Single screen, yes. And you shouldn't use the chisel stylus on it. Or holy water to clean it.

I don't see it as a big issue, either. The original article and the repost here are all FUD. If you read the bill, the congressional concerns are that the legislative data is downloaded intact and authenticated. They seem to be concerned that there is no way to lock an XML file in a manner similar to a PDF, which is already a common format used by much of the federal government. There is also concern about certificates. And there is language about the costs of developing a system. It's all in the bill itself, pages 17 and 18.

http://appropriations.house.gov/UploadedFiles/LEGBRANCH-FY13-FULLCOMMITTEEREPORT.pdf

Obviously, the biggest issue is that detractors for each party will modify downloaded bills to meet their own political agendas and mudslinging goals. I would prefer to see this done correctly, too.

As a government employee who had to plan and deal with sharing of information across thousands of systems, I often sat across the table from Microsofties who claimed that their software met our compatibility needs even though it didn't have even a basic IP stack at the time. We supported military engineers worldwide who had Sun, Apollo, Masscomp, Pyramid, and dozens of systems running a number of operating systems. Yet, they all had one thing in common - they were all POSIX compliant, and there were common tools and interfaces across all of them. Even when Windows finally got a native (sorta) IP stack, it still never got POSIX compliance. POSIX is a set of IEEE standards initiated in the 1980s, and was adopted into the NIST FIPS standards. The POSIX standards continued to develop until just 4 years ago. Most of the popular operating systems today are POSIX compliant, even certified. I wouldn't expect you to know that, though, being a MSoftie. Of all *mainstream* operating systems in use today, only Windows (in all versions) remains out of compliance. Microsoft has always fought against compatibility and portability rather than work with everyone else. The MSofties I knew were always trying to get us to drop all standards and just buy their stuff, with no care about how we could get it to work with what we already had.

Good point. I just filed a patent for the wheel.

The patent's main features, from what I can see, are that it allows for authentication controls to limit access to the annotations, and for compensation methods as well. Most of the abstract describes these features.

Also, annotations for MS Office documents are stored in the documents themselves, not kept seperately. Authentication in MS Office documents is limited to encryption passwords, if you have the password to the document, you also have access to the annotations.

The focus here is on e-commerce related to the annotations. I can see it being used for educational e-texts. Certainly, an engine could also be sold to businesses of all kinds for sensitive document development and review.

I can also see it being used to patent troll against Microsoft and anyone else that has annotation and comment abilities in their applications.

from OP:

Also can't give Microsoft a pass, especially if they're truly supposed to be ignoring undefined policies. It's not like Microsoft has ever been particularly supportive of standards they didn't develop, or like they've ever really developed a secure browser.

Al Gore is gonna be sooo mad...

Exactly. Google's facing lawsuits from around the world for collecting "private" data. Does Apple face the same issue?

NELL was studying Shakespeare sites just a bit ago. NELL finds us slashdotters to be particularly tragic.

Add breasts?

Post something conservative and send them a bill.

Facebook probably has a valid complaint. If you follow the links all the way to the author's page, you will note that he calls it "Fluff Busting Purity, also known as F*** B*** Purity" and he continues to use the F*** B*** and F.B. terms throughout. It's pretty obviously just a smack in their "face." If he wants to avoid lawsuits, he should just name it "mysocialnetwork purity" or something completely unrelated to FB. Then they could do nothing about it.

Yes. A number of them.

Correct. That also calculates into this, on the opposite side of the points I was making - I was not arguing to off-net the email, only pointing out some of the reasoning used.

Your point is fallacious. While Google won't bother to offer the user that sort of service, system administrators of locally-owned email services at colleges/universities often don't have the ability to turn said requests/demands down. So my point is hardly specious, it's a definite support issue for some college IT staff in that they have to help users undelete things they shouldnt' have deleted.

Many colleges (not just universities) run Exchange. I'm not sure how you differentiate between serious and non-serious institutions. I know of colleges with only their staff/faculty accounts in Exchange, and others with student accounts in excess of 40,000, running Exchange. I also know of institutions where each department runs their own system, and Exchange pops up in some of the departments.

If you google "Microsoft Exchange college" or "Microsoft Exchange university" you will get thousands of links to higher education bodies running Exchange for at least some of their population. For example: Texas Christian University, Edinburgh Napier University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (45,000 employees), University of Kentucky, University of Sydney, University of Arkansas, Colorado State University, University of Connecticut, University of Miami Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, Eastern Illinois University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (if that's not a serious university in your definition, then there is no such thing), Pace University, University of South Carolina, University of Washington, California State University at Northridge, University of Virginia, University of New Orleans, University of Pittsburgh, Tufts University, and many many more. And I haven't even started pasting in "college" names (versus "university").

You really should get out more.

There are a number of good reasons for *not* hosting your own email.

• User issues are constant. And that's not just the students, it's faculty and staff, too.
• Increasing demands for storage drive up costs. As soon as you expand a user's storage space, s/he fills it up and asks for more. Automatic archival systems help, but are also expensive.
• Email traffic volumes get pretty high. Even if you have local single-instance storage, remote systems aren't smart enough to take advantage of that. For example, an on-campus user sends a 50MB video to a list server at a remote site, rather than sending a link to the video. The remote list server has 30 other subscribers on the same campus. Back comes the same video, in 30 separate emails, through the shared and often already heavily loaded campus Internet trunk(s), to the local email system. Storage jumped from 30Mb in the first user's "sent" store to 1.5GB across multiple inbox stores.
• Record retention may require backups to be kept for years, depending on state and local statutes and regulations.
• Most campus mail systems are commercial applications, such as MS Exchange. They are costly, and the license fees for running them are often more costly and grow faster than your storage. Open source is a great alternative, but some administrations aren't too accepting of anything that they can't buy, for various reasons.
• Backups require additional storage, tape or disk. Tape is sluggish, and a full system backup of a large mail server takes a lot of time. Brick level backups are worse. Restoring individuals' accidentally deleted emails is often time consuming, since they seldom can actually tell you the subject line of the message you're trying to restore for them, into their too-full mailbox. Disk backup is faster, but far more costly than tape.
• Power and cooling overhead increase with storage, and energy isn't cheap.
• Downtime is a huge issue. Everyone wants 24x7, 5 9's service, if not better. That means backups are done online, which slows them down more. Incrementals and synthetics become bigger issues for possible emergency restoration plans.
• Email is a huge issue in disaster recovery, and email restoration is usually a top priority for any sort of disaster, as communications are critical during emergencies. It's time-consuming to build a fresh server farm for email, restore data, and return to "normal" email services.
• E-discovery is a costly endeavor every time it has to be done. One lawsuit or complaint can result in hundreds of man hours lost to sifting through email stores, archives, backups, and logs.
• Uninterrupted power means UPS and generator requirements.
• Data Centers are expensive real estate, and all many other information and technology systems are also putting increasing burdens on them.
• Costs continue to increase, yet funding is decreasing in most institutions. Students don't want their tuition/fees increased. Taxpayers don't want tax increases. Yet service demands continue to grow.

None of this precludes the fact that there are compliance and privacy issues surrounding email. FERPA, HIPPA, GLB, SOX, and Privacy Act may all apply. It's not an easy decision. There are at least as many factors supporting retained hosting. Outsourcing student email hosting can make a lot of sense. I don't recommend outsourcing faculty/staff email for an educational institution, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to consider it.

Microsoft has a history of repressing the competition and its customers, and even of buying out members of standards committees to grab / keep marketshare. As a company, Microsoft shows no real ethics. Why would it start now?