A virus that is not competing with fellows of its own variety do not have an entire ecosystem at their disposal unless they're in a body entirely clean of other organisms with a completely compromised immune system.

This is completely blind speculation. It's also possible, using similar blind speculation, that this pathway is the virus panacea we've been waiting for, and that it will ultimately prove to be the death of all human-susceptible viruses ever. Take THAT, HIV!

You can sit there and tell everyone to 'hold on' all you want but if you don't give them a good reason to stop pushing forward with the implementation, they aren't going to wait for your consortium to debate for another five years. We're moving forward.

Seriously, the pace of an individual company's innovation is not going to wait for a standards body that can't keep up.

If W3C wants to remain relevant, they'll have to pick up the pace.

"it would be like buying auto insurance after you've had a wreck and expecting the insurance company to cover you for that wreck."

No, it would be like having a heart attack, going to the hospital, and be told that since you did not buy insurance they would not treat your life-threatening condition at all. Not that you would have to pay full price - NO amount of money would convince them to treat you.

Rules are rules, right?

Pretty much, yep!

"A 2007 memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee described him as one of the five "best-read national conservative bloggers,"[3] though Reynolds self-identifies not as a conservative, but as a libertarian.[4]" - wiki Let me know when the story's picked up by an even vaguely neutral news publication, eh?

This is all beside the point - whether or not a given smartphone is treated with in-depth analysis has nothing to do with political affiliation - my point was that as a whole, journalists do not "arrange" a point of view - they may share one due to incompetence or laziness, but there is no grand pro-Apple conspiracy.

I'm not saying that it was not more of a good thing than a bad thing - but I AM going to say that the security vulnerability solved a problem for a lot of people. It may have also opened a door to malicious code, but that doesn't negate the idea that being able to install the code -you- want on your phone is good.

Next, I expect to see root kits that patch their own back doors. :)

With the exception of right wing political media that get together for weekly talking points, "The Media" doesn't collude together for a common focus. Most reporters know next-to-nothing about the beat they cover unless it is a personal passion, and expecting them to dig deep is incredibly naive, especially in a time like today when a skeleton crew covers virtually everything.

You have people like Engadget saying "hooray, we can root our iPhones!" and you have people like CNet saying "iPhones are hot shit!", and then you have every tiny tech beat for every newspaper in the country creating stories from that and the massive wave of popularity Apple has garnered. I'd love to see more non-specialty reporting on the history of locking down devices, but you'll have to wait for someone like Wired (who, despite their flaws, is a news hybrid) to try to cross that bridge first.

Fixed.

"If you want to use a service, you have to play by that service's rules, unless in your outrage you find a cheaper, easier solution that costs the service profits."

I mean, let's not be idealistic here, this is what happens.

From TFA:

"What's interesting is that the head of the Android project at Google has flatly said, more than once, that the company is not interesting in making or selling hardware. Obviously, this changes things. Granted, HTC is actually making the device for Google, but it will be fully branded by Google and the user experience will be Google's and not HTC's."

Really? The company said it wasn't going to make or sell hardware, and HTC is making the hardware, and this changes things? Granted, Google may put marketing might behind it, but they've not really done so with anything in the past, so we'll see.

The most exciting new MMOs on the scene seem to be making noises about having more persistent worlds. Players or guilds have (instanced) housing, people can modify their gear in visual ways such as changing the color or style, and there are world-changing events - some universal (like the AQ gate), some personal (Wrathgate/death knight intro). MMOs like the new Star Wars have split up the quests so they are entirely unique per class.

Some of your most ardent supporters have come up with fully-fleshed ideas for personal housing based on current in-game graphic assets and expansion of the professions.

Do you have plans to compete with these new contenders on the level of personally-unique, class-unique, or guild-unique content?

The idea of hacking the FasTrak system (or, more specifically, cloning FasTrak units) for false alibis and other social mayhem was explicitly brought up in Cory Doctorow's Little Brother. I think it is way more interesting in the fiction book, because they rapidly re-cloned random other cars, essentially switching IDs around.