I suspect that movies have the advantage of multiple, fairly well price discriminated, release channels: Produce movie, reap opening weekend theatre sales, then reap new-release purchase/premium rental income, then slowly discounted purchase/regular rental/Pay-per-view, and finally sit back on the residual occasional rentals/purchases/licenses for broadcast by cable channels/airplanes/etc.
Games pretty much have a short sales window in which they enjoy any serious retail push, and then they start to lose physical shelf space and make the rest in bargain bin/download sales.
Also, while the money is often spent rather unwisely(precise motion-capture and high-precision rendering of generic-space-marine-protagonist's emotional spectrum, all the way from 'scowl' to 'rageful scowl', rather than "making it not suck") some of the AAA titles do end up costing pretty serious amounts of money...
While I certainly am uninspired by much of what has the temerity to bear a "$59.99" sticker, I don't understand how you can declare the category illegitimate as a whole:
If there are games that are acceptably worth $30, surely a game that provided twice as many man-hours of enjoyment would be worth $60(being essentially equivalent to buying two $30 games that just happen to have some sort of narrative coherence)?
In all but the most rigidly (mal)designed games, "length" has long been fairly fuzzy. Virtually every shooter, for instance, if it even bothers to have a single player campaign, won't be too terribly long(and if it is long, most of the 'length' might well consist of backtracking for keycards through recycled art assets slapped together by the we-just-don't-give-a-fuck intern); but it will have a multiplayer/bot mode of some sort or another that will keep people busy for as long as they want.
RPGs are often rather similar: In Diablo II, say, you started running into enemies that were just the same damn sprites as an hour ago, tinted a different color and shooting 'energy blasts' instead of fireballs, and the game was quite upfront about the fact that the dungeons being crawled were programmatically stitched together out of a set of tiles. On the other hand, while "original" content started to run dry within hours, the game provided the option to play, play again on harder difficulty(possibly two rounds of harder difficulty), play in "hardcore" mode, etc, etc.
RTSes usually have the same basic mechanics as FPSes: a fairly limited single-player campaign; but multiplayer/bot battles until you get bored of the whole thing.
If games start artificially force-quit-after-the-cutscene ending on you, just so you'll buy the unlock code for "Chapter 2, the DLC that isn't actually downloaded because it was on the disk the whole time", that would be unacceptable. If, however, the point at which the art/story people start just phoning it in and adding additional 'length' by changing the tints and HP numbers for new enemies is being slightly tweaked, that'll be a trend that goes back as far as I can remember, and has always been a touch subjective in terms of where "new" ends and "recycled" begins.
The poor bastards on the consoles, of course, are likely to get the worst of it; because many PC games have their novel lengths radically boosted by modders; whose works are often unavailable or DLC-ified on the console side...
My understanding is that, if you wish to use any encrypted cable service, you either suck it up and rent the company's cable box, or you enter the delightsome world of cablecard 'compatibility' with so-called "host" devices. At present, because of the somewhat onerous(incidentally the 'open' in "opencable" appears to be a piece of gallows humor, not an actual description) certification requirements, specific Wintel hardware configurations are the only ones DRMy enough for the purpose, along with a number of STBs and TVs and similar appliances.
Apple's continued lack of enthusiasm for DRM systems other than their own makes adoption of Cable Card on any of their platforms less than entirely likely, and I'm pretty sure that there is a standing order at Cable Labs HQ that any Linux system not thoroughly Tivoized is to be stopped at the door and ejected by security.
If you are dealing with OTA signals, or snarfing analog feeds from STBs, or using non/weakly DRMed digital media, you have options; but if you want to talk to a commercial cable network, not so much...
The naming is slightly misleading: "Motorola Mobility" encompasses their cellphone line; but also a bunch of STB, cable modems, and other consumer electronics widgets. "Motorola Solutions" is their government and enterprise customer brand(which includes a bunch of mobile RF stuff, just not the consumer focused gear).
There could certainly be some re-shuffling that happens during the merger; but "Mobility" presently includes a variety of hardwired consumer products.
The question, though, is whether the customers(ie. the cable companies that mass-buy STBs, not the end users) would see that as a desirable feature...
Team Cable already knows who you are, because they bill you and run a coax line to your house, and may well prefer their own in-house collection, however inferior, to Google having a chance to improve its overall advertising prowess on "their consumers".
