Good luck compiling Flash and H.264 into that.

Interestingly I just noted about this on slashdot a week ago when someone was thinking why Windows was connecting to a Microsoft ip address. It only makes good sense to test that the network connection really is working, but also shows that Microsoft isn't there to violate your privacy like Google. You can easily turn it off or even change what url it requests. If you value your privacy, it's better to pay for your software instead of selling your privacy to marketers in return, like with Chrome OS.

Since Netflix uses almost 30% of the whole North American traffic during peak hours, they should really improve their technology. Most of the traffic is in peak hours. Instead of sending individual streams over the internet to every customer, they could develop some kind of protocol which could be used to broadcast all the streams to everyone at the same time. To make sure they don't clog the existing internet lines, they should lay down their own lines. Then they have full control over the infrastructure too. Broadcasting so many different streams probably doesn't work, so Netflix could instead start showing specific programs at certain times and people would tune in at those times to watch their favorite shows. For example once a week Netflix would show episode of every tv show and maybe movies at certain times and days. Since they own the infrastructure too, Netflix could stop worrying about all the different devices and just sell a product you put in your living room and use it to watch Netflix.

Who said that you would be liking the something on the search engine page? The summary just notes that if some of your friends has liked something on Facebook, Bing will note that on the results.

Another case where it really is bad to store everything in the cloud. Is it just me or does Android seem to have these security problems come out almost every day? I hope Google secures its own servers a little better than what the amount of security problems on Android suggests...

And like you noted, .NET apps or games can be written in many different languages. He seems to like Python and that too can be used to write .NET code. All the languages can also use the huge library of code and API's. For that reason it's also easy and headache-free to write .NET apps, and for the usual languages Visual Studio is a great IDE, but there are others too. When I tried Windows Phone 7 programming a few months ago I was seriously impressed how fast the developing progress was. You can get stuff done in no time.

Most likely 99.9% people will find it useful. It's not other peoples fault you 1) have friends who share nothing with you 2) are anti-social and still living the 80's.

They didn't say it affects rankings, only that it will show in the search results.

With Left4Dead the whole team is playing better if every player plays better. This model could, for example, reward those who are playing a good team game and making the game fun for others too. Since Left4Dead "director" can dynamically change the difficulty level based on how good everyone plays there wont be a problem with too easy games either.

Just like in real life you benefit from having friends. Ultimately it should be the same for games, especially since companies make good amount of money when players get their friends to join them or make the gaming experience great for others. On the other hand if you're an asshole in the game you ruin it for others and lose revenue for the company. It only makes sense for the developer to give bonuses for making the experience better for everyone.

Steam is a great service. I've bought over 200+ games with it and completely stopped buying games from brick and mortar stores. A lot of them are from sales, and now they're introducing one new sale every day too.

Speaking of which, just last night I spotted a really fun game on Steam - Terraria. I love games where you can build, dig and explore. If you have to compare, it kind of reminds of Minecraft, but is still different and has a lot more features. The multiplayer works great too and you can have teams. It's great fun when both teams build a castle and start attacking the other one, even making secret tunnels to get there unnoticed, and there's tons of weapons and other fun stuff in the game. YouTube has a cool video series on the game.

And all the users programs will be gone on next reboot?

FBI should really put up ads on the seized domains. The more high value sites they seize, the more money they would make.

I mostly just use it for image hosting for forums or to quickly give something to a friend, which it's just fine for.

Also, before someone comes in blaming the whole cloud thing again, it's not the fault of "cloud". It's a fault of a lying company. If your bank told you that your money would be safe with armed guards and you would not be responsible for someone robbing them, but it turns out the bank stored all their money in an insecure normal office and someone casually broke in and took the money, you would blame that one bank, not the whole banking system.

Exactly. Don't break your legs and head in a car accident if you don't know how to repair them!