History always repeats

If US companies didn't move offshore to take advantage of lower wages and taxes, new foreign companies would be set up. These companies would soon undercut the US companies and drive them out of business.

It's happened with steel, with cars, with consumer electronics, it will happen with software.

The US might try and revert to protectionist policies (lining the pockets of the corporate shareholders, at the expense of the consumer), but tarrifs haven't saved the industries above, and they wont save software.

I can't imagine why the US thinks they can pay higher wages and taxes simply because of their geographical coordinates.

Spec seems to be a bit of a mess

It doesn't help that its an extension to XMPP, which is not the internet's simplest protocol.

The authors assert the success of email was due to open protocols. I'd argue that the success of email was largely down to being a very very very simple and easy to implement protocol. SMTP sits directly on top of TCP. It uses ASCII. It uses half a dozen commands. That's it, it's simple enough to "implement" by hand, using telnet. No need for fancy API's. You could teach a ten year old to do it.

Wave uses XMPP, and this sits on top of TCP, TLS, and SASL, using XML, UTF-8, X509, MD5, base-64, URNs etc, which is great - much better than email - but has a lot bigger learning curve. You need libraries and APIs, frameworks, public key infrastructures, XML parsers, and so on. On the server side, I wonder if we will ever see the situation where practically every organisation on the net has an XMPP server and they communicate seemlessly (as we see now, more or less with SMTP).

Or will the complexity lead to a few big walled gardens like Facebook and Twitter?

Compatibility

Seems like the average web developer doesn't care about compatibility; if it runs on their desktop it's ready to ship.

SSL?

"went on to suggest that customers who were paying attention would have noticed Bandesco's secure sockets layer certificate generated an error when they were redirected to the fraudulent login page."

I doubt that. If the domain name matched the certificate (which it would have, since it is the IP address that gets changed), there would have been no error.

Another reason to get a VM

Virtualise the BIOS, then you can just can the infected machine image.

Now they'll have to make up a list

I bet the old "classified" list was something like "anything we decide on the spot". Now they'll have to make up a "list" and come up with other ways to get around the court ruling.

Secondary disk accreation.

A theory of planetary formation, such as the current theory of secondary disk accreation, will make certain predictions about how a planet should look and behave. Pluto does not look or behave like a planet formed by this process. Draw your own conclusions.

Flash install stats

The 99% figure quoted by Adobe is mainly home users. And I suspect a large number of surfers are sitting behind work machines. In my experience corporate machines often don't have flash, or an outdated version. Even an up to date version of adobe reader is a luxury.