There certainly might be some weeding on the basis of subtler inherent capabilities lower down in the ranks; but the sheer amount of drill and practice(both playing and hammering at word lists) required to make a good scrabble player suggests a major 'effect' component.
I do find the notion that this is a 'good' development(outside of the environment of scrabble, where it is obviously useful) sort of interesting. When I am reading, the most pleasant, fastest, and most engaged state is when the words become 'transparent' to me. I'm no longer consciously aware of visually scanning the individual words, nor is their any vocal component(audible or subvocalising), the meaning of what I'm reading just sort of flows in, without any consciousness of the intermediate tasks that I have to perform to get it there. The state of immediate visual recognition of real/false, divorced from meaning, sounds like it would be rather distracting while trying to do anything with words that isn't a particular rather abstract word game...
It's like the Stroop effect tests: some people are better than others at them; but the illiterate knock them out of the park without effort, while the more proficient readers often have great difficulty completing the task instead of just responding to the meaning of the word. Obviously, you aren't likely to become a top tier scrabble player through illiteracy or other serious reading disorder; but I have to wonder if developing this specialized visual facility to such a high pitch detracts from one's general-purpose reading ease.
Based on the relative costs(and sizes) of the existing visible-spectrum-camera-hidden-on-the-ATM technology and the available thermal imaging gear, I'm somewhat inclined to doubt any significant uptake.
Even if you go fleabaying, a thermal imaging system up to the task will easily be north of $1,000, and the cheap seats are often rather bulky and don't exactly sip power. If you go with something handheld, the fact that many of them look very much unlike normal digital cameras will make you stand out a good deal.
Your dinky little pinhole spycam, either from a skimmer-vendor or modified from a cheap cellphone or some chintzy perv-market 'security' camera is going to be at least a factor of ten cheaper, able to run much longer on batteries, and substantially smaller.
Unless somebody really fucked up in terms of the conditions under which computer forensics expert witnesses had access to the computer(and at least one forensics guy is willing to risk some serious smackdown, presumably for compensation that somebody else would be risking serious smackdown to provide him...) the "but they planted it on my computer!" defense seems unlikely to work well...
(Again, barring monumental incompetence on the part of at least one party in a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-on-the-line case) this just isn't the sort of situation where the computer in question would have been left in Sheriff Bubba's evidence locker/misc. supplies closet with a sticky note asking people not to touch it.
It's all part of my plan to brute-force the entire punspace in a search for the good ones. The tailings of that operation can be downmodded or converted to cheap laughs, as my fellow slashdot timewasters prefer...
Eh, I'm sure that if you give Visa's lawyers a call they can probably hook you up with the draft language for a 'Managed Freedom Debt Restructuring Settlement' which would do almost as well...
What I want to know, in this case, is what they were fucking up before to go from 50 pounds to 9.
Once you factor in support circuitry, enough structure to keep the cells from easy damage, and maybe a little battery to steady output, 9 pounds doesn't get you all that much panel area. And not that much panel area, especially in less than full sun, means not all that much power output. What were they doing with 50 pounds of payload before? A totally unexceptional, off the shelf, sealed lead acid deep-cycle battery of 40 pounds is rated for a touch over 50 amp hours and 12v(which would still leave more weight in the 50lb budget than the entire new system just for support/DC-DC conversion circuitry...) If you were feeling cost insensitive a Li-poly pack would do considerably better.
Did the previous solution involve a backpack full of car batteries, a 12v-120v inverter, and a proprietary wall-wart for every brand of hardware in their toolkit?
Somebody ran a fiber line out to Galt's Gulch again. A backhoe should be around to correct the problem in the near future; but best to ignore it until then...
I'm afraid that you have your strawmen mixed up, producing a strange hybrid of the 'liberal elitist hipster either sponging off his parents or in possession of a job that lets him look down on Real Americans' and the 'coddled welfare negroid who knows only gangsta rap and animalistic violence', possibly with a touch of 'one of the tiny remnants of what could be described as genuinely radical leftists, venturing out of his anarco-syndicalist squat somewhere'...
A well-to-do hipster wouldn't be caught dead in possession of "grillz", and prefers ironic PBR or obscure artisinal microbrews to liquor. Someone looting for "grillz" and liquor, on the other hand, should be of the 'urban' persuasion, and (while glutted on unearned welfare checks confiscated from decent people like you) sufficiently poor to be menacing.
