A factor of 20-30 reduction is my guess for where it's likely to wind up in a best-case situation as well, at least with rocketry as we currently implement it. The crazy and wonderful thing is that other changes will potentially make a big difference in the future. For example, if the world ever collectively gets over its brick-shitting with regard to nuclear power, there are conceptual designs for rockets where the energy comes from nuclear sources (such as uranium-hexafluoride gas contained in a quartz "lightbulb") and the only expendables that the rocket needs to carry are the reaction mass. Turns out water, or any of a number of fairly cheap gases, make excellent reaction mass (and because this design would have a ridiculously high specific impulse - basically "fuel economy" for rockets - you wouldn't need very much reaction mass either). Thus, we could reach a point where the consumables on every launch were a trivial fraction of a percent of the cost of the rocket. At that point, costs could drop even further than under the best case of the "fuel is 3-5% of the cost of every launch" assumption.
BUT, that's only if we manage to make rockets reusable, so we can amortize the costs of launching them over a large number of launches. We can start work on that today, with propulsion systems that have changed little in decades, and maybe use those savings to fund R&D into the next generation of rocket propusion, one that has even lower per-launch costs...
Disagree with your first point, though the rest are good.
Credit cards, if paid off in full every month, are a great way to build your credit score and can also offer "rewards" amounting to a couple percent discount on your purchases (which comes in the form of higher prices to cover CC fees, but most places charge the same whether you pay with credit or cash). They are also a really convenient way to handle disputes with merchants. Oh, and your bank(s) suck(s); I only carry one card (so it gets used regularly) but my parents each have a "backup" card that may not get pulled out for years yet still works when the do (typically done in case there's a block for something like suspected fraud on their other card).
My CC has a far higher limit than my debit card (which I carry pretty much just for ATMs), was virtually the only reason I *had* a credit score before buying my car, works all over the world without requiring me to get local cash (I travel a lot), means I don't have to carry much cash so I'd lose very little if I got mugged / pickpocketed, and has no service fees. It's a pretty great deal. The balance on it rarely breaks 1000 (usually only when I made a huge purchase that month) even though I put practically everything except rent on it (I'd use it for rent too, if I could). It automatically pays out of my checking account each month, with much of the remainder being moved into savings. Every month or so I check it for unexpected expenses, which takes just a couple minutes online. The only thing I've ever found was some stupid bank-related charge I got canceled (I don't need whatever-the-hell-it-is protection, thanks!)
Otherwise known as "all that economics-related stuff that people who aren't Econ or Business majors really ought to know". I'd throw in a few other topics, like credit scores (what impacts them, what they mean for you), bankruptcy (too many people seem to think it's a get-out-of-jail-free card), a bit more info on the stock market (there's actually "stock market games" that simulate stock investment portfolios for people, typically using closing price each day), and some stuff on planning for big life events, like buying a house or retiring. Oh, and maybe some stuff on taxes... so few people understand anywhere near enough about taxes, which lets politicians mislead them with ease.
The crazy thing is, you could cover all this material, and more, in a semester of high school. It doesn't require a lot of math or science background. It doesn't take long to go over it. It divides nearly into sub-units (investments, loans, budgeting, taxes, etc.). It's easy to devise homework and tests for the material. It can be taught at a sufficiently abstract level to handle changes in technology (people these days balance their budgets using Mint, not using checkbooks, but the basic concept is the same) without getting theoretical (*I* like theory, but I'm kind of weird that way and there's no need or even much value for it in a class like this).
When my parents were in high school and college, "Home Ec" classes were actually about home economics (ranging from budgeting to investments to the consequences of bankruptcy and even to running a home business). By the time I was that age, those subjects were all but gone (at least in the area I went to school, namely western Washington state) and what vestiges of them were left seemed to be about... cooking, or something. Nobody really talked about them, except in a disparaging voice intended to deride girls who had no real place in the school so they took "home ec" because that was all they could manage. Yes, they really were that sexist about it, too.
I've often thought it was a pity that *real* home economics classes - the kind of things that every adult ought to know, but so few people apparently learn - really ought to be standard material. What are the various kinds of investment accounts, and what are their tradeoffs? How can you calculate how much stock options are likely to be worth at a company? What is a "short sell" and why should or shouldn't you do them? What does it mean to "refinance" a loan, and when can or should you do it? How do you compare salaries in areas with different costs of living? When is renting a home more cost-effective than buying one? What kinds of things impact your credit score in what ways? How expensive of a car can I afford? Is it better to get a short loan or a long one (or none at all) in various common scenarios? Why is it better to diversify investments?
These aren't business major questions. You don't need a degree in economics to understand them. They don't even require advanced mathematics, certainly nothing above a typical high school curriculum. At least some of this material is highly likely to be useful to literally every single competent (as in, doesn't need a full-time caregiver) adult, and in a capitalist society, the costs of *not* knowing it can be severe.
Despite that, we don't usually teach those subjects in school. I got a bit from my parents, a bit from some extraordinary teachers I had prior to high school, a tiny bit from an intro econ class in college (said class focused more on theoretical economics, not on the real-world stuff), and a bit more through independent research... and I'm still not confident that I can answer all the questions above (I intentionally included some that I've been meaning to read up on in the future). I've been out of college for four years now...
Perhaps "recertification" would be a better word. They will need to do a lot of inspection and probably at the very least unmount and closely examine many of the parts, but it's possible they will be able to re-use them without any actual modification. That would be phenomenal, in terms of cost savings. If the average life expectancy of a rocket engine could be raised even to two launches, the costs would come way down.
Well, it's great to hear that the algorithms are getting so good! That's awesome progress in AI.
Too bad our AIs are apparently now smarter than our journal reviewers/editors. Well, at least in the specific domain of the jobs these people have probably been doing every day for years....
I look forward to is as well. Assuming it performs like the Grasshopper test platforms (which it really should, given that Grasshopper is basically just a Falcon 9 first-stage itself), they can bring it down, upright, to an accuracy of a few feet. Of course, that was from a much lower altitude than first-stage separation occurs at, and it probably won't have the fuel for braking thrust all the way down, but I still wouldn't be *that* surprised if they manage to make the incredible thing hover for a second before splashing. After all, without the upper stages and with the fuel mostly gone, the first stage is pretty lightweight... not a lot of inertia they need to counteract.
The other amazing thing about all this is that it's pure experimentation. There's no risk, aside from costs, if something goes wrong with this experiment. The payload will continue on up to the ISS regardless of what the first stage does post-separation. By using a wet landing, they avoid the risk of damaging anything on the ground. This is a chance to purely try things out, and it costs almost nothing more than the launch (which NASA is paying for) already would. A fantastic opportunity to try their models in the real world!
There will probably be a lot of reconditioning needed anyhow, but yeah, the cost saving could be enormous. The fuel is pretty cheap, really; what makes rocket launches expensive is the need to build an entire new rocket every time. Even the so-called reusable Space Shuttle had a ton (actually, many tons) of parts that were discarded with every launch and had to be built anew for the next one. If SpaceX can actually make the Falcon 9 reusable, it could reduce launch costs by at least an order of magnitude. I think their actual goal is to hit *two* orders of magnitude, and they have a much better ides of costs and feasibility than I do...
Erm... what do you consider to be worse about the Model S compared to other cars? It has superior performance to most luxury cars (it borders on being classified as a sports car itself, performance-wise), is surprisingly roomy, has lots of storage (due to the "front trunk"), is very comfortable to ride in (no engine vibration, no gear shifting, no idle noise... heck, it makes even sitting in traffic tolerable), has excellent handling with an extremely low center of gravity (the battery pack and it's armor plate make up the car's undercarriage), and it literally exceeds the maximum safety ratings that can be assigned (it broke some of the testing equipment rather than itself breaking, and the testers were *unable* to flip it with their usual test machine).
Its electronic, touch-driven center dashboard console might be a bit weird and off-putting to some people, but other people will absolutely love it. It's RWD, but since the motor is at the rear (and the whole car is pretty heavy anyhow) it actually has good traction under the drive wheels. Despite some news excitement, it's way less fire-prone than a gasoline car (and far safer in the event of a fire, too, with the car warning people in plenty of time to pull over and exit the car... following collisions with heavy metal objects on the road that would likely have totaled a conventional car). The range concern is a bit of a red herring; I drive more 250 miles in one day (giving some margin of error from their nominal max range) only a few days a year, and most people literally never do (for those who do, there's always the rental option for that occasional day... or just plan to eat lunch while the car sits at the supercharger station, unless you're planning to hit 500 miles in that one day).
I see it as far, far more than merely bragging rights. Most people seem to agree more with me than with you, too, considering all the "car of the year" and such awards it has received...
It's actually still a very common resolution, plus or minus a few pixels, in really low-end phones (which is exactly what this is). It's intended for markets where people consider a $100 phone (no subsidies, just the phone without even a SIM card) to be about as expensive as it's possible to sell at. It's not a competitor with the HTC One, it's an Android-based alternative to their Lumia 520.
By "$99 per year" you mean "$19 per year" in the case of MS... but hey, what's a factor of 5 or so?
The SDK, incidentally, includes an "emulator" (actually a Hyper-V based virtual machine running an x86 version of the OS) for testing your apps. This SDK is free, and you can get it before signing up for the developer account.
I get that reading the TFA is weird around here, but there's actually three Android different phones being launched; this is just the first one (the others should be out in the next few weeks). This is also, I believe, the lowest-end one, although none of them are high-end.
I assume you're talking about Android... on WP8, third-party apps are not allowed to request write access to the SD card, or *any* access to SMS. (OEM apps, considered "second-party", are allowed to request SMS access which is useful for things like SMS blockers). Third-party developers can't even compile apps with those capabilities requested unless they modify their VS configuration files, can't install those apps to their phone unless they hacked the phone a bit, and if they try submitting those apps to the store Microsoft will reject them or at least strip out the restricted capabilities. Even if somehow they made it onto the store with those capabilities in place, people's phones wouldn't install the apps because they have capabilities that only OEMs (and Microsoft) are allowed to have, and the app wouldn't have an OEM signature.
It's actually kind of annoying. Independent developers are *extremely* restricted in what capabilities they are allowed to request for their WP apps.
Strictly speaking, the Microsoft account is optional (you can choose "not at this time" when it asks you to sign in, and just never get around to actually doing so). You won't be able to access many of the phone's features until you sign in, but the basics (calls/messaging/voicemail/web browsing/taking pictures/accessing WiFi/running built-in apps like calculator/etc.) will work fine. You may even be able to add email accounts that will sync to the phone (I never tried) before setting it up.
The big problem is the lack of access to the app store. You can developer-unlock a phone that has no associated MS account, and then sideload some apps, but WP8 restricts sideloading a lot more than Android does so it's not really a viable option unless there's only a couple specific apps you need.
Something a lot of Americans don't know: there's a ton of bad blood between Finland and Russia, to the point that they sided with Germany during WW2...they wanted help keeping the Russians out.
Turning off "location services" does not resolve the problem.
Source, please? I very much doubt this is true. There are a number of options which will cause your location to be sent to MS (for example, the Find My Phone feature, or the "Send information about WiFi networks near me to Microsoft to improve location services" feature) but each one of them explicitly calls out that they will send your location. Turning off Location Services is supposed to completely disable the GPS and WiFi-hotspot-based location features as well (hypothetically the latter could be re-implemented in other code, but I've seen no sign of this).
The only "location data" that is sent to MS simply as an integral part of being signed into your account on the phone is your IP address, so far as I know (and I've done some research in this area, including reporting some unrelated privacy risks to MS, none of which were nearly this blatant). Anything much more specific would get them in hot water, legally speaking, here in the US as well as in Europe. It's possible my test device (which is a Samsung, not a Nokia) is missing some Nokia-specific issue, but you strongly imply this is an aspect of the Microsoft codebase, unrelated to the OEMs. So yeah, [citation needed].
Oh, and for the record, sideloading is possible on WP as well as on Android. It's definitely more restrictive (you need a PC) but it's possible.
Specifically, the option for SMS backup (it can be set up after initial boot, of course). Obviously, this requires sending your SMS. Now, they can (and should) be encrypted, but it still must send them. If they're inside an SSL tunnel (and nobody goofed their cert validation, the way Apple has apparently been doing...) then they should be secure in transit, at least.
They mean excluding code written be companies that aren't Nokia (for example, most of the OS and some of the built-in apps on each Lumia are Microsoft code, they also come with Angry Birds pre-installed, and that's Rovio code... you get the idea). Nokia's contributions will mostly be some drivers, some services that run in the background (apps aren't generally allowed to do so), some "settings" apps to control those drivers and services, some "normal" apps to add features that aren't built into the OS (for example, Nokia recently copied the Samsung WP8 "App Folders" app, which lets you create live tiles that contain tiles from other apps, creating a folder-like system), and possibly some fluff apps (dumb stuff like a horoscope app or a notepad app seems to be very common from OEMs).
Drivers and services that they added to the OS. Nokia-authored apps that come pre-installed (such as their custom camera "lens" that gives more control over the camera behavior than the stock camera app). Nokia-authored apps downloaded from the store (including updates to pre-installed apps).
In total, actually, not much - WP8, unlike Android, discourages OEMs from tinkering too much - but it would only take very little. A single thread in a driver or service could do this all day long, easily...
Yyyep. Don't store your pictures in the cloud, folks. There's automated scanning (not just of Sky/OneDrive, but of others as well) that looks for anything it thinks is nudity, and flags it for human review. If said human decides it's nudity, or even if it could be considered erotic / is too risqué, they can and often will shut down your account. This has happened before. I admit I've never heard of it happening to related accounts owned by other companies (i.e. Microsoft killing somebody's Nokia account as well as their Microsoft account) but it's possible, I suppose. Or maybe Nokia flagged the images themselves. Or maybe the article author is confused and meant the Nokia user's Microsoft account is the one that got blocked (WP supports automatic picture uploads to what it still calls SkyDrive).
And yes, the whole thing is bloody ludicrous. I don't even think it's a CP issue, really.. just general prudishness and puritanism turned up to 11.
Microsoft requires that any PC which wants to be certified for Win8 allow the user to control Secure Boot (turn it off and/or add their own certificates). Not permits, or even recommends, but actually requires. If you want OEM licensing, you have to allow other OSes.
Mind you, I'm not claiming this is done out of the goodness of their hearts. More like they are afraid of another anti-trust trial, with reason. Still, what you "seen [sic] to recall" is incorrect.
On the other hand, on Windows Phone and Windows RT (basically, on things which Microsoft can argue "aren't really PCs", even though by far the biggest difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is which instruction set the compiler emitted), Secure Boot is mandatory and user control is disallowed. There's absolutely no valid reason I can see for this - the same "enabled by default but the user is in control" seen in Win8 would be perfectly viable on tablets and phones - so I can't argue that they don't still want to rule your computing experience.
You... don't read Slashdot much, then? The phrase "convicted monopolist" is still used to describe Microsoft (and justify hate/mistrust of them) quite often around here. As you say, there are some far-more-current reasons... but most of them lack the impact of "they were tried in a court of law and found guilty!" so people do, in fact, still drag out the anti-trust trial fairly often.
NT actually predates 9x (the first versions used Program Manager, like the 16-bit Win3.x versions, and looked much like them; it wasn't until NT4 that they switched to Explorer.exe and the 9x UI). NT has always had full multi-user support, with ACLs and everything, although early versions (arguably, anything up through XP) were often quite unpleasant to run as non-Administrator users (I used to do this, and found UAC - even the Vista version of it - to be a vast improvement and the best thing to happen to Windows in a long time). Still, you *could* (and occasionally people did) run NT4 and even NT 3.x (the first version was called 3.1, for parity with the then-current 16-bit Windows version) on home PCs.
Yep. NT was basically intended as "the one OS to rule them all" and be compatible with everything. From NTVDM (the Virtual DOS Machine, that could run Dos and Win16 programs and understand the relevant system calls) to the OS2 and even POSIX subsystems*, NT was somewhere between a miracle and a monstrosity, especially for its time (early-to-mid 90s). Even its "official" API, Win32, is actually a subsystem on top of the native NT APIs, which need to support things like POSIX fork(2) style process creation as well as Win32 CreateProcess() (both are implemented as variants on the largely undocumented native system call NtCreateProcess, alternatively called ZwCreateProcess if called by another kernel component).
* the POSIX subsystem was only removed in 8.1, although it was "deprecated" in 8.0 and hadn't seen a major update since Vista. Said removal is actually the main reason one of my boxes still runs Win8 instead or 8.1, as I find Interix (the user environment that most commonly runs on the subsystem, available as a free download from Microsoft and the only MS download I've ever seen that contains GPLed software such as gcc) much nicer to use than either Cygwin or a Linux virtual machine (I have the latter anyhow, as Interix is a bit old and not all Linux programs will compile for it).
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True that. Watch the Grasshopper test flights. It's like science fiction come to life!
A factor of 20-30 reduction is my guess for where it's likely to wind up in a best-case situation as well, at least with rocketry as we currently implement it. The crazy and wonderful thing is that other changes will potentially make a big difference in the future. For example, if the world ever collectively gets over its brick-shitting with regard to nuclear power, there are conceptual designs for rockets where the energy comes from nuclear sources (such as uranium-hexafluoride gas contained in a quartz "lightbulb") and the only expendables that the rocket needs to carry are the reaction mass. Turns out water, or any of a number of fairly cheap gases, make excellent reaction mass (and because this design would have a ridiculously high specific impulse - basically "fuel economy" for rockets - you wouldn't need very much reaction mass either). Thus, we could reach a point where the consumables on every launch were a trivial fraction of a percent of the cost of the rocket. At that point, costs could drop even further than under the best case of the "fuel is 3-5% of the cost of every launch" assumption.
BUT, that's only if we manage to make rockets reusable, so we can amortize the costs of launching them over a large number of launches. We can start work on that today, with propulsion systems that have changed little in decades, and maybe use those savings to fund R&D into the next generation of rocket propusion, one that has even lower per-launch costs...
Disagree with your first point, though the rest are good.
Credit cards, if paid off in full every month, are a great way to build your credit score and can also offer "rewards" amounting to a couple percent discount on your purchases (which comes in the form of higher prices to cover CC fees, but most places charge the same whether you pay with credit or cash). They are also a really convenient way to handle disputes with merchants. Oh, and your bank(s) suck(s); I only carry one card (so it gets used regularly) but my parents each have a "backup" card that may not get pulled out for years yet still works when the do (typically done in case there's a block for something like suspected fraud on their other card).
My CC has a far higher limit than my debit card (which I carry pretty much just for ATMs), was virtually the only reason I *had* a credit score before buying my car, works all over the world without requiring me to get local cash (I travel a lot), means I don't have to carry much cash so I'd lose very little if I got mugged / pickpocketed, and has no service fees. It's a pretty great deal. The balance on it rarely breaks 1000 (usually only when I made a huge purchase that month) even though I put practically everything except rent on it (I'd use it for rent too, if I could). It automatically pays out of my checking account each month, with much of the remainder being moved into savings. Every month or so I check it for unexpected expenses, which takes just a couple minutes online. The only thing I've ever found was some stupid bank-related charge I got canceled (I don't need whatever-the-hell-it-is protection, thanks!)
Otherwise known as "all that economics-related stuff that people who aren't Econ or Business majors really ought to know". I'd throw in a few other topics, like credit scores (what impacts them, what they mean for you), bankruptcy (too many people seem to think it's a get-out-of-jail-free card), a bit more info on the stock market (there's actually "stock market games" that simulate stock investment portfolios for people, typically using closing price each day), and some stuff on planning for big life events, like buying a house or retiring. Oh, and maybe some stuff on taxes... so few people understand anywhere near enough about taxes, which lets politicians mislead them with ease.
The crazy thing is, you could cover all this material, and more, in a semester of high school. It doesn't require a lot of math or science background. It doesn't take long to go over it. It divides nearly into sub-units (investments, loans, budgeting, taxes, etc.). It's easy to devise homework and tests for the material. It can be taught at a sufficiently abstract level to handle changes in technology (people these days balance their budgets using Mint, not using checkbooks, but the basic concept is the same) without getting theoretical (*I* like theory, but I'm kind of weird that way and there's no need or even much value for it in a class like this).
When my parents were in high school and college, "Home Ec" classes were actually about home economics (ranging from budgeting to investments to the consequences of bankruptcy and even to running a home business). By the time I was that age, those subjects were all but gone (at least in the area I went to school, namely western Washington state) and what vestiges of them were left seemed to be about... cooking, or something. Nobody really talked about them, except in a disparaging voice intended to deride girls who had no real place in the school so they took "home ec" because that was all they could manage. Yes, they really were that sexist about it, too.
I've often thought it was a pity that *real* home economics classes - the kind of things that every adult ought to know, but so few people apparently learn - really ought to be standard material. What are the various kinds of investment accounts, and what are their tradeoffs? How can you calculate how much stock options are likely to be worth at a company? What is a "short sell" and why should or shouldn't you do them? What does it mean to "refinance" a loan, and when can or should you do it? How do you compare salaries in areas with different costs of living? When is renting a home more cost-effective than buying one? What kinds of things impact your credit score in what ways? How expensive of a car can I afford? Is it better to get a short loan or a long one (or none at all) in various common scenarios? Why is it better to diversify investments?
These aren't business major questions. You don't need a degree in economics to understand them. They don't even require advanced mathematics, certainly nothing above a typical high school curriculum. At least some of this material is highly likely to be useful to literally every single competent (as in, doesn't need a full-time caregiver) adult, and in a capitalist society, the costs of *not* knowing it can be severe.
Despite that, we don't usually teach those subjects in school. I got a bit from my parents, a bit from some extraordinary teachers I had prior to high school, a tiny bit from an intro econ class in college (said class focused more on theoretical economics, not on the real-world stuff), and a bit more through independent research... and I'm still not confident that I can answer all the questions above (I intentionally included some that I've been meaning to read up on in the future). I've been out of college for four years now...
Perhaps "recertification" would be a better word. They will need to do a lot of inspection and probably at the very least unmount and closely examine many of the parts, but it's possible they will be able to re-use them without any actual modification. That would be phenomenal, in terms of cost savings. If the average life expectancy of a rocket engine could be raised even to two launches, the costs would come way down.
Well, it's great to hear that the algorithms are getting so good! That's awesome progress in AI.
Too bad our AIs are apparently now smarter than our journal reviewers/editors. Well, at least in the specific domain of the jobs these people have probably been doing every day for years....
I look forward to is as well. Assuming it performs like the Grasshopper test platforms (which it really should, given that Grasshopper is basically just a Falcon 9 first-stage itself), they can bring it down, upright, to an accuracy of a few feet. Of course, that was from a much lower altitude than first-stage separation occurs at, and it probably won't have the fuel for braking thrust all the way down, but I still wouldn't be *that* surprised if they manage to make the incredible thing hover for a second before splashing. After all, without the upper stages and with the fuel mostly gone, the first stage is pretty lightweight... not a lot of inertia they need to counteract.
The other amazing thing about all this is that it's pure experimentation. There's no risk, aside from costs, if something goes wrong with this experiment. The payload will continue on up to the ISS regardless of what the first stage does post-separation. By using a wet landing, they avoid the risk of damaging anything on the ground. This is a chance to purely try things out, and it costs almost nothing more than the launch (which NASA is paying for) already would. A fantastic opportunity to try their models in the real world!
There will probably be a lot of reconditioning needed anyhow, but yeah, the cost saving could be enormous. The fuel is pretty cheap, really; what makes rocket launches expensive is the need to build an entire new rocket every time. Even the so-called reusable Space Shuttle had a ton (actually, many tons) of parts that were discarded with every launch and had to be built anew for the next one. If SpaceX can actually make the Falcon 9 reusable, it could reduce launch costs by at least an order of magnitude. I think their actual goal is to hit *two* orders of magnitude, and they have a much better ides of costs and feasibility than I do...
Erm... what do you consider to be worse about the Model S compared to other cars? It has superior performance to most luxury cars (it borders on being classified as a sports car itself, performance-wise), is surprisingly roomy, has lots of storage (due to the "front trunk"), is very comfortable to ride in (no engine vibration, no gear shifting, no idle noise... heck, it makes even sitting in traffic tolerable), has excellent handling with an extremely low center of gravity (the battery pack and it's armor plate make up the car's undercarriage), and it literally exceeds the maximum safety ratings that can be assigned (it broke some of the testing equipment rather than itself breaking, and the testers were *unable* to flip it with their usual test machine).
Its electronic, touch-driven center dashboard console might be a bit weird and off-putting to some people, but other people will absolutely love it. It's RWD, but since the motor is at the rear (and the whole car is pretty heavy anyhow) it actually has good traction under the drive wheels. Despite some news excitement, it's way less fire-prone than a gasoline car (and far safer in the event of a fire, too, with the car warning people in plenty of time to pull over and exit the car... following collisions with heavy metal objects on the road that would likely have totaled a conventional car). The range concern is a bit of a red herring; I drive more 250 miles in one day (giving some margin of error from their nominal max range) only a few days a year, and most people literally never do (for those who do, there's always the rental option for that occasional day... or just plan to eat lunch while the car sits at the supercharger station, unless you're planning to hit 500 miles in that one day).
I see it as far, far more than merely bragging rights. Most people seem to agree more with me than with you, too, considering all the "car of the year" and such awards it has received...
It's actually still a very common resolution, plus or minus a few pixels, in really low-end phones (which is exactly what this is). It's intended for markets where people consider a $100 phone (no subsidies, just the phone without even a SIM card) to be about as expensive as it's possible to sell at. It's not a competitor with the HTC One, it's an Android-based alternative to their Lumia 520.
By "$99 per year" you mean "$19 per year" in the case of MS... but hey, what's a factor of 5 or so?
The SDK, incidentally, includes an "emulator" (actually a Hyper-V based virtual machine running an x86 version of the OS) for testing your apps. This SDK is free, and you can get it before signing up for the developer account.
I get that reading the TFA is weird around here, but there's actually three Android different phones being launched; this is just the first one (the others should be out in the next few weeks). This is also, I believe, the lowest-end one, although none of them are high-end.
I assume you're talking about Android... on WP8, third-party apps are not allowed to request write access to the SD card, or *any* access to SMS. (OEM apps, considered "second-party", are allowed to request SMS access which is useful for things like SMS blockers). Third-party developers can't even compile apps with those capabilities requested unless they modify their VS configuration files, can't install those apps to their phone unless they hacked the phone a bit, and if they try submitting those apps to the store Microsoft will reject them or at least strip out the restricted capabilities. Even if somehow they made it onto the store with those capabilities in place, people's phones wouldn't install the apps because they have capabilities that only OEMs (and Microsoft) are allowed to have, and the app wouldn't have an OEM signature.
It's actually kind of annoying. Independent developers are *extremely* restricted in what capabilities they are allowed to request for their WP apps.
Strictly speaking, the Microsoft account is optional (you can choose "not at this time" when it asks you to sign in, and just never get around to actually doing so). You won't be able to access many of the phone's features until you sign in, but the basics (calls/messaging/voicemail/web browsing/taking pictures/accessing WiFi/running built-in apps like calculator/etc.) will work fine. You may even be able to add email accounts that will sync to the phone (I never tried) before setting it up.
The big problem is the lack of access to the app store. You can developer-unlock a phone that has no associated MS account, and then sideload some apps, but WP8 restricts sideloading a lot more than Android does so it's not really a viable option unless there's only a couple specific apps you need.
Something a lot of Americans don't know: there's a ton of bad blood between Finland and Russia, to the point that they sided with Germany during WW2...they wanted help keeping the Russians out.
Source, please? I very much doubt this is true. There are a number of options which will cause your location to be sent to MS (for example, the Find My Phone feature, or the "Send information about WiFi networks near me to Microsoft to improve location services" feature) but each one of them explicitly calls out that they will send your location. Turning off Location Services is supposed to completely disable the GPS and WiFi-hotspot-based location features as well (hypothetically the latter could be re-implemented in other code, but I've seen no sign of this).
The only "location data" that is sent to MS simply as an integral part of being signed into your account on the phone is your IP address, so far as I know (and I've done some research in this area, including reporting some unrelated privacy risks to MS, none of which were nearly this blatant). Anything much more specific would get them in hot water, legally speaking, here in the US as well as in Europe. It's possible my test device (which is a Samsung, not a Nokia) is missing some Nokia-specific issue, but you strongly imply this is an aspect of the Microsoft codebase, unrelated to the OEMs. So yeah, [citation needed].
Oh, and for the record, sideloading is possible on WP as well as on Android. It's definitely more restrictive (you need a PC) but it's possible.
Specifically, the option for SMS backup (it can be set up after initial boot, of course). Obviously, this requires sending your SMS. Now, they can (and should) be encrypted, but it still must send them. If they're inside an SSL tunnel (and nobody goofed their cert validation, the way Apple has apparently been doing...) then they should be secure in transit, at least.
They mean excluding code written be companies that aren't Nokia (for example, most of the OS and some of the built-in apps on each Lumia are Microsoft code, they also come with Angry Birds pre-installed, and that's Rovio code... you get the idea). Nokia's contributions will mostly be some drivers, some services that run in the background (apps aren't generally allowed to do so), some "settings" apps to control those drivers and services, some "normal" apps to add features that aren't built into the OS (for example, Nokia recently copied the Samsung WP8 "App Folders" app, which lets you create live tiles that contain tiles from other apps, creating a folder-like system), and possibly some fluff apps (dumb stuff like a horoscope app or a notepad app seems to be very common from OEMs).
Drivers and services that they added to the OS.
Nokia-authored apps that come pre-installed (such as their custom camera "lens" that gives more control over the camera behavior than the stock camera app).
Nokia-authored apps downloaded from the store (including updates to pre-installed apps).
In total, actually, not much - WP8, unlike Android, discourages OEMs from tinkering too much - but it would only take very little. A single thread in a driver or service could do this all day long, easily...
Yyyep. Don't store your pictures in the cloud, folks. There's automated scanning (not just of Sky/OneDrive, but of others as well) that looks for anything it thinks is nudity, and flags it for human review. If said human decides it's nudity, or even if it could be considered erotic / is too risqué, they can and often will shut down your account. This has happened before. I admit I've never heard of it happening to related accounts owned by other companies (i.e. Microsoft killing somebody's Nokia account as well as their Microsoft account) but it's possible, I suppose. Or maybe Nokia flagged the images themselves. Or maybe the article author is confused and meant the Nokia user's Microsoft account is the one that got blocked (WP supports automatic picture uploads to what it still calls SkyDrive).
And yes, the whole thing is bloody ludicrous. I don't even think it's a CP issue, really.. just general prudishness and puritanism turned up to 11.
Microsoft requires that any PC which wants to be certified for Win8 allow the user to control Secure Boot (turn it off and/or add their own certificates). Not permits, or even recommends, but actually requires. If you want OEM licensing, you have to allow other OSes.
Mind you, I'm not claiming this is done out of the goodness of their hearts. More like they are afraid of another anti-trust trial, with reason. Still, what you "seen [sic] to recall" is incorrect.
On the other hand, on Windows Phone and Windows RT (basically, on things which Microsoft can argue "aren't really PCs", even though by far the biggest difference between Windows RT and Windows 8 is which instruction set the compiler emitted), Secure Boot is mandatory and user control is disallowed. There's absolutely no valid reason I can see for this - the same "enabled by default but the user is in control" seen in Win8 would be perfectly viable on tablets and phones - so I can't argue that they don't still want to rule your computing experience.
You... don't read Slashdot much, then? The phrase "convicted monopolist" is still used to describe Microsoft (and justify hate/mistrust of them) quite often around here. As you say, there are some far-more-current reasons... but most of them lack the impact of "they were tried in a court of law and found guilty!" so people do, in fact, still drag out the anti-trust trial fairly often.
NT actually predates 9x (the first versions used Program Manager, like the 16-bit Win3.x versions, and looked much like them; it wasn't until NT4 that they switched to Explorer.exe and the 9x UI). NT has always had full multi-user support, with ACLs and everything, although early versions (arguably, anything up through XP) were often quite unpleasant to run as non-Administrator users (I used to do this, and found UAC - even the Vista version of it - to be a vast improvement and the best thing to happen to Windows in a long time). Still, you *could* (and occasionally people did) run NT4 and even NT 3.x (the first version was called 3.1, for parity with the then-current 16-bit Windows version) on home PCs.
Yep. NT was basically intended as "the one OS to rule them all" and be compatible with everything. From NTVDM (the Virtual DOS Machine, that could run Dos and Win16 programs and understand the relevant system calls) to the OS2 and even POSIX subsystems*, NT was somewhere between a miracle and a monstrosity, especially for its time (early-to-mid 90s). Even its "official" API, Win32, is actually a subsystem on top of the native NT APIs, which need to support things like POSIX fork(2) style process creation as well as Win32 CreateProcess() (both are implemented as variants on the largely undocumented native system call NtCreateProcess, alternatively called ZwCreateProcess if called by another kernel component).
* the POSIX subsystem was only removed in 8.1, although it was "deprecated" in 8.0 and hadn't seen a major update since Vista. Said removal is actually the main reason one of my boxes still runs Win8 instead or 8.1, as I find Interix (the user environment that most commonly runs on the subsystem, available as a free download from Microsoft and the only MS download I've ever seen that contains GPLed software such as gcc) much nicer to use than either Cygwin or a Linux virtual machine (I have the latter anyhow, as Interix is a bit old and not all Linux programs will compile for it).