It's one of the world's most ambitious projects. Not surprisingly, its construction and operation can be problematic from time to time.

It's not a valid comparison. Windows is the major cash cow for MS, while IE doesn't generate direct revenue. The main reason why they are spending resources on IE is to promote Bing and a number of other products.

Yep, the future of the web is looking good, except for IE that is lagging behind. I wonder, why MS wouldn't just get over it and discontinue the development of its monstrous browser. They've lost the browser war, why wouldn't they put their resources elsewhere?
At least IE8 is better than its predecessors and IE9 looks even better, but still..

Unfortunately, in this world the idiotic, regular populace is what really matters to the industry.

All three will be marginalized by the ARM onslaught. Within 10 years, smartphone will be the personal computing device, AMD and Intel processors will power the cloud.

Entropy shows us the direction of time. Lower entropy than now means past, higher entropy means future. However, if entropy ever reaches maximal level (thermodeath of the Universe), then this measure of time won't be usable any more.

Don't bother my beard, you insensitive clod!

Or he'll kill you with his bearded chin

As for me, I'm still waiting for real-life Gauss rifle (along with Advanced Power Armor).

Google is responsible to "keep Wikipedia running", so it won't collapse under Google's massive traffic. It's a symbiosis: Wikipedia needs Google for traffic and (to lesser extent) money, Google needs Wikipedia for the world's information. Besides, Google's engineers won't be happy tweaking their core ranking algorithms should Wikipedia suddenly disappear.

Google ranks Wikipedia very high in its search results, which bring enormous amount of traffic. Scaling and maintaining the infrastructure to deal with this traffic is the major part of Wikimedia Foundation's expenses. So, Google is in fact responsible for a huge chunk of Wikipedia's expenses, and it probably feels obligated to give Wikipedia some compensation for this.

Certainly, Apple will reject the app and Opera knows it. Maybe Opera tries to strengthen Apple's "Evil Empire" image and deal with it with the help of EU (just like they did with Microsoft recently).

Google just doesn't get all these social things, they're good at creating ruthless search bots, but lose when it comes to social interaction.

They'd better let this generation social networks be and focus on next generation social networks (mobile social networks). At least now they have an Android platform, so they may integrate social network functionality into their OS (maybe even based on current Gmail application) and start from there.

iPad is a computer for technically illiterate people. As those people form the majority of world's population, there's potentially huge market for it. Just think of it from the point of view of an average consumer:

• It's simple. Even a monkey can learn how to interact with iPhone OS, everything is simple, touchable, rounded and shiny.
• It has a nice browser (even though it doesn't support Flash)
• It can be used to watch videos, listen to music and read books
• It will have a gazillion of [relatively] cheap and cool games.
• It won't have viruses, malware and spyware
• You don't need to ask your geeky friend to reinstall Windows on it once in a while.
• It's good looking (in comparison to an average PC, at least).
• It's relatively cheap (in comparison to an average Mac)

The only problem with iPad is that it can't be used without iTunes, but then again, every family usually has at least one more-or-less technically-savvy person, who has a PC or a Mac and can synchronize his mother's, dad's and granny's iPads with iTunes from time to time.

I expected Linus Torvalds to use something more geeky, e.g. N900 or one of OpenMoko devices, but in this case he has chosen user-friendliness instead of endless tinkering. Nexus One is probably one of the most user-friendly Linux-based devices to date (competing with WebOS devices in this respect), and it is very functional as well, so the choice seems obvious.