...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.

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.)

When I read the headline and started the summary my reaction was along the lines of "whaaaaaat!". Then I saw that they were only disabling "older" versions of Flash, not Flash entirely, and thought about what it would be like for the end user.

Right. Disabling Flash entirely is what Microsoft is doing, in the "Metro" flavor of "Windows 8" (where no browser plugins work at all).

(Though if you flip back into "Desktop" mode, you can still get them. The "Desktop" flavor of the web browser is dumbed down over current IE, but not nearly as much as the "Metro" flavor is.)

I didn't include the extra year's warrantee, very intentionally.

See, every single XBox hardware failure I know about personally (RROD specifically) got fixed by free by Microsoft even if the console was out of its warrantee period. They did this for PR reasons.

So, in practice, I'm not so sure it's correct to value it at $50 like you're doing. In theory, it results in additional coverage. In reality, I'm not so sure that it does.

So, we got a Kinect, and the biggest downside we noticed is the sheer amount of space it requires to function properly.

I do not have a small house, but it's a bit tight in our living room. I can't imagine how badly it works in a typical dorm room.

Does this sound-based mechanism work better with smaller spaces? Has it been tested in dorm rooms and cube farms?

You consider "passphrase" to actually be different from "password"? I just consider it "training people to be less stupid about passwords" -- it's not a fundamentally different method.

We have better authentication methods...

Would you kindly name three?

(Please be specific. Then, we can explain how for a given set of reality-based situations, they're not in fact actually "better".)

Heh, in a sense, the MobileMe iDisk supports Linux as well -- since the network protocol is simply WebDAV. Any WebDAV client can access the data and do whatever it wants with it.

(For a couple of months, anyhow. The switch from MobileMe to iCloud kills that feature.)

I did. It's not.

(Unless you're using Google Chrome and have offline access to Google Docs set up, and had connected to it before syncing the file you want to look at, that is. Because in that case, it was already syncing down without the Google Docs sync client. But only read-only, not for editing.)

So: you try it, with your default browser set to anything other than Chrome. Or: quit Chrome, go to another computer, create a new Google Docs file, let the sync client pull it over, kill your internet connection, and then double-click on the synced file.

Go ahead, try it. If your results differ from mine, we can try to figure out why.

There is offline access to Google Docs stuff, not tried that yet.

No, there isn't. Not really. They make it look like there is, but there isn't.

What syncs down for these files is just a wrapper containing a URL and some metadata. Double-click on one and you're in the web interface, editing the file online.

Want to prove it to yourself? Then use command-line tools ("cat" on MacOS or "type" on Windows) to dump the contents of the file.

I'm very disappointed.

If they were a private business, they could.

As a university, they cannot, especialy after Virginia Tech. Go read what Schneier recently wrote on the topic.

If you're a conspiracy-minded crackpot who uses "follow the money" reasoning, then another obvious possibility is Verizon or AT&T.

Why?

Every time one of these bomb-threat incidents happens -- and they've been happening multiple times a day every day for quite a while now -- Pitt uses their emergency notification infrastructure to coordinate communication about them. And that means text messages to thousands of students.

(Because of the whole "in loco parentis" thing Universities have to deal with, and because of the aftermath of Virginia Tech, and for all sorts of other reasons some of which Bruce Schneier recently articulated talking about this very topic, Pitt does not have the realistic option of scaling back their response. The minute they react less seriously, they're potentially open to massive lawsuits -- and that's if nothing happens. If the jackasses are waiting for a weaker response before doing something real, well, Pitt might not survive the aftermath.)

Reports indicate that multiple students who didn't previously have unlimited texting plans have now been forced to upgrade to unlimited plans. Follow the money...

Of course, that theory for what's going on is absurd to the point of being laughable. Can't be disproven, no, but come on...

It's almost certainly the case that some drunk undergrad asshat thought it would be funny to make a bomb threat anonymously, figured out how to push the buttons on the anonymous remailer while sitting in a public library, and did it. (Well, once the "scrawled on the walls of a men's room" vector had been shut down, which is how it all actually started.)

Let it spread to the level of a minor in-joke meme among even a small number of such folks, and you'd observe something an awful lot like what we're actually seeing now. Much more likely than government conspiracy, anti-occupy conspiracy, or mobile operator conspiracy (though of course we can't disprove any of those).

Until the masses of American citizens, especially and particularly the "helicopter parents" of current undergrads, are willing to accept a security environment that involves cost/benefit analysis and the acceptance of some actual threat, what can be done? And it doesn't look like they're ready to accept that any time soon. "Think of the children!"

FYI, we're not dealing with "the occasional bomb threat" here.

The University of Pittsburgh (which is down the street from where I work) has gotten multiple bomb threats per day every day for weeks now.

Many students have been driven out of their dorms, to live off campus, because the evacuations were too disruptive. The campus police are no doubt way over budget. Classes are disrupted to the point where folks on academic probation were told this semester "doesn't count".

At this moment, as I type this, two buildings have evacuation notices. Earlier today, eleven buildings had to be evacuated.

And today was not exceptional.

If you want to follow this yourselves, evacuation notices go out over the @PittTweet twitter account.

Now, I'm not trying to say "knocking every anonymous remailer off the internet is justified". Please don't assume I think that. I'm just pointing out that this very much isn't a case of "the occasional bomb threat". It's basically a full-on ongoing multi-day denial-of-service attack on the Pitt police, Pittsburgh police, and a bunch of the university, happening in meatspace.

Yeup. The last time I willingly watched the olympics, the year was 1976. I don't see that changing this time around.

...and your "that way" is no longer the "that way" I was talking about, which didn't include iTunes.