fpgeek

You're getting more than two years of updates. There's another year of security updates, plus at least two years (probably more given historical trends) of system-level app updates ( Google Play Services, Chrome, WebView, Play Store, ...) that only come via OS updates on iOS. Not to mention Google providing compatibility libraries so that third-party apps are significantly less likely to leave you behind.

> Did Tokyo's decision to allow high density housing solve their 'housing is too expensive in Tokyo' problem?

http://www.vox.com/2016/8/8/12390048/san-francisco-housing-c...

Why yes, it did. Take a look at the graph in that article. Housing in Tokyo is still expensive, but it didn't get even more expensive the way other cities did, like San Francisco. That may not be perfect, but it is a clear win.

> I mean, it's a Bay wide problem, why can't all the building be done right outside Palo Alto?

I mean, climate change is a worldwide problem, why can't all the cutting of greenhouse gas emissions be done outside the US?

I just tried this in a private window.

Yes, "google" is a suggested search when you type "hoogle", but that seems only fair. After all, G and H are next to each other on a QWERTY keyboard. I'm sure a typo for google swamps deliberate searches for hoogle (maybe even for me, but then I have a custom search keyword). They're also suggesting other Google services you might want (Translate, Maps and Drive, when I tried), not just the one you're already using.

More generally, I don't see how overly generic suggestions amount to dumbing-down Google Search. If I actually persist and search for "hoogle" (which I had to do anyway in the days before search suggestions) I get the Haskell results I want, even without any connection to my Google account.

iOS and Windows Phone devices may be limited to a single package provider, but Android devices are not. I've had more than one store on my Android phones and tablets for over five years now. And, yes, I'd love it if there were a standard way to include signing keys for additional stores so that installations were seamless, that's not a significant problem in practice.

Let's run with the Windows analogy for the moment.

Microsoft did make an iOS-like Windows Store with a standardized cut, though they did let developers have control over pricing. And they bundled it with Windows 8, gave Windows Store apps access to new APIs and generally pushed it as hard as they could. It hasn't gone anywhere (at least not so far).

So let's say YouTube has Windows-like market power. Just like Microsoft, they still don't get everything they want. The other side of the table (artists or developers) has market power too - they own the rights to their music or apps. There's nothing stopping them from putting their official presence somewhere else (Facebook, Amazon, Vimeo, ...) and issuing takedowns for everything that shows up on YouTube. That they don't do this is a pretty strong indication that the deal they're getting isn't actually that bad (especially since YouTube's competitors would happily given artists all sorts of incentives to switch to help build their user base).

Thiel suing Gawker has is absolutely related to his Trump support. Trump is the presidential candidate who wants to "open up those libel laws" to make it easier to sue the press. It is certainly notable that one of Trump's prominent supports has pushed the boundaries of existing laws in the service of similar goals.

In the other direction, Thiel's Trump support suggests that his funding of Gawker lawsuits isn't just about Gawker and his history with them (which is how many people defend Thiel's actions, describing Gawker as an unusually bad actor that is reaping what they sowed). Instead, it suggests that the Gawker lawsuits are indicative of his broader attitudes about how the press should behave and what consequences there should be for press that doesn't.

> The decision to support SD cards made a lot of sense back in the days when internal storage was a lot more limited.

And it still makes sense today. See: Android One (and most other handsets targeted at the developing world), manufacturers adding SD cards back after dropping them (most recently Samsung) and so on.

Personally speaking, despite loving my Nexus 7s in the past, I'm no longer interested in tablets without SD card slots. Even if it were good for nothing else, it's easy to fill up a 128 GB or larger SD card with video and music I want on hand.

But that's the amazing part of the story. What happened wasn't in the interest of any of the middlemen involved! They just want to skim off their slice. The last thing they want is any whiff that the ultimate owner might not get their voting rights or might not get the money coming to them. That's the kind of thing that makes people take their business to the other middleman across the street.

The only people who really benefited from this mess were Michael Dell and the others on the other side of the buyout. And they had nothing to do with this clusterfuck.

Isn't that the space Rust is going after? That's certainly whst I find interesting about it.

Well considering that one of his major competitors has claimed 5x higher unit sales on Android vs iOS (and the Andriod price was $1 more at the time) [1], I think you can draw your own conclusions.

[1] See: https://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/

There is an important difference. Google is transparent about what is going on.

When I set up Google Photos I was asked: Do you want to use Google's high quality or do you want to preserve the original photos and have them count against your storage quota?

After that, you should know what you're getting into. I certainly did.

We're not talking about most developed countries, we're talking about the United States.

The Internet, like many other things that are considered basic human rights in other countries, isn't a basic human right here. You can talk about using libraries and publicly-issues to fill the gaps, but, unfortunately, US politicians know how to game those things. They'll manipulate funding for public computers, change library hours and maybe even relocate libraries to gain a small electoral advantages.

And before you say they won't, that's exactly what happens today with polling places, distribution of voting machines and (in states that require photo ID to vote) locations and hours of DMVs (and any other places you can use to get a state-issued photo ID).

Even easier (or as a first step), Amazon could count the pages that were actually displayed, not the ones that were skipped past. I'm pretty surprised they're not doing that already since it would be a good way to account for books of short stories where a reader might skip over some stories naturally.

I really don't understand what Oracle's lawyers are thinking.

Yes, coming up with ever-more-creative theories about why Google owes Oracle might have some tactical advantages, but any victory in court on those terms would be pyrrhic.

It doesn't matter how many billions Google coughs up if the next phone call is IBM demanding the company for using SQL.

Aren't Oracle's lawyers looking past the next move? Are they that confident that their API arguments will lose? Do they really have that much faith in the hairs they're splitting between Google's API reuse and Oracle's?

Or is their advice being colored by all the follow-on legal work there will be because Oracle is going down this path?

Conversely, my 7 year old daughter dramatically prefers her guest account on my touchscreen laptop as opposed to the non-touch Chromebook we had intended for her to use. She just has a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of a screen that doesn't do anything when you touch it.

Sony has its own substantial patent portfolio, which makes a big difference.

That being said, I know from personal experience that many Sony Xperia devices support exFAT, which, to me, doesn't sound like they're showing the middle finger to Microsoft at all.

No, I mean 2010-2013 when agency pricing made shopping across ebookstores a waste of time.

If you're mad about the ebook market concentrating on Amazon, you should be absolutely furious at Apple over agency pricing. That was when ebookstores were launching and competing for attention. Agency pricing blocked a critical dimension of competition when the big wave of new ebookstores was trying to get off the ground.

And even if Apple didn't want to compete with Amazon over price, others did. For instance Google - their Play Books pricing model seems to be "discount whatever we can, wherever we can". Even in these "agency lite" days, they're still a useful price-match reference for the Kindle Store. Or consider Kobo - they had a regular stream of coupons that made them worth checking for a lot of books... until agency pricing clamped down on the books you could apply them to.

Instead, agency pricing more-or-less froze the ebook market starting in 2010 until 2013 or so (when the last publisher defendant settled and started allowing discounting again), entrenching Kindle as the default platform for most readers, crushing smaller companies that wanted to try something different. More over, this has worrying downstream effects - encouraging many independent authors to be Kindle-only and so on.

I'd say it is even worse than that. The years of strict agency pricing trained people to not even bother looking at competing ebookstores, entrenching Amazon's dominance.

> Jobs wanted to launch iBooks right now and was willing to cut corners to get what he wanted.

We should be precise here. Jobs preferred to cut legal corners with respect to the antitrust laws instead of cutting financial corners by directly competing with Amazon on price.

To me, this is exactly the sort of choice the legal system should punish, even if Jobs had been right about the merits of his hypothetical antitrust complaint against Amazon (which he almost certainly wasn't - Amazon has testified that the Kindle store was a sustainable business on its own, i.e. that the headline new bestseller discounts were more than covered by profits on backlist titles). The antitrust laws, like other laws, shouldn't have exceptions for "justified" vigilantes. That way lies chaos.

As I understand it, the core problem is that when Apple price-matches, the 70/30 split between the publisher and Apple doesn't change. If the other retailer (e.g. Amazon) has the freedom to set their prices via the wholesale model, the publisher will start making less money in the iBookstore (and any other "agency MFN" retailers, which eventually included Nook as a willing participant) on any book that retailer chooses to discount, even though the publisher has no control over that price. To avoid this problem, each publisher has to switch all of their retailers to the agency model - giving up the extra money they make when a wholesale retailer charges their customer a discounted price but pays the publisher the full wholesale price in return for greater control over the prices the final customers pay.

Try reading this: http://www.drinkerbiddle.com/files/ftpupload/PORTAL/Kunz_Art...

This is an article the legal reasoning behind why the iBookstore MFN clause was an antitrust violation - it was designed to impose financial penalties on publishers that did not get all of their retailers to switch to an agency pricing model.

This is similar to an earlier case about Toys 'R Us. They got a group of toy manufacturers to agree to restrict their toy sales to warehouse clubs, so long all the manufactures in the group agreed to do so.

I used to feel like that - that Justice Scalia was an thoughtful, intellectually honest justice that I profoundly disagreed with simply because I found his foundational principles alien and wrong.

Then came Eldred v. Ashcroft. Larry Lessig, argued the case before the Supreme Court. In his retrospective on the case [1], Lessig describes how he built his argument on the Lopez/Morrison line of decisions which said that Congress's enumerated powers had to be interpeted so that they are structurally limited. In Lopez/Morrison, Scalia agreed with the argument that Congress can't regulate whatever they want simply by declaring it to be related to interstate commerce. Lessig's argument in Eldred was that a similar structural limit should apply to the copyright power: Congress shouldn't be able to establish effectively unlimited copyright "on the installment plan".

I want to be clear what I am claiming here. I'm not saying Scalia was intellectually dishonest because Lessig lost. I'm claiming it because (as described in the retrospective) the Court didn't even address his core argument. Even if Ginsburg didn't want to include it in her majority opinion (perhaps because she didn't agree with the Lopez/Morrison decisions), Scalia could have explained why Eldred was different in a concurrence, but he didn't. That's where I see the intellectual dishonesty.

[1] http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/March-April-2004/story_le...

They thought everyone would go nuts over the guy with the mask. They didn't understand that the mask was only a small part of what made Darth Vader such an amazing character.

I don't think it's about the market value of Google search in isolation (which is large and positive). Instead, it's about two things:

1. The power of browser defaults puts browser vendors in a strong position to demand a cut from third parties that make money from being a default.

2. Yahoo and Bing (plus some regional options) are realistic alternative bidders for this preferred placement. That dramatically tilts the bargaining power towards the browser vendor. With an alternative, however, a browser vendor still makes some money if negotiations with Google break down. Beyond that, a realistic alternative means Google loses more. Assuming negotiations broke down, more users would end up searching at Google if there were no search engine default than would if there were an alternative one.

To build on the cable analogy, suppose sports leagues were required by law to license their broadcasts (with the same terms) to any cable channel that wanted them. In that case, it wouldn't be hard for someone to put together ZSPN and bid away ESPN's carriage fees. ESPN doesn't just get those fees because they have valuable content - they can demand those fees because they have control over that content.

You're not looking at the whole board. There are other companies that make money off of Android. Qualcomm, for instance.

They've made money off of Android by being the dominant SoC provider in the Android ecosystem (could've gone another way in a hypothetical Android-free world) and because Android pushed the smartphone market to grow faster than the alternatives (Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc) would have.

If you'd love a 15 minute refund window, I wonder how you feel about the current Google Play refund window (2 hours).

See: http://www.androidcentral.com/google-play-support-page-confi...

I don't know enough to have an opinion on whether or not Karen Sandler would be a good or bad community representative for the Linux Foundation.

That being said, if the problem is that she would be a bad representative, the appropriate solution is for someone better to run against her and win the election. Eliminating the position suggests that the Linux Foundation doesn't trust the community to pick the "right" representative... and that says a lot about the situation.

WiFi not working at all is a different matter, but not working with a specific wireless card is a quirk.

Mini PCI Express is a standard (as was Mini PCI before it). Swapping out a laptop wireless card you don't like isn't that hard. I've done it several times (to get dual band support, for better Linux drivers, etc).

Spending around $100 (including installation if you don't want to do it yourself) may be annoying, but it shouldn't be a deal breaker.