But today it shed some light on the subject.

It said that its Kindle lineup of devices have continued to sell more than one million a week for the third straight week. It’s entirely unclear how many Kindles have been sold to date and Amazon prefers it to stay a mystery.

In particular, it reports that the Kindle Fire is the No. 1 bestselling, most gifted, and most wished for product across the gazillions of items available on the expansive e-retailer’s site.

The Kindle lineup covers the $79 Kindle, the $99 Kindle Touch, the $149 Kindle Touch 3G and the $199 Kindle Fire.

Earlier this week, a storm of criticism was brewing over the Fire tablet with reports of consumers returning the device because of complaints over technical glitches.

The Seattle company did not include any information about return rates.

Ahead of the dinner, Anderson stopped by my office to let me have a peek at his 10 predictions, and we talked them over a bit. All 10 are below, along with some comments from Anderson that emerged from our conversation.

Before diving into the predictions, Anderson tells me there is a grand theme that unifies them all: “Integrating everything.”

What does that mean? “It means a whole lot of stuff that needs to be integrated. We don’t need anything new at all. There’s so much work that needs to be done with the existing tool sets. Steve Jobs didn’t really invent anything at all. But he was great at integrating things into a product. There’s a lot more of that work to do. We have to do it in the phone world and the TV world and the health care world. We have lots of devices and lots of chips and lots of operating systems and lots of content. The bigger question is, how do human beings use it all efficiently?”

As an example, he cites the collaboration between Nuance, the speech software company, and IBM, bringing the Watson computer of “Jeopardy” fame into the area of health care. “For the first time, the idea of evidence-based medicine won’t just be in a magazine article,” Anderson says. “A doctor will be able to pick up his phone and describe four symptoms, and find out what the likely diagnosis is, what the indications are. It’s fantastic.”

So here are those 10 predictions, with additional comments from Anderson:

1. TV becomes the new center of gravity in the tech universe. All the other devices find their niches in the TV galaxy. Microsoft’s attempt to integrate Kinect into TV is a strong if qualified success. Smart phone-TV integration software becomes a new category. Pad-TV integration becomes common.

“Apple will hustle to launch the next version of Apple TV, and it will be a roaring success and be seen as Tim Cook’s first great product success. But what it really will be is Steve’s last product.”

2. 2012 will see tectonic shifts in phone markets. “Nokia will fail to come back, which is pretty clear to everyone except the people in Finland.” Samsung, Anderson says, will retain its spot as the new global leader in mobile phones by volume, and will keep this crown despite the debut of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Meanwhile, Anderson says, Google will lose control over the Android operating system, mainly because unlicensed versions of Android will multiply in type and in installed base, especially in Asian countries. “It’s already a balkanized environment. Now Google loses control of the technology entirely. China is already running an unlicensed version of Android, and I think there will be more of that.”

Finally, the smartphone will finally emerge as the dominant category of wireless phone. “Why would you have anything else? And why would sellers of content and services want you to?” he says. “It doesn’t matter if you’re in a rich country or a poor country. This stuff is cheap.”

3. Clouds are for consumers, and for start-ups. Even as a large number of big companies move pilot projects onto external clouds, it will become clear that the real trend is for enterprise to stay away from clouds in all key areas, for reasons of both security and reliability.

“The cloud guys hate this because they want to sell to enterprises,” Anderson says. “But the security issues are becoming really intense. If you’re a CIO, it’s a terrible environment, and you’re a target, for sure, especially if you’re a company with a lot of intellectual property. I’m not implying that things like SAAS (software as a service) aren’t a big trend. But no one is going to put their valuable IP on the cloud.”

4. Security splits the tech world in two, finally getting attention from CEOs. Companies with real IP start to realize they have to “go big or go home” with their security response, and their spending on protecting their “crown jewels” rises dramatically.

5. Siri stuns the world. Siri, on Apple’s iPhone 4S, has sounded the arrival of Internet personal assistants, and the world will spend this year marveling at what Siri and its rivals can and cannot do — and what they can learn to do.

“I think we’ll see a bunch of these things,” Anderson says. “Siri will get much better. It will learn how you learn. We’ve never seen people have long-term relationships with machines before, but it will be a long-term relationship, and she will remember everything, but make good use of it. She will know you learn better by seeing than hearing, or that it takes three times to tell you something. All those things that you have to program today should be learnable. None of that has been done yet. That creates a real friendship. And I think we’re going to start seeing personal assistants not just for everyday life, but for professions like medicine or car repair. Instead of just having Siri be everything, there will be many Siris for different contexts.”

6. We enter the amazing world of Dave and HAL, as voice recognition comes of age. From hospital to car, mobile to home, Kinect to Siri, exercise to play, work to entertainment, remote control to direct action, from Microsoft to Apple, from Tellme to Nuance — the time has come for computers and humans to talk to each other. With lots of funny stories, big bloopers and amazing breakthroughs, humanity at the end of 2012 will be talking to machines in a normal voice, and it will not seem unusual, nor be the cause of unending frustration.

“The voice-recognition part is almost trivial,” Anderson says. “The important part is context-sensitive understanding. It used to be that all the researchers at Carnegie Mellon used to think that all you needed was more computing horsepower to do better at voice. It turned out that was wrong. It was right for a little while, but the real problem is context. And so, if you can build up that database where you can search it contextually for what to expect, that is where you get all the mileage.”

7. E-readers prosper, but pads continue to dominate what Anderson calls the “carry-along” market. Pads and tablets will come down in price and get closer to prices of e-readers. Meanwhile, Anderson says, Amazon’s Fire will move upmarket and evolve into a full-fledged tablet.

“If you look at the specs on the Fire, it’s a tablet, but it’s hobbled,” Anderson says. “So I think that this is part of the whole strategy: Come in and sell at a low price, and then later unveil a more complete tablet. Apple will stay ahead, though. A lot of people are asking me if Amazon will catch Apple, and the answer is no. The way it’s configured right now, there’s no way the Fire will catch up with the iPad.”

8. The consumption world explodes. Get ready for new devices, new content, new bundles, new connection techniques, new distribution channels, new aggregators, new tablets, new phones, new players, new self-published authors, new garage bands, new consumption models riding on social networks. There is nothing but high energy in the content consumer market. People are now ready to spend subscription money, and the publisher response will be huge. “It’s going to be a huge melee of stuff,” Anderson says. “We’ll invent more stuff to consume, and it will be very hard to figure out who the players are from week to week, and how they’re doing. They may not even know themselves.”

9. Governments and corporations focus on intellectual property as though it were their most prized asset. It is. This new global understanding leads to a reevaluation regarding giving critical IP away for nothing versus protecting it. The age of what Anderson calls “IP naïveté” is over, and the question of proper IP valuation is here.

What is IP naïveté? “When Jeff Immelt stood on the steps of the White House the day after he was named jobs czar, and handed the plans for GE’s most important jet-engine project to Hu Jintao in order to get the permission to be allowed to bid on maybe selling engines to China — that’s IP naïveté,” Anderson says. “Thinking that’s not going to come back and show up for sale in Houston from some Chinese company in about six months is IP naïveté.”

During 2012, he says, companies and countries will start valuing their intellectual property not for its replacement value, but for figures that are magnitudes larger. State-sponsored IP theft will shift from being considered a nuisance and more along the lines of an act of aggression.

10. Amazon gets it all. Between outdoing Wal-Mart online, to beating the booksellers and delivering groceries, and making new inroads in video streaming, Amazon will prove that one company can indeed have it all. Strong Kindle and Fire sales will only be icing on the cake.

No surprise there — Netflix and Pandora are two of the four apps Amazon talked up at the Fire’s rollout event (along with Facebook and Twitter).

But it’s worth reminding folks that the tablet will work with third-party video and music services, because those are the same two services that Barnes & Noble referred to, over and over, when it unveiled its own Nook tablet this week.

Barnes & Noble’s suggestion — actually, the company spelled it out repeatedly — was that while its tablet wouldn’t have an integrated music/movies vending machine like Amazon will have, that was actually an advantage, because it meant it could work with outside services like Netflix and Pandora.

Anecdotally, that seems to have been an effective ploy — lots of folks I’ve talked with about the two tablets are under the impression that Amazon won’t have Netflix, because Netflix is a rival to Amazon’s in-house service. That said, the Nook will have access to Hulu Plus, and the Fire doesn’t (for now).

The Nook and the Fire are also on equal footing when it comes to Google’s Android Market — users won’t be able to shop there using either device, even though both tablets are built using Android. Barnes & Noble was upfront about this earlier this week; Amazon doesn’t spell it out but makes it clear via the release below, which says Fire users will be able to use “several thousand of the most popular Android apps.”

Press release excerpt:

Facebook, Pandora, Netflix, Rhapsody, Games from Electronic Arts, Zynga and Rovio, and Several Thousand More Apps and Games Coming To Kindle Fire Next Week

Just like with movies and TV shows, music, books, and magazines, Kindle Fire offers a fully-integrated Android apps and games experience – purchase or register for an app or game once, enjoy it on your Kindle Fire and other Android-based devices – and all apps and games are backed up in the Amazon Cloud for re-download anytime

SEATTLE – November 9, 2011 (NASDAQ: AMZN) – When Kindle Fire customers across the country open their boxes next week, they will be able to choose from several thousand of the most popular Android apps and games, including Netflix, Rhapsody, Pandora, Twitter, Comics by comiXology, Facebook, The Weather Channel and popular games from Zynga, EA, Gameloft, PopCap and Rovio. Kindle Fire customers will be able to download these apps and games without having to register multiple times and using Amazon’s simple and secure 1-Click payment technology. Plus, all apps are Amazon-tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible, customers can get a great “paid” app for free every day, and once you’ve downloaded an app from the Amazon Appstore, it’s available on Kindle Fire as well as your other Android-based devices.

“We started talking to app developers everywhere the day we introduced Kindle Fire, and the response has been overwhelming,” Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “In addition to over 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, books, and magazines from Amazon, we are excited to offer customers thousands of apps and games to choose from on Kindle Fire – from Pandora and Rhapsody to Facebook and Twitter to Netflix, as well as popular games from EA, Zynga and many other top game developers. And this is only the beginning – we’re adding more apps and games every day across all categories.”

With the Netflix app, Kindle Fire customers who are Netflix members can browse and instantly watch unlimited TV shows and movies and resume watching where they left off on their TV or computer. “We’re excited to team up with Amazon to give what we think will be a huge community of Kindle Fire owners the opportunity experience all that Netflix has to offer,” said Bill Holmes, Vice President of Business Development at Netflix. “We’re certain that our members will have a great viewing experience on Kindle Fire.”

… Additional examples of apps and games that will be available to Kindle Fire customers include Allrecipes, Bloomberg, Cut the Rope, Doodle Fit, Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, Jenga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Airport Mania, Battleheart, Pulse, The Cat in the Hat, Quickoffice Pro, Jamie’s 20-Minute Meals, IMDb Movies & TV, and Monkey Preschool Lunchbox.

And if you’ve got a gripe with the video quality, take it up with Amazon — this is from their official YouTube account.

“While Amazon’s price point, installed base, digital content and cloud ecosystem will attract a certain consumer demographic to the Kindle Fire, there is still no real competitor to the iPad 2,” Ticonderoga analyst Brian White said in a note to clients today. “Essentially, we believe the Kindle Fire addresses a different market than the iPad 2, a tablet-light user on a tight budget that may not have yet purchased a tablet or already use a Kindle. … It’s hardly an iPad killer.”

Nor does Amazon intend it to be one. As CEO Jeff Bezos said in a message to customers Wednesday, there are two approaches to the tablet market, and both can work. Apple has chosen one (feature-rich, powerful, high-end hardware tightly integrated with a formidable content ecosystem) and Amazon the other: (spartan, feature-limited hardware tightly integrated with a formidable content ecosystem).

With the launch of the Fire, Amazon has a good chance at splitting the tablet market in two and dominating its lower end. Folks in the market for a $500 tablet will likely still look to the iPad. But if that price is too dear, $200 for the Fire is a compelling proposition.

And that’s ugly news for other tablet makers, because at $199, Amazon has really just ruined their pricing.

With rushed-to-market hardware, comparatively weak app ecosystems and mediocre content offerings, what will companies like Research In Motion, Samsung and Motorola do now? Come Nov. 15, there will be two tablets on the market — one at the high end, the other low — and they won’t be able to compete with either of them.

It will cost $199, compared to the iPad, which starts at $499.

Initially, it appears the Kindle Fire will be more of a color version of the Kindle e-reader than a true competitor to the iPad.

The device will have a seven-inch display (three inches shy of the iPad), and will run Google’s Android software, but it won’t have an embedded camera or microphone. Additionally, it will come with Wi-Fi, but not 3G. It will start shipping on Nov. 15.

All Things D’s Peter Kafka is in New York covering the proceedings via liveblog.

As rumored previously, the device will come with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime, the Seattle company’s $79 annual membership, which includes free two-day shipping, but also some content, like streaming video.

One other major difference between the Kindle lineup and the iPad is Amazon’s Whispersync, which means all of the user’s data is stored in the cloud, allowing them to read books or watch videos on multiple devices without plugging in a cable and syncing.

Along with the new Kindle Fire, Amazon rolled out a whole new lineup of black-and-white e-readers at bargain basement prices.

In the end — the bitter end, that is — there really is no good time to fire someone.

But the timing of the ouster of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo is one of the more curious things about the corporate mishegas at the Silicon Valley Internet giant of late.

That included drastically moving up the clock on Bartz, which was not part of a plan until recently. In fact, several sources were told only last month by Yahoo board members that evaluation of her status — her contract ended at the beginning of 2013 — would not take place until the end of 2011.

That obviously changed.

And, because it is Yahoo — which never met a crisis situation it could not hopelessly complexify — there are numerous and conflicting accounts about the reasons it was done so quickly and abruptly.

They include the board’s feeling that Bartz had not responded to their requests for a credible strategic plan; worries that she would not ever meet annual performance goals, including improving its stock price; upcoming weak third-quarter numbers, which will continue a troublesome downward trend in Yahoo’s key advertising business; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the need to make a move before it was revealed that another activist investor, this time Third Point’s Daniel Loeb, had decided to target Bartz and the Yahoo board.

One thing is certain: The firing of Bartz was messier than it needed to be, mostly because several sources said she was caught unawares.

“She did not know it was happening, even if she probably should have seen it coming,” said one person familiar with the situation. “And she had no allies at the company to warn her, either.”

Indeed, at the time Bartz was fired over the phone by Chairman Roy Bostock — who had until late this summer been her fervent supporter — she was set to appear at a high-profile Citigroup investor conference in New York.

“It had to happen then, because you can’t put a CEO in front of investors and analysts and then fire her soon after,” said one person close to the situation.

Actually, former Yahoo CEO Terry Semel stepped down only days after appearing at the company’s annual meeting and telling the gathering he was in for the long haul.

The Loeb problem also played a part. According to several sources, while Loeb did not surface until after Bartz’s firing, several directors and Silicon Valley players were aware of his plans to target Yahoo.

While Loeb was not the more heavyweight threat that activist investor Carl Icahn had been in the past, sources said he was planning to call for Bartz’s firing, as well as a board re-do.

The large part of the reason for letting her go finally, of course, centered on not meeting performance goals set by the board.

While the overhaul of a hairball of systems and a rejiggering of staff was quickly done by the longtime and experienced manager, the turnaround and renewed product innovation promised by Bartz was slow in coming.

In addition, advertising sales results had worsened and recent quarterly reports showed little progress.

To remedy the situation, directors had asked Bartz to present a strategic plan earlier this year, which she did with the help of top execs. It further underscored the idea of Yahoo as a top-level digital media company.

But the board pressed for more details and felt Bartz was not the right exec to carry out the kind of dramatic renewal of Yahoo that is needed.

Looming, too, was the third-quarter earnings results on October 18, which sources said will show continued weakness at Yahoo.

For that, it’s likely the fired Bartz will get the blame, giving the board — which is also being criticized by large shareholders and others — a bit of breathing room as it figures out what to do next.

In other words, with no good news to report, the Yahoo board decided to deliver some bad news to Bartz.

(In related news, according to an 8-K filing by the company, interim Yahoo CEO and also CFO Tim Morse got a small bump in base salary from $600,000 to $750,000, effective September 15, 2011.)

And here is a video I did on WSJ.com’s Digits show yesterday about the buyer interest in Yahoo I previously wrote about, as well as its weak board:

According to a report initially posted on Gawker Media’s Valleywag site, the telecom giant had a flaw that allowed a group of computer experts to expose the email addresses and identity numbers of 114,000 owners of the popular tablet device.

Including mine.

That would be my personal one from Comcast (CMCSA), which you can see here in an obscured list of others–including some prominent officials in government.

AT&T (T) had my email because it was used to sign up for mobile service for the Apple (AAPL) iPad’s 3G version, automatically appearing during registration.

Now the Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the AT&T breach, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal, in what seems to be an early probe.

Oooh, the Feds are involved now.

I wish I could say it will make a difference. Because it won’t.

In fact, coming on the heels of privacy controversies at Facebook and Google (GOOG), it’s just another log on the digital fire that has been burning up privacy for a very long time now.

And now more than ever, it is part of a massive confluence of trends, including:

Consumers more interested than ever in sharing information about themselves in order to make ever better social networking connections online; a plethora of innovative devices–mostly mobile–and Internet tools available to seamlessly and easily allow those consumers to do so; and, perhaps most of all, Internet companies intent on hoovering up as much information as possible, in order to garner more consumers and sell it to advertisers.

In large part, this is all well and good, creating a range of valuable and entertaining services at little or no cost and making the computing experience more personal and relevant.

Because of that, I have to admit I was less tweaked than I thought I would be, although I wish I were not.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose email was also compromised, expressed the feeling best.

“It shouldn’t be pretty hard to figure out my email address,” he was quoted saying in the Journal article. “To me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

That’s because all of us are thinking less that such information is private or will remain that way for long.

See this handy illustration, below, from the Journal, about how the iPads were hacked so easily and you get the picture quickly.

And, indeed, I am one of those who puts a great deal of information about myself out there for many to see, from my email on Facebook to my locations on Foursquare to my thoughts on Twitter to photos and videos everywhere.

That said, like others, I have also begun to rethink some of this, recently removing my phone number and other personal information from Facebook and other places where I had stashed them in plain sight, making them harder to find.

Of course, I also know that retrieving much of my personal information is now a lost cause, like trying to unmix cream poured into coffee.

Still, companies, especially those entrusted with this information, should not be quite so sanguine as consumers have become.

I still haven’t heard from AT&T, for example, which is somewhat irksome since the company has known about the issue for days now.

And as each of these incidents occurs, you get the feeling of execs either too obtuse or thoughtless or, yes, cynical to make this a priority.

They should, since the avalanche of information being made available will only increase, with possibly dire circumstances if not handled well.

Hollywood actress Joan Crawford had it right in a famous quote: “Love is a fire. But whether it is going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell.”

Substitute “Digital living” for love and it’s the very same message.

One of the great things about the Internet is the immediacy in getting relevant information, especially via video.

Such has been the case with the fires that have been raging around Los Angeles of late, riveting images of which have proliferated around the Web, posted by professionals and amateurs alike.

Having just spent a week in the area, BoomTown can attest to the surrealness of driving around the city with scary fires clearly visible on the hills nearby. While the fires are now starting to come under control, the videos of them are still burning hot.

To get a taste of it, check out this amazing real-time video of one of the fires, taken last week and posted on YouTube–it is a time-lapse format, which a lot of people are doing:

So says Barclays Capital analyst Anthony DiClemente, who probably isn’t going out on a limb here. Yesterday’s cuts from Viacom (VIA) and GE’s (GE) NBC–850 and 500 jobs, respectively–are actually “small in aggregate,” he argues. So who’s next?

Pretty much anyone that hasn’t made significant cuts will have to do so soon, DiClemente says. He singles out Disney (DIS), and specifically “its underperforming divisions, including the ABC Network” as a logical candidate. But DiClemente doesn’t get any more specific about the number of people he thinks Disney will or should fire, other than noting it has a lot of workers (see Barclays chart below; click to enlarge). I’ve asked him for additional color and have asked Disney for comment, as well; not holding my breath, though.

After being plugged in for somewhere between 5 to 10 minutes I heard a sizzling sound. I looked down on the iPod just in time to see it explode open and start shooting sparks and spewing smoke. I managed to unhook the iPod from my computer’s USB port immediately. I noticed that a small fire had started on the table I had the laptop and the iPod sitting on, and I managed to extinguish those flames quickly before any apparent damage could be done to my laptop. Unlike in other cases, I’ve read about, my iPod continued to spew smoke and spit sparks while throwing out some kind of sooty substance from the inside of the iPod for several minutes after removing the cable from the computer.”

– A Consumerist reader recounts his experiences with Apple’s iPod Flamo

What an ugly week for Apple. Voice and data reception issues plaguing iPhone 3G, MobileMe still not up to company standards and now reports of sparking iPod Nanos. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) is investigating a possible battery defect in Apple’s older iPod Nano music players after receiving reports of minor fires caused by overheating devices. “There have been multiple cases of overheating and fire damage, in particular during recharging, so please use caution,” METI said in a statement on its Web site.

METI is working with Apple Japan to diagnose the problem, which is said to affect only Nanos sold in Japan between Sept. 2005 and Sept. 2006, although there have been reports of similar incidents in the states.

Another tough break for Apple (AAPL), which just can’t seem to shake this negative news cycle.

UPDATE: Apple just issued the following statement:

Apple today responded to statements reported by Japan’s METI regarding batteries in the first-generation iPod nanos. Apple has determined that in very rare cases, batteries in first-generation iPod nanos sold between Sept. 2005 and Dec. 2006 can overheat, causing failure and deformation of the iPod nano. Apple has received very few reports of such incidents (less than 0.001 percent of first-generation iPod nano units), which have been traced back to a single battery supplier. There have been no reports of serious injuries or property damage, and no reports of incidents for any other iPod nano model.

Any first-generation iPod nano customers who have experienced their battery overheating should contact AppleCare for a replacement. Any other customers who have concerns about their first-generation iPod nano battery should also contact AppleCare.