someone making $50k a year *shouldn't have*. Period. A few investment bankers racking up seven figure bonuses isn't even a fraction of a percent of the money that was stolen the greed of the "99%".

Plenty of people made lots of money on it -- institutional investors and professionals. Private amateur investors are universally told IPOs are a *bad* idea to invest in. Greed drove a lot of morons to invest money on a "sure thing".

The FB IPO dragged down a bunch of other solid stocks, which have all rebounded. If you bought AAPL the day before the FB IPO, you've already made almost 7% -- in four days. A lot of other stocks were similarly pulled down by the market wanting to realize some gains and shift money into FB. Other people shorted FB, knowing the price was at least 2-3x what could be justified. (And the IPO was far too big for single-investor hype to drive the prices up that far.)