You seem to be missing the point: The fact that UA spoofing works is generally proof of either laziness or malice. Laziness is certainly common enough(remember the good old days when large numbers of sites would shriek for IE; but render just fine if FF was set to IE's UA string?); but malice also occurs from time to time(The old Opera/MSN story, for instance).
In this case, the fact that Apple is just UA sniffing is shabby at best. Just checking for feature support isn't rocket surgery. Neither would be sending the least interesting summer intern to test the demos on a couple of other browsers that are likely to work and accepting those UAs as well. The fact that their "HTML5 demo" is just "transparent Safari propaganda" isn't illegal or anything; but talking up "web standards" and then hardcoding your demo to only work with your browser doesn't exactly scream "intellectual honesty"...
I would suspect that the only people unhappy with this particular initiative are those who compete with linux, for obvious reasons, and possibly those companies who currently specialize in doing bespoke embedded linux work for hire. MontaVista, for instance, has basically made a business of doing the (often obnoxious and tricky) work of turning "linux runs on ARCHITECTURE" into "Linux is now running on CUSTOMERS_HORRID_EMBEDDED_BOARD". An industry consortium dedicated to giving that away probably isn't ideal for them.
Presumably, any hardware manufacturers who treat their BSPs as a source of profit(or consider their BSPs to be superior to such a degree that they serve as a key differentiator from competing products) from would also be displeased; but the impression that I get is that most of them view hacking together the BSP as a necessary evil to be endured in selling the board(even when they do charge for them, it's more of a cost recovery/keeping out the riff-raff sort of thing), so most would probably prefer a strategy that makes it happen as cheaply as possible.
I have no idea what use snippets of unencrypted data from unsecured networks would be. There just isn't much there that isn't either blatantly illegal and/or terrible PR that you can't learn just by having one of the world's larger Ad networks.
SSIDs, though, make a lot more sense. Wi-fi APs, while by no means completely static, provide an incredibly dense network of individually identifiable radio transmitter nodes. If your receiver knows its location(via GPS fix from a good GPS unit), and knows what APs are nearby(ideally with directional antennas), you can turn that into a database that devices with no GPS can use for rough location detection by means of any 802.11a/b/g/n card(or, as is frequently the case with cellphones, devices with ghastly GPS antennas and/or chipsets can use nearby APs to assist their GPS). Skyhook Wireless already has such a database(among other customers, Apple contracted with them to give their non-GPS iDevices some degree of location ability), I don't know if other outfits do as well. Since Google was already going to the expense of having GPS and camera equipped cars drive all over everywhere, it seems quite logical to throw a few wi-fi antennas on the cars and get an AP geolocation database for minimal additional cost.
It is quite plausible to assume that Google, since they were already going to the expense of running the cars, figured that they could grab their own geolocation dataset for virtually no additional cost. However, their massive corporate wardrive episode is hardly the first of its kind, as Skyhook's products demonstrate.
Depends on where on the priorities list it falls, I suspect. In pretty much all societies, things happen according to how much people care, not by catering to the most miserable first, and working up from there.
Now, all that makes no difference if there isn't some relatively cheap way; but I have to imagine that detecting the difference between solid rock and unstable loose fill in the top hundred meters or so is probably about the easiest Reflection Seismology problem that you'll run into in the real world. Might have to bum some supercomputer time; but you'll be way behind the difficultly curve compared to the reflection seismology problems that the oil guys are doing all the time.
The second question, of course, is whether these unstable patches are fixable in some cheap way. Knowing which half of the capital you have to evacuate is only incrementally more helpful than knowing that you have to evacuate half the capital. If, on the other hand, it turns out that you can just drill a well(ie. basic water-well drilling tech, cheap and widely available) and then pump in some cement, that might actually be economically practical, compared to the alternatives.
From having done a fair amount of fiddling with the NSLU2(266MHz ARM, 32MB RAM, 8MB onboard flash, 2 USB 2.0 ports(with the ability to hack another couple on) 1 10/100 ethernet) RAM ended up being the big kicker for a lot of applications.
With USB, you can trivially add terabytes of mass storage(or in the case of this portable, SD cards up to 32 gigs are cheap), and the onboard 8MB is enough for a kernel and initrd; but if you start swapping into a swapfile located on a USB HDD, your performance will tank.
With a 233MHz ARM, you can run an entire network's worth of services for a smallish household of users(RADIUS server, file server, VPN endpoint, SFTP, mostly-static web server, etc.) for 2-5 people, no problem; but you'll have a harder time doing that in 32MB of RAM, without serious effort that just isn't justified by the cost of 64 or 128MB. Adding a framebuffer to the equation isn't going to help any.
I'm a touch befuddled by the severely limited RAM. Shoving in an SDIO wifi card is a doable upgrade. Upping the RAM would pretty much involve breaking out the rework station. How much could it have possibly added to the price to go to 64 or 128MB?
I suspect, in practice, there will be a certain amount of moving going on(of the "run screaming" variety, if not a formal program.)
The tricky thing is, though, that moving large numbers of people is actually pretty difficult, and has a history of not working out very well, especially in areas where resources are slim, or governance isn't brilliant.. Moving slightly under 20K people, as part of a formal program, in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$36,000, is a pain in the ass, and won't be cheap; but is doable.
Moving 2 million(or even a substantial fraction thereof), in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$2,700 could get ugly. Like "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps in disease-infested refugee camps" ugly.
While the occasional sinkhole is scary and dramatic, the human costs of staying put and paying closer attention to hydrology, and possibly dealing with the occasional sinkhole incident, are almost certainly lower than trying to move on that scale.
The... er... fine folks at adobe will be more than happy to assist in selling a $150 copy of Organic Chemistry 14th edition that magically goes "poof" as soon as the 15th edition is published... Let's see the used market get past the fact that circumventing the(no doubt shoddy) DRM is felony offense anywhere in the greater American empire. Never mind the DRM, it's EPUB, so it must be open!
Not to mention, of course, that said previously unknown company set up shop in the fine town of McLean, Virginia, which is within spitting distance of Langley, and a classic location for those who have business in Washington; but don't want to deal with actually having to live there. Neighbors include SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton.
They do have civilian customers of course; but you don't get the sense that the place was set up primarily for their benefit.
On the plus side, they should be able to absolutely cash in on the heavily subsidized "US puppet warlords in dusty hellholes with dubious cell coverage who need to chat with their CIA handlers" market...
Worse than that: Life has unforseen consequences and game theory demonstrates that, all too frequently, even forseeing a consequence won't stop you walking into it, face-first.
Your point sounds more plausible than it is: Biological resources(wood, fish, etc.) are in principle renewable. That is, there exists one or more courses of actions that allows a steady yield in the very long term, or even increased yields. However, in practice, if a human population cannot adhere to one of those courses of action, they will deplete the biological resource(sometimes just to the point where it is no longer economically relevant, sometimes to the point where the remaining population is no longer self-sustaining, and becomes permanently extinct). In fisheries management, for instance, it is a simple point of fact that we have hit, and passed, "peak" yield for dozens of wild species. Same goes for really nice big chunks of hardwood. We have plenty of structural steel, and crappy pulp-pine; but anything that took 200 years to grow is getting thin on the ground.
Since, (barring extinct species with no DNA on file), one can always, at least in theory, restore a population back to its old levels, or above, and exceed the "peak", we can refer to it as a "local maximum" if you wish.
As for oil, it is actually pretty similar to other minerals. In many respects actually more convenient. Oil is, basically, a very convenient source of energy, and hydrocarbons in chemically convenient configurations. The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc. The problem isn't that we are going to run out of energy, or run out of hydrocarbons; but that we will run out of convenient energy and hydrocarbons. This is pretty much exactly the same game as other minerals, where the problem isn't running out; but having applications that used to be viable being priced out.
"Scarcity" rarely means that there is literally no more of something. It just means that some people can't afford it. More scarce means that more people can't afford it. That's the problem. Supply isn't a binary thing "oil exists = all is well" or "neodymium has disappeared = apocalypse". Supply is a matter of degree. If the cost of the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the scope of activity that you can afford just shrank. If the cost of a gram of the element you need goes from Y to Y+1, the same.(worse, since most flavors of mineral extraction require energy, when the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the cost of every mineral will increase).
Heartening than they appear. Oil, unless you subscribe to one of the abiotic origins/provided by Jesus to empower the American Way of Life(tm) theories, is in more or less fixed supply. The exact number varies based on the price and the available technology, which dictate exactly how crazy the techniques are that you are willing to use to get at the stuff; but it is more or less fixed. You can't have "sustainable" oil production by making sure only to harvest adult oil and restore any juvenile oil you accidentally catch back to its natural habitat.
Forests, on the other hand, are a population, not a mineral resource. If you are willing to forgo some short-term profit, you can generate modest returns more or less in perpetuity. If you aren't, you'll find yourself with a fancy new lunar resort. Anyone who destroys a biological resource isn't, as with a mineral resource, simply reaching the inevitable sooner rather than later, they are effectively pawning an annuity for pennies on the dollar.
With oil, the only real questions are 1). "Will we invest some of the convenient energy and chemicals in finding another source of the same before the first runs out?" and 2."How far will we go, in terms of sacrificing other resources(ie. drilling in the middle of highly productive fisheries or digging up large chunks of canada and boiling it down for tar) in order to secure that one?" There is no question of whether or not we will be "sustainable"; because, for mineral resources, there is no such thing, only a question of how fast you want to dig up the supply you have.
I chose to go with something a bit milder because I was taking into account the fact that Microsoft will be, at least for a while, acting from a position of substantial weakness. Since they'll need apps and good PR, they will likely reward any high-profile defectors they can find.
Long term, though, it won't last. If they gain substantial market power, using their control to extract rents, dictate aesthetics, and suppress competitors will be irresistible, just as it has been for Apple. If they flounder, I would be unsurprised to see a zune-style backstab of the third-parties and retreat to a fully vertically integrated model.
I always pictured Han as more of an overclocker/haxxor kiddie/warez enthusiast... Running a cracked copy of some datacenter edition of Windows(but with his own special modifications, to get DirectX and all those codec packs working) on a creaky, dubiously reliable; but undeniably very fast, begging-for-death overclocked box.
Don't worry, you could always join the heretical sect of the Cult of Mac, the one that awaits the Second Coming of Woz, the True Steve, who shall lead them back to the promised land, flowing with expansion slots and user-customizable features...
Given that the devs are pissed about the vendor's control of the platform(which Microsoft plans to emulate), rather than the platform's technical prowess, I'd say that anybody who is hoping that Windows Phone 7 will save them is moderately delusional.
Admittedly, since MS will be coming at the market from a position of significant weakness by the time any WP7 handsets actually make it out the door(oh hai! Our revision 1 product, missing most of the enterprise stuff that kept people on WM6 despite the fact that it blew, is being released into the face of iPhone OS 4, and android 2.2, if not 2.3 or later...) they will likely be inclined to be merciful masters. At first.
However, if they experience any significant success, there is no reason to expect that they won't abuse their power just as hard as Apple. If they experience little or no success, they might well double-down on the crackdown, and vertically integrate even harder, screwing over any remaining 3rd parties(this is barely hypothetical, we all know what happened to the 3rd-party "playsforsure" ecosystem when MS decided that they weren't doing the job against Apple...)
Frankly, the kiddie vandal stuff was way less dangerous than the pro-level sneaky botnet crap we put up with now. Yeah, it sucked for the target(whereas, with a sufficiently powerful machine, your modern malware victim can limp along for months); but diseases virulent enough to kill their hosts swiftly don't spread as well, and don't have time to spam.
It would be ugly, for a while; but if more modern viruses nuked their hosts, as opposed to quietly lurking and spamming, the internet would be a safer, cleaner, place today.
I would tend to assume that the googlers doing windows development would not have a difficult time getting official dispensation to run windows on dev and test machines(though, conceivably, they might be required to do riskier stuff like web and email on a separate box..)
If this is, in fact, a Real Serious Security Policy, the smartass who tries to skirt approval by dumping a personal copy of Windows into a VM is going to get his ass handed to him, unless he is extremely careful.
Running Windows in a VM is trivial. Running Windows in a VM such that it will escape the notice of a reasonably with-it network security team doing routine internal scanning and monitoring is not(unless you are running the VM completely without a network connection, which rather reduces its utility).
Yes and no. If it does, in fact, become a major selling point,(as in, actually drives considerable amount of consumer behavior), then clearly a lot of people need flash a lot more than I do.
However, as a marketing bullet point, it makes perfect sense. Adobe already supports Windows, and is desperate to support android, so if you are running one of those, the engineering is done for you, more or less. Plus, it makes for an easy, instant, product differentiation vs. the iDevices. Completely logical that you would see it showing up as a bullet point.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be missing the point: The fact that UA spoofing works is generally proof of either laziness or malice. Laziness is certainly common enough(remember the good old days when large numbers of sites would shriek for IE; but render just fine if FF was set to IE's UA string?); but malice also occurs from time to time(The old Opera/MSN story, for instance).
In this case, the fact that Apple is just UA sniffing is shabby at best. Just checking for feature support isn't rocket surgery. Neither would be sending the least interesting summer intern to test the demos on a couple of other browsers that are likely to work and accepting those UAs as well. The fact that their "HTML5 demo" is just "transparent Safari propaganda" isn't illegal or anything; but talking up "web standards" and then hardcoding your demo to only work with your browser doesn't exactly scream "intellectual honesty"...
I would suspect that the only people unhappy with this particular initiative are those who compete with linux, for obvious reasons, and possibly those companies who currently specialize in doing bespoke embedded linux work for hire. MontaVista, for instance, has basically made a business of doing the (often obnoxious and tricky) work of turning "linux runs on ARCHITECTURE" into "Linux is now running on CUSTOMERS_HORRID_EMBEDDED_BOARD". An industry consortium dedicated to giving that away probably isn't ideal for them.
Presumably, any hardware manufacturers who treat their BSPs as a source of profit(or consider their BSPs to be superior to such a degree that they serve as a key differentiator from competing products) from would also be displeased; but the impression that I get is that most of them view hacking together the BSP as a necessary evil to be endured in selling the board(even when they do charge for them, it's more of a cost recovery/keeping out the riff-raff sort of thing), so most would probably prefer a strategy that makes it happen as cheaply as possible.
I have no idea what use snippets of unencrypted data from unsecured networks would be. There just isn't much there that isn't either blatantly illegal and/or terrible PR that you can't learn just by having one of the world's larger Ad networks.
SSIDs, though, make a lot more sense. Wi-fi APs, while by no means completely static, provide an incredibly dense network of individually identifiable radio transmitter nodes. If your receiver knows its location(via GPS fix from a good GPS unit), and knows what APs are nearby(ideally with directional antennas), you can turn that into a database that devices with no GPS can use for rough location detection by means of any 802.11a/b/g/n card(or, as is frequently the case with cellphones, devices with ghastly GPS antennas and/or chipsets can use nearby APs to assist their GPS). Skyhook Wireless already has such a database(among other customers, Apple contracted with them to give their non-GPS iDevices some degree of location ability), I don't know if other outfits do as well. Since Google was already going to the expense of having GPS and camera equipped cars drive all over everywhere, it seems quite logical to throw a few wi-fi antennas on the cars and get an AP geolocation database for minimal additional cost.
To the best of my knowledge, Apple's wi-fi based geolocation is based on Skyhook's offering in the area.
It is quite plausible to assume that Google, since they were already going to the expense of running the cars, figured that they could grab their own geolocation dataset for virtually no additional cost. However, their massive corporate wardrive episode is hardly the first of its kind, as Skyhook's products demonstrate.
Depends on where on the priorities list it falls, I suspect. In pretty much all societies, things happen according to how much people care, not by catering to the most miserable first, and working up from there.
Now, all that makes no difference if there isn't some relatively cheap way; but I have to imagine that detecting the difference between solid rock and unstable loose fill in the top hundred meters or so is probably about the easiest Reflection Seismology problem that you'll run into in the real world. Might have to bum some supercomputer time; but you'll be way behind the difficultly curve compared to the reflection seismology problems that the oil guys are doing all the time.
The second question, of course, is whether these unstable patches are fixable in some cheap way. Knowing which half of the capital you have to evacuate is only incrementally more helpful than knowing that you have to evacuate half the capital. If, on the other hand, it turns out that you can just drill a well(ie. basic water-well drilling tech, cheap and widely available) and then pump in some cement, that might actually be economically practical, compared to the alternatives.
From having done a fair amount of fiddling with the NSLU2(266MHz ARM, 32MB RAM, 8MB onboard flash, 2 USB 2.0 ports(with the ability to hack another couple on) 1 10/100 ethernet) RAM ended up being the big kicker for a lot of applications.
With USB, you can trivially add terabytes of mass storage(or in the case of this portable, SD cards up to 32 gigs are cheap), and the onboard 8MB is enough for a kernel and initrd; but if you start swapping into a swapfile located on a USB HDD, your performance will tank.
With a 233MHz ARM, you can run an entire network's worth of services for a smallish household of users(RADIUS server, file server, VPN endpoint, SFTP, mostly-static web server, etc.) for 2-5 people, no problem; but you'll have a harder time doing that in 32MB of RAM, without serious effort that just isn't justified by the cost of 64 or 128MB. Adding a framebuffer to the equation isn't going to help any.
I'm a touch befuddled by the severely limited RAM. Shoving in an SDIO wifi card is a doable upgrade. Upping the RAM would pretty much involve breaking out the rework station. How much could it have possibly added to the price to go to 64 or 128MB?
I suspect, in practice, there will be a certain amount of moving going on(of the "run screaming" variety, if not a formal program.)
The tricky thing is, though, that moving large numbers of people is actually pretty difficult, and has a history of not working out very well, especially in areas where resources are slim, or governance isn't brilliant.. Moving slightly under 20K people, as part of a formal program, in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$36,000, is a pain in the ass, and won't be cheap; but is doable.
Moving 2 million(or even a substantial fraction thereof), in a country with a GDP per capita of ~$2,700 could get ugly. Like "squalid children with big eyes huddled under sodden tarps in disease-infested refugee camps" ugly.
While the occasional sinkhole is scary and dramatic, the human costs of staying put and paying closer attention to hydrology, and possibly dealing with the occasional sinkhole incident, are almost certainly lower than trying to move on that scale.
Testilie brother!
The... er... fine folks at adobe will be more than happy to assist in selling a $150 copy of Organic Chemistry 14th edition that magically goes "poof" as soon as the 15th edition is published... Let's see the used market get past the fact that circumventing the(no doubt shoddy) DRM is felony offense anywhere in the greater American empire. Never mind the DRM, it's EPUB, so it must be open!
Not to mention, of course, that said previously unknown company set up shop in the fine town of McLean, Virginia, which is within spitting distance of Langley, and a classic location for those who have business in Washington; but don't want to deal with actually having to live there. Neighbors include SAIC and Booz Allen Hamilton.
They do have civilian customers of course; but you don't get the sense that the place was set up primarily for their benefit.
On the plus side, they should be able to absolutely cash in on the heavily subsidized "US puppet warlords in dusty hellholes with dubious cell coverage who need to chat with their CIA handlers" market...
Based on the behavior of cops, that seems plausible enough...
Point taken(but shouldn't you leave worring about message flow to TCP?)
Worse than that: Life has unforseen consequences and game theory demonstrates that, all too frequently, even forseeing a consequence won't stop you walking into it, face-first.
Your point sounds more plausible than it is: Biological resources(wood, fish, etc.) are in principle renewable. That is, there exists one or more courses of actions that allows a steady yield in the very long term, or even increased yields. However, in practice, if a human population cannot adhere to one of those courses of action, they will deplete the biological resource(sometimes just to the point where it is no longer economically relevant, sometimes to the point where the remaining population is no longer self-sustaining, and becomes permanently extinct). In fisheries management, for instance, it is a simple point of fact that we have hit, and passed, "peak" yield for dozens of wild species. Same goes for really nice big chunks of hardwood. We have plenty of structural steel, and crappy pulp-pine; but anything that took 200 years to grow is getting thin on the ground.
Since, (barring extinct species with no DNA on file), one can always, at least in theory, restore a population back to its old levels, or above, and exceed the "peak", we can refer to it as a "local maximum" if you wish.
As for oil, it is actually pretty similar to other minerals. In many respects actually more convenient. Oil is, basically, a very convenient source of energy, and hydrocarbons in chemically convenient configurations. The entire planet is absolutely covered with at least one, often both, of those, just in less economic forms. Solar, wind, tidal, plants, worms, poor people, etc. The problem isn't that we are going to run out of energy, or run out of hydrocarbons; but that we will run out of convenient energy and hydrocarbons. This is pretty much exactly the same game as other minerals, where the problem isn't running out; but having applications that used to be viable being priced out.
"Scarcity" rarely means that there is literally no more of something. It just means that some people can't afford it. More scarce means that more people can't afford it. That's the problem. Supply isn't a binary thing "oil exists = all is well" or "neodymium has disappeared = apocalypse". Supply is a matter of degree. If the cost of the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the scope of activity that you can afford just shrank. If the cost of a gram of the element you need goes from Y to Y+1, the same.(worse, since most flavors of mineral extraction require energy, when the cheapest watt goes from X to X+1, the cost of every mineral will increase).
Heartening than they appear. Oil, unless you subscribe to one of the abiotic origins/provided by Jesus to empower the American Way of Life(tm) theories, is in more or less fixed supply. The exact number varies based on the price and the available technology, which dictate exactly how crazy the techniques are that you are willing to use to get at the stuff; but it is more or less fixed. You can't have "sustainable" oil production by making sure only to harvest adult oil and restore any juvenile oil you accidentally catch back to its natural habitat.
Forests, on the other hand, are a population, not a mineral resource. If you are willing to forgo some short-term profit, you can generate modest returns more or less in perpetuity. If you aren't, you'll find yourself with a fancy new lunar resort. Anyone who destroys a biological resource isn't, as with a mineral resource, simply reaching the inevitable sooner rather than later, they are effectively pawning an annuity for pennies on the dollar.
With oil, the only real questions are 1). "Will we invest some of the convenient energy and chemicals in finding another source of the same before the first runs out?" and 2."How far will we go, in terms of sacrificing other resources(ie. drilling in the middle of highly productive fisheries or digging up large chunks of canada and boiling it down for tar) in order to secure that one?" There is no question of whether or not we will be "sustainable"; because, for mineral resources, there is no such thing, only a question of how fast you want to dig up the supply you have.
I chose to go with something a bit milder because I was taking into account the fact that Microsoft will be, at least for a while, acting from a position of substantial weakness. Since they'll need apps and good PR, they will likely reward any high-profile defectors they can find.
Long term, though, it won't last. If they gain substantial market power, using their control to extract rents, dictate aesthetics, and suppress competitors will be irresistible, just as it has been for Apple. If they flounder, I would be unsurprised to see a zune-style backstab of the third-parties and retreat to a fully vertically integrated model.
I always pictured Han as more of an overclocker/haxxor kiddie/warez enthusiast... Running a cracked copy of some datacenter edition of Windows(but with his own special modifications, to get DirectX and all those codec packs working) on a creaky, dubiously reliable; but undeniably very fast, begging-for-death overclocked box.
Don't worry, you could always join the heretical sect of the Cult of Mac, the one that awaits the Second Coming of Woz, the True Steve, who shall lead them back to the promised land, flowing with expansion slots and user-customizable features...
Given that the devs are pissed about the vendor's control of the platform(which Microsoft plans to emulate), rather than the platform's technical prowess, I'd say that anybody who is hoping that Windows Phone 7 will save them is moderately delusional.
Admittedly, since MS will be coming at the market from a position of significant weakness by the time any WP7 handsets actually make it out the door(oh hai! Our revision 1 product, missing most of the enterprise stuff that kept people on WM6 despite the fact that it blew, is being released into the face of iPhone OS 4, and android 2.2, if not 2.3 or later...) they will likely be inclined to be merciful masters. At first.
However, if they experience any significant success, there is no reason to expect that they won't abuse their power just as hard as Apple. If they experience little or no success, they might well double-down on the crackdown, and vertically integrate even harder, screwing over any remaining 3rd parties(this is barely hypothetical, we all know what happened to the 3rd-party "playsforsure" ecosystem when MS decided that they weren't doing the job against Apple...)
Frankly, the kiddie vandal stuff was way less dangerous than the pro-level sneaky botnet crap we put up with now. Yeah, it sucked for the target(whereas, with a sufficiently powerful machine, your modern malware victim can limp along for months); but diseases virulent enough to kill their hosts swiftly don't spread as well, and don't have time to spam.
It would be ugly, for a while; but if more modern viruses nuked their hosts, as opposed to quietly lurking and spamming, the internet would be a safer, cleaner, place today.
I would tend to assume that the googlers doing windows development would not have a difficult time getting official dispensation to run windows on dev and test machines(though, conceivably, they might be required to do riskier stuff like web and email on a separate box..)
If this is, in fact, a Real Serious Security Policy, the smartass who tries to skirt approval by dumping a personal copy of Windows into a VM is going to get his ass handed to him, unless he is extremely careful.
Running Windows in a VM is trivial. Running Windows in a VM such that it will escape the notice of a reasonably with-it network security team doing routine internal scanning and monitoring is not(unless you are running the VM completely without a network connection, which rather reduces its utility).
Yes and no. If it does, in fact, become a major selling point,(as in, actually drives considerable amount of consumer behavior), then clearly a lot of people need flash a lot more than I do.
However, as a marketing bullet point, it makes perfect sense. Adobe already supports Windows, and is desperate to support android, so if you are running one of those, the engineering is done for you, more or less. Plus, it makes for an easy, instant, product differentiation vs. the iDevices. Completely logical that you would see it showing up as a bullet point.