Fortunately he failed, it runs on vxWorks

No reason to shout. Let people have their hobby! I think AVR and similar inexpensive microprocessors are a great way to get started in "not purely software" hackery. And if Arduino and the likes make it even easier, the better! Just because not everyone was born with a keyboard in their hand, typing into emacs, doesn't mean they don't have the right to explore the realm of programming with whatever editor and platform they like. Sure, there are a lot of applications these 8-bit MCUs are ill-suited for, but let them figure that out by themselves. It's a learning process, but you in your arrogance shout at AC because he/she wished for something you think is impossible. And maybe it is, but the way you communicate that is somewhat arrogant. There are plenty of paths to becoming an educated hacker and if it's via a Java-based IDE on Windows that's just as well.

In addition to external hard drives, I use DVD-RAMs, which are supposed to survive a few decades.

To me it seems more and more like these companies with their huge patent pools are bored and now play a game against each other.
company1: "Hey company2, I hold a patent vaguely describing what you do with product X"
company2: "Hey company1, I have two patents even more vaguely describing what you do with product Y"
company3: "Hey both of you, I hold ten patents that you both infringe on"
company1: "Oh yeah, well guess what, I have twelve other patents, that ..."
...Ad infinitum...
It's getting ridiculus...

That's French you're describing there.
At least that's how it seemed to me in school. English on the other hand was a lot easier.
I don't think you can generalize that way and label certain languages easy or hard to learn, it probably depends on how your native language has influenced your brain structure for languages, on the circumstances in which you try to learn another language (I didn't really get along with my French teacher, I don't think that helped) and many other things.

(my native language is German)

They already do sub-contract manufacturers for their hardware. The XBox360 is - like Apples products - manufactured by Foxconn (at least according to wikipedia), so that wouldn't be a huge leap.

... and failed spectacularly?
And seeing how the "make the OS, leave making the phone (mostly) to others" business model seems to be working rather well for Google, I don't see, why it shouldn't for Microsoft.

I'm not following that analogy. I think AVRStudio is just fine as far as IDEs for microcontrollers go.

even though it's called iTex, i isn't useful as a version numbering scheme... \sqrt{2} maybe?

oh great, just what everyone was waiting for.

...in fact, as far as I'm concerned it's about time that someone legislated how companies I have to deal with protect my personal information.
This "Written Information Security Plan"-Thing (yes, I read TFA) sounds like an unnecessary and useless PITA though...