Please, please, try to observe a modicum of accuracy when employing stereotypes.
It isn't just black-and-white, it's either blindingly idiotic or sheer jingoism...
Can he seriously doubt that his hypothetical counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia were doing anything other than denouncing the merely criminal activities of those who, unlike legitimate activists, simply attacked Law Enforcement?
If he can, and somehow imagines that 'evil' regimes consist entirely of bad guys twirling their mustaches and congratulating themselves on how evil they are, then he is being idiotic. If he can't, then his point amounts to little more than "Our Law Enforcement good, their law enforcement evil!" That may, as it turns out, incidentally be true; but you can't usefully hold such a position with some standards for determining what actions make a given entity 'bad' or 'good', a 'legitimate activist' target, or something that only a 'mere criminal' would attack. He seems to have skipped that part.
Are there alternatives to SSL for HTTPS? If so, what are they and how supported are they? I'm no fan of SSL, but I'm much less of a fan of plaintext channels.
The problem isn't really with the math(I'm not ruling out specific implementation flaws, or future cryptographic research work; but that is overwhelmingly the least broken part of the system); but with the rather tragicomedic state of the measures in place to prevent impersonation by men in the middle, registrars fucking up/being co-opted, users being morons(Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between a lock icon in the address bar and a.gif of a lock on the webpage...) and so forth.
If you've already verified the certificate of the host you'll be chatting with by some out-of-band means, you are pretty much good to go: your communications will be impractical to eavesdrop upon, and nothing short of breaking into the host, by physical or electronic means, and grabbing the private key will allow impersonation by hostile entities. The sticky problem is the (overwhelming majority of) cases where you haven't or cannot verify the certificate ahead of time/out of band. Our present answer of "Well, just trust any one of an alarming number of not very competent entities to vouch for them" is pretty weak.
There are several prongs to why: One, it isn't clear that their rootkit development is restricted to fed work. The leaked emails related to their rootkit work specifically mention an "intent to commercialize". Even if they were restricted to fed work, there is certainly no evidence that their customers are only those entities concerned with external surveillance. Given the eagerness and creepiness of the HB Gary/Palantir/Berlico proposal to BoA to deal with wikileaks and a journalist who was considered troublesome(and similar work for the 'US Chamber of Commerce') I'm inclined to find the development of purely offensive tools, like rootkits, rather sinister.
Second, their emphasis on selling exploit code, even if their customer list is a bunch of squeaky-clean boy scouts, creates a perverse incentive for them as a security company: to stockpile and conceal a variety of zero-day vulnerabilities in assorted common software(the phrase to look for, in the leaked email archives is "juicy fruit", they enthusiastically collected them). Given the very high dependence of US, and 1st world generally, nations on their computers working properly, a situation where 'defense' contractors have an incentive to make virtually all software users less safe, just so the feds have an easier time inserting rootkits, is a deeply perverse and undesirable one.
Actually, for specific definitions of "open" that is a longstanding Microsoft tradition:
Microsoft does, in fact, enthusiastically endorse the right of as many hardware vendors as possible to license Microsoft operating systems and certain other platform technologies(unless that doesn't work out, like 'Playsforsure', in which case dump their sorry asses and leave the 3rd parties to rot). They also endorse the right of as many software developers as possible to develop software that depends on win32,.NET, or other Microsoft technologies.
They take these principles of freedom and openness quite seriously...(except when they don't work out).
By " Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with equal opportunity for all partners." he means "Well, except for Nokia, who is our pet OEM, with whom we have a cozy special alliance..."
Obviously, the biggest potential downside of the Google/Motorola acquisition is the effect on other current Android device producers, so MS can reasonably be expected to say something like that; but come on. It was not so very long ago that Microsoft and Nokia were shamelessly leveraging one another's dynamic synergies, right there in public, and now they want us to believe that Windows Phone is all equal opportunity for everyone and fuzzy kittens?
The "Team Themis" work for Bank of America also appears to have been heartwarmingly benign. I can't tell if this guy has a serious case of cognitive dissonance, or whether he is just lying.
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I suspect that movies have the advantage of multiple, fairly well price discriminated, release channels: Produce movie, reap opening weekend theatre sales, then reap new-release purchase/premium rental income, then slowly discounted purchase/regular rental/Pay-per-view, and finally sit back on the residual occasional rentals/purchases/licenses for broadcast by cable channels/airplanes/etc.
Games pretty much have a short sales window in which they enjoy any serious retail push, and then they start to lose physical shelf space and make the rest in bargain bin/download sales.
Also, while the money is often spent rather unwisely(precise motion-capture and high-precision rendering of generic-space-marine-protagonist's emotional spectrum, all the way from 'scowl' to 'rageful scowl', rather than "making it not suck") some of the AAA titles do end up costing pretty serious amounts of money...
While I certainly am uninspired by much of what has the temerity to bear a "$59.99" sticker, I don't understand how you can declare the category illegitimate as a whole:
If there are games that are acceptably worth $30, surely a game that provided twice as many man-hours of enjoyment would be worth $60(being essentially equivalent to buying two $30 games that just happen to have some sort of narrative coherence)?
In all but the most rigidly (mal)designed games, "length" has long been fairly fuzzy. Virtually every shooter, for instance, if it even bothers to have a single player campaign, won't be too terribly long(and if it is long, most of the 'length' might well consist of backtracking for keycards through recycled art assets slapped together by the we-just-don't-give-a-fuck intern); but it will have a multiplayer/bot mode of some sort or another that will keep people busy for as long as they want.
RPGs are often rather similar: In Diablo II, say, you started running into enemies that were just the same damn sprites as an hour ago, tinted a different color and shooting 'energy blasts' instead of fireballs, and the game was quite upfront about the fact that the dungeons being crawled were programmatically stitched together out of a set of tiles. On the other hand, while "original" content started to run dry within hours, the game provided the option to play, play again on harder difficulty(possibly two rounds of harder difficulty), play in "hardcore" mode, etc, etc.
RTSes usually have the same basic mechanics as FPSes: a fairly limited single-player campaign; but multiplayer/bot battles until you get bored of the whole thing.
If games start artificially force-quit-after-the-cutscene ending on you, just so you'll buy the unlock code for "Chapter 2, the DLC that isn't actually downloaded because it was on the disk the whole time", that would be unacceptable. If, however, the point at which the art/story people start just phoning it in and adding additional 'length' by changing the tints and HP numbers for new enemies is being slightly tweaked, that'll be a trend that goes back as far as I can remember, and has always been a touch subjective in terms of where "new" ends and "recycled" begins.
The poor bastards on the consoles, of course, are likely to get the worst of it; because many PC games have their novel lengths radically boosted by modders; whose works are often unavailable or DLC-ified on the console side...
My understanding is that, if you wish to use any encrypted cable service, you either suck it up and rent the company's cable box, or you enter the delightsome world of cablecard 'compatibility' with so-called "host" devices. At present, because of the somewhat onerous(incidentally the 'open' in "opencable" appears to be a piece of gallows humor, not an actual description) certification requirements, specific Wintel hardware configurations are the only ones DRMy enough for the purpose, along with a number of STBs and TVs and similar appliances.
Apple's continued lack of enthusiasm for DRM systems other than their own makes adoption of Cable Card on any of their platforms less than entirely likely, and I'm pretty sure that there is a standing order at Cable Labs HQ that any Linux system not thoroughly Tivoized is to be stopped at the door and ejected by security.
If you are dealing with OTA signals, or snarfing analog feeds from STBs, or using non/weakly DRMed digital media, you have options; but if you want to talk to a commercial cable network, not so much...
The naming is slightly misleading: "Motorola Mobility" encompasses their cellphone line; but also a bunch of STB, cable modems, and other consumer electronics widgets. "Motorola Solutions" is their government and enterprise customer brand(which includes a bunch of mobile RF stuff, just not the consumer focused gear).
There could certainly be some re-shuffling that happens during the merger; but "Mobility" presently includes a variety of hardwired consumer products.
The question, though, is whether the customers(ie. the cable companies that mass-buy STBs, not the end users) would see that as a desirable feature...
Team Cable already knows who you are, because they bill you and run a coax line to your house, and may well prefer their own in-house collection, however inferior, to Google having a chance to improve its overall advertising prowess on "their consumers".
There certainly might be some weeding on the basis of subtler inherent capabilities lower down in the ranks; but the sheer amount of drill and practice(both playing and hammering at word lists) required to make a good scrabble player suggests a major 'effect' component.
I do find the notion that this is a 'good' development(outside of the environment of scrabble, where it is obviously useful) sort of interesting. When I am reading, the most pleasant, fastest, and most engaged state is when the words become 'transparent' to me. I'm no longer consciously aware of visually scanning the individual words, nor is their any vocal component(audible or subvocalising), the meaning of what I'm reading just sort of flows in, without any consciousness of the intermediate tasks that I have to perform to get it there. The state of immediate visual recognition of real/false, divorced from meaning, sounds like it would be rather distracting while trying to do anything with words that isn't a particular rather abstract word game...
It's like the Stroop effect tests: some people are better than others at them; but the illiterate knock them out of the park without effort, while the more proficient readers often have great difficulty completing the task instead of just responding to the meaning of the word. Obviously, you aren't likely to become a top tier scrabble player through illiteracy or other serious reading disorder; but I have to wonder if developing this specialized visual facility to such a high pitch detracts from one's general-purpose reading ease.
I'm going to express my full confidence that this site couldn't possibly be a trap.
Based on the relative costs(and sizes) of the existing visible-spectrum-camera-hidden-on-the-ATM technology and the available thermal imaging gear, I'm somewhat inclined to doubt any significant uptake.
Even if you go fleabaying, a thermal imaging system up to the task will easily be north of $1,000, and the cheap seats are often rather bulky and don't exactly sip power. If you go with something handheld, the fact that many of them look very much unlike normal digital cameras will make you stand out a good deal.
Your dinky little pinhole spycam, either from a skimmer-vendor or modified from a cheap cellphone or some chintzy perv-market 'security' camera is going to be at least a factor of ten cheaper, able to run much longer on batteries, and substantially smaller.
Unless somebody really fucked up in terms of the conditions under which computer forensics expert witnesses had access to the computer(and at least one forensics guy is willing to risk some serious smackdown, presumably for compensation that somebody else would be risking serious smackdown to provide him...) the "but they planted it on my computer!" defense seems unlikely to work well...
(Again, barring monumental incompetence on the part of at least one party in a hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-on-the-line case) this just isn't the sort of situation where the computer in question would have been left in Sheriff Bubba's evidence locker/misc. supplies closet with a sticky note asking people not to touch it.
It's all part of my plan to brute-force the entire punspace in a search for the good ones. The tailings of that operation can be downmodded or converted to cheap laughs, as my fellow slashdot timewasters prefer...
Eh, I'm sure that if you give Visa's lawyers a call they can probably hook you up with the draft language for a 'Managed Freedom Debt Restructuring Settlement' which would do almost as well...
What I want to know, in this case, is what they were fucking up before to go from 50 pounds to 9.
Once you factor in support circuitry, enough structure to keep the cells from easy damage, and maybe a little battery to steady output, 9 pounds doesn't get you all that much panel area. And not that much panel area, especially in less than full sun, means not all that much power output. What were they doing with 50 pounds of payload before? A totally unexceptional, off the shelf, sealed lead acid deep-cycle battery of 40 pounds is rated for a touch over 50 amp hours and 12v(which would still leave more weight in the 50lb budget than the entire new system just for support/DC-DC conversion circuitry...) If you were feeling cost insensitive a Li-poly pack would do considerably better.
Did the previous solution involve a backpack full of car batteries, a 12v-120v inverter, and a proprietary wall-wart for every brand of hardware in their toolkit?
Somebody ran a fiber line out to Galt's Gulch again. A backhoe should be around to correct the problem in the near future; but best to ignore it until then...
I'm afraid that you have your strawmen mixed up, producing a strange hybrid of the 'liberal elitist hipster either sponging off his parents or in possession of a job that lets him look down on Real Americans' and the 'coddled welfare negroid who knows only gangsta rap and animalistic violence', possibly with a touch of 'one of the tiny remnants of what could be described as genuinely radical leftists, venturing out of his anarco-syndicalist squat somewhere'...
A well-to-do hipster wouldn't be caught dead in possession of "grillz", and prefers ironic PBR or obscure artisinal microbrews to liquor. Someone looting for "grillz" and liquor, on the other hand, should be of the 'urban' persuasion, and (while glutted on unearned welfare checks confiscated from decent people like you) sufficiently poor to be menacing.
Please, please, try to observe a modicum of accuracy when employing stereotypes.
It isn't just black-and-white, it's either blindingly idiotic or sheer jingoism...
Can he seriously doubt that his hypothetical counterparts in Egypt and Tunisia were doing anything other than denouncing the merely criminal activities of those who, unlike legitimate activists, simply attacked Law Enforcement?
If he can, and somehow imagines that 'evil' regimes consist entirely of bad guys twirling their mustaches and congratulating themselves on how evil they are, then he is being idiotic. If he can't, then his point amounts to little more than "Our Law Enforcement good, their law enforcement evil!" That may, as it turns out, incidentally be true; but you can't usefully hold such a position with some standards for determining what actions make a given entity 'bad' or 'good', a 'legitimate activist' target, or something that only a 'mere criminal' would attack. He seems to have skipped that part.
Are there alternatives to SSL for HTTPS? If so, what are they and how supported are they? I'm no fan of SSL, but I'm much less of a fan of plaintext channels.
The problem isn't really with the math(I'm not ruling out specific implementation flaws, or future cryptographic research work; but that is overwhelmingly the least broken part of the system); but with the rather tragicomedic state of the measures in place to prevent impersonation by men in the middle, registrars fucking up/being co-opted, users being morons(Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between a lock icon in the address bar and a .gif of a lock on the webpage...) and so forth.
If you've already verified the certificate of the host you'll be chatting with by some out-of-band means, you are pretty much good to go: your communications will be impractical to eavesdrop upon, and nothing short of breaking into the host, by physical or electronic means, and grabbing the private key will allow impersonation by hostile entities. The sticky problem is the (overwhelming majority of) cases where you haven't or cannot verify the certificate ahead of time/out of band. Our present answer of "Well, just trust any one of an alarming number of not very competent entities to vouch for them" is pretty weak.
Ship: Noun. "A hole in the water into which one pours money."
It struck me as the surveillance geek analog to the "Honor Bound to Defend Freedom" sign that hangs, without a hint of irony, in front of Gitmo...
There are several prongs to why: One, it isn't clear that their rootkit development is restricted to fed work. The leaked emails related to their rootkit work specifically mention an "intent to commercialize". Even if they were restricted to fed work, there is certainly no evidence that their customers are only those entities concerned with external surveillance. Given the eagerness and creepiness of the HB Gary/Palantir/Berlico proposal to BoA to deal with wikileaks and a journalist who was considered troublesome(and similar work for the 'US Chamber of Commerce') I'm inclined to find the development of purely offensive tools, like rootkits, rather sinister.
Second, their emphasis on selling exploit code, even if their customer list is a bunch of squeaky-clean boy scouts, creates a perverse incentive for them as a security company: to stockpile and conceal a variety of zero-day vulnerabilities in assorted common software(the phrase to look for, in the leaked email archives is "juicy fruit", they enthusiastically collected them). Given the very high dependence of US, and 1st world generally, nations on their computers working properly, a situation where 'defense' contractors have an incentive to make virtually all software users less safe, just so the feds have an easier time inserting rootkits, is a deeply perverse and undesirable one.
They should seriously consider changing their name to "Wronghaven"...
Does the time when that HB Gary exec came in to the anon IRC channel and begged for mercy count?
It wasn't strictly audible; but it was both hilarious and the lamentations of one of their women...
Actually, for specific definitions of "open" that is a longstanding Microsoft tradition:
.NET, or other Microsoft technologies.
Microsoft does, in fact, enthusiastically endorse the right of as many hardware vendors as possible to license Microsoft operating systems and certain other platform technologies(unless that doesn't work out, like 'Playsforsure', in which case dump their sorry asses and leave the 3rd parties to rot). They also endorse the right of as many software developers as possible to develop software that depends on win32,
They take these principles of freedom and openness quite seriously...(except when they don't work out).
By " Windows Phone is now the only platform that does so with equal opportunity for all partners." he means "Well, except for Nokia, who is our pet OEM, with whom we have a cozy special alliance..."
Obviously, the biggest potential downside of the Google/Motorola acquisition is the effect on other current Android device producers, so MS can reasonably be expected to say something like that; but come on. It was not so very long ago that Microsoft and Nokia were shamelessly leveraging one another's dynamic synergies, right there in public, and now they want us to believe that Windows Phone is all equal opportunity for everyone and fuzzy kittens?
The "Team Themis" work for Bank of America also appears to have been heartwarmingly benign. I can't tell if this guy has a serious case of cognitive dissonance, or whether he is just lying.