"Amazon will likely succeed only in alienating customer with PlayBooks who have already purchased lots of streaming video content."

Is this just an elaborate way to say "nobody will care", or is this thing more popular than I imagine? I have never even seen a PlayBook, never mind buying streaming video content for it.

Probably, and indeed that is (a basic form of) programming. And yet I believe most people could not do even that if their live depended on it. If someone bothered to do the research, I think they'd find that the majority of people who even have a remote idea of how to use a computer (know how to read mail and how to click links on "the internet") are not actually able to create an Excel spreadsheet with a column A that lists some items, a column B that lists prices for said items, and then stick a SUM(B1:Bxx) in there somewhere, say. At least, not without prior extensive instructions on how to do exactly that one trivial task, of course.

Its amazing how far a single article of FUD goes these days - Microsoft is not "going soft" on .Net, they just weren't willing to discuss it during a talk about something else entirely, while in Windows 8, .Net is still there and stronger than ever.

"Stronger than ever" how?

Rather, it's amazing that .NET made it this far, while Microsoft itself (apart from its development division) hasn't used it for basically anything (that was released, anyway), also clearly won't in the future, and it's clear that the Windows group upper management hates it.

That's not FUD, that's just facing facts.

This is completely standard in most of Europe and has been for decades, so no electrician would look funny at that. From this thread I get the feeling most European electricians would rather be in for quite a shock if they ever saw a US wiring scheme, though.

16A (230V) is both the maximum per socket, as well as the standard maximum per circuit. Nearly any power strips and extension cords are equally rated at ~3600W (which, you'll note, is what you get by multiplying those two).

...my speedometer indicates a number somewhat higher than the speed limit. This differs per car but in my case the speedometer is off by 3-6 km/h (the difference increases with speed) according to the average indicated by several SatNavs I tried. I'm assuming these are quite accurate, because they can calculate an average over a somewhat longer distance; I also live in a very flat country.

For example, if my speedometer reads 125 km/h I'm actually doing 120 km/h (that's 75 MPH for the metric-impaired).

The fun thing is that the car system is actively lying about your speed (because the manufacturer wants to stay on the safe side); I have a ScanGauge that indicates a lower (correct) speed as reported by the board computer, which I assume is also the number used to keep track of distance covered. So it seems that the speedometer logic purposely increases this number by some small factor.

my new 2010 CR-V has a real time miles per gallon calculator on the dashboard and i can easily go above 30mpg at 65mph

Yeah, hybrids easily get 50-60 mpg at similar speeds though. So do small diesels (those can do even better, in fact).

the only time it drops a lot is when i accelerate which is a lot since i'm in NYC and we have a lot of traffic lights.

You do realize these are exactly the circumstances where a hybrid drivetrain actually helps a lot, even compared to small diesel engines?

Remember that this very stock exchange moving to a purely Microsoft/.NET based solution was widely touted in Microsoft's so-called 'Get the "Facts"' campaign. Microsoft was involved (with Accenture) in the implementation of the project, not just in selling some Windows licenses. So this screwup should really be a PR disaster for them. If Microsoft themselves cannot even get a .NET project to work in places where their Linux-using competitors have no trouble at all (Chi-X is also Linux-based), then that sure looks like a platform in trouble to me.

Remember that the entire thing crashed down for an entire trading day, something that you can imagine didn't go over well, and together with the high latencies and other numerous problems, was the reason they dumped it for Linux.

If I purchase the phone outright, wouldn't this be willful destruction of property on Motorola's part? Does a company have the right to destroy a purchased product - after the sale - if the consumer doesn't use it in a prescribed manner?

To my knowledge (IANAL etc.) many countries have laws against this, though I don't know about the USA specifically. Generally the line is crossed at the point when there are built-in additional features that serve no purpose other than to cause the product to "break" intentionally, in circumstances that are not advertised and obviously not intended by the user. The latter might be the case for e.g. self-destructing USB sticks and the like (in which case it would be an advertised and obviously intentional feature).

In other words, it's fine to build (shoddy) products that are "designed to have a limited life-time", to put it the corporate speak way, but intentionally adding "self-destruct" components is not - in particular if the customer could not reasonably have known about it (e.g., when that property was not advertised anywhere).

For once, we're hearing about an authentically clever, afaik new physical design which solves a real problem and is actually sanely applicable to be patented. I wasn't expecting that when I clicked on this story. Gotta hand it to Microsoft for this one.

Whenever reading something like this, I cannot help wondering which company they bought the solution from.

It's certainly a clever design, and even if they bought it elsewhere that was a very good decision. Which, if technology blogs are anything to go by, are increasingly rare within Microsoft's management layers.

Adult here, with a well paid job. I live in a city, and I have never felt like I needed to own a car. In fact, do not even have a drivers license.

Also, you don't live in the USA, I'd guess?