fpgeek

But WINE isn't designed to be interoperable with Windows. I'm not even sure what that means. Outside of some special cases, it's not like you can get something useful (or even functional) by arbitrarily mixing and matching Windows and WINE components.

Instead, for the APIs it supports, WINE was designed to interoperate with Windows programs (binary and source) in same kind of way the Android Java environment interoperates with Java programs (again both binary and source) