The answer is yes. Hulu has regularly blocked Flash-enabled devices through various (often circumventable, but still) means. It's just that you never hear about them.
I feel like Google is constantly launching Facebook killers and waiting to see what will stick. They have so many different social networks and feed mechanisms that it's hard to discern a coherent strategy from them.
HTC has been building giant-touchscreen-type phones for years. Windows Mobile is not some kind of cheap Blackberry ripoff; it's a Palm ripoff, a lot closer to the iPhone when it came out than anything else. Moreover, the first Android phones didn't even have multitouch or capacitive screens.
Did Apple influence some design decisions? Sure. However, the design of the G1 and the first Android phones were also a logical extension from what was available at the time.
I think that it could become a liability to do this at some point, though. When everybody is calling in and people have flaky quality, you are wasting at least some time. If a meeting is more effective in person, then have that meeting in person! You shouldn't be afraid to exclude one or two people if they're traveling; they're already excluded anyway. Why provide an illusion of close involvement?
The points you make are disturbing. As far as I can tell, the reason why people shy away from SEO is not that it doesn't work. Indeed, it seems like people shy away from SEO because it works too well. At least for me, there's a perception that SEO is evil and crowds out legitimate content. I would hope that these startups are not going over to SEO just because it works; I would hope that SEO is trying to show that it works legitimately.
It's a textbook. Flash doesn't matter. The content needs to be there. I've read textbooks on my iPad before; for the most part, it works OK. There doesn't appear to be any big advantage to the Kno that couldn't be matched in a specialized iPad app.
They lacked metallurgy, banking, agricultural technology... The Industrial Revolution was built on hundreds of years of slow progress and access to tons of natural resources. The Aeliopile was a toy that opened doors; it wasn't going to power any steamships.
Extra cloaking for malicious links? Bit.ly can't exactly check the original site to see if it's OK if it's hidden behind a funky redirection layer. I think that bit.ly was reasonable to have an interstitial, although maybe they should be more open about why and how to remove it.
Well - you basically made the exact reply he was expecting.
I think that letting serial killers out of jail is a bad idea, yes. The reason why we should keep serial killers in jail, though, is not that they're serial killers - it's that, in most cases, they tend to not care and will willingly kill again.
If there is a serial killer who is provably not sociopathic and who can actually become reformed, then that person should be eventually let out of jail. That is a very difficult standard to meet.
Embedding Google Maps in one's own site would probably be a better solution. It also helps if you have a bunch of reference points concentrated in the UK or in some other small region (you could have one world map and one UK map). That would make things clearer.
It's come to the point where I actively avoid SEO-optimized sites on Google. If I see my search terms in the URL ("how-to-become-a-travel-agent") of a result, I'll just skip over it. Even moreso when there is generic, cut-and-paste content in the description. SEO may help you rank, but you won't get any clicks from me until I've run out of options.
He went on to say that they were so focused on revenues in the early days of Zynga that they did some things he didn't like. He then mentioned the Zwinky toolbar and said he installed it on his machine and couldn't get it off. And then went on to say that he told his developer to take that lead gen offer down.
Those are device developer programs, though. XNA for PC is free, and pretty much all major desktop PC development tracks are free. iPhone/XBox/etc are a different story (and my understanding is that $99 is cheap for such a program).
If people are complaining about their articles getting cut, doesn't that mean that they care about those articles and would maintain them? Wikipedia is actively spurning volunteers and reducing that "finite number" with deletionism.
It's a key fact which you have to keep in mind when reading this article and considering it for use on PCs. Console copy protection is today important, but not critical as PC copy protection is. Chances are, this protection would have been instantly defeated on a reasonably high-profile PC game.
Isn't this mainly an aesthetic thing, though? Consumer text-to-speech is certainly adequate for vocalizing almost any conversation. One could just use that to carry out "covert voice communication."