You are absolutely right. In fact, supporting these myriad operating systems and configurations is going to be so hard (things like domain join, security, etc., not to mention versions of productivity software not working due to the plethora of conflicts), that IT isn't going to go in for the BYOD in the way people think. They will just punt and provide VDI sessions for people who BYOD - and that session will be all that is supported.

Actually I think it is worse than that. We all have things we like to do. Many people have things that they like to do that they really don't want others to know about. It might be that shoe fetish you mentioned. It could be gambling. As soon as people realize that they are being tracked on these activities and lists are being sold saying that they engage in them, they may modify their behavior. And while this may seem a net good for gambling or jailbait or something - it may eventually extend to things like "votes libertarian" or "is an atheist" or even "hindu, but frequents burger king" or whatever. I really don't want to see us get so far as to have people consciously having to modify their normal (legal) behaviors simply because they are being reported, tracked, and shipped to anyone with some money. You never know when that information will get out and you don't know who will see it. Let's label it "do not want" and see if we can prevent this "behavior modification through tracking everything" dystopia from becoming a reality.

Add to the items you list EMET - http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29851. This is a free download from Microsoft that allows you to protect processes (such as IE and Java) from well known exploit techniques (such as heap spray, etc.). As an example, it protected against this latest IE zero day "execCommand Use After Free Vulnerability - CVE-2012-4969". We (large enterprise) had no worries at all about that vulnerability since we have EMET deployed and configured. Here's the MS02-063 bulletin - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms12-063. If you expand the execCommand node and look at the mitigations you'll see you would have been protected. Often times Adobe Flash bulletins mention that EMET was a mitigation for the plethora of vulnerabilities that Adobe Flash code contains.

I've gone from spinning drives to SSD in my notebooks and I won't be going back. As a person responsible for both coding and creating system images, I rebuild my machines all the time. The build time is a lot faster on an SSD. Besides just the OS, it takes about 15 minutes to install Visual Studio 2010 + SP1 on an SSD as opposed to nearly an hour for a spinning drive. (BTW, I am a real poster - not that Visual Studio troll / shill we've seen recently). I also run a single VM on my notebook. That boots up and runs almost like a real computer instead of the pokey slowness I had before with a spinning drive. Honestly all of the other things mentioned here are valid. Less heat, better shock resistance, better battery life, etc. But don't count performance out either. As with most things, it depends on the workloads you are running. For my workload, SSD makes a lot of sense.

Well, to be fair, they would have to settle the whole "making available" thing before they can determine if the actual damages (by law) were more than $24. Because, honestly, WHO makes the copy? The downloader does. Not the seeder. The seeder "makes available" and the legal status of that has really not been settled. It would be similar to you hanging up a pamphlet on a bulletin board near a copy machine. Yes, people may make copies. But you didn't. You made it available for them. Contrast this with the commercial violation of copyright making bootleg DVDs. The person making the DVD made the copy. Very different. I know it is semantics and all, but copyright law is full of things like this where things don't make a lot of sense.

Maybe they just claimed copyright on the original PDF and are holding the malware infested version as merely an infringing derivative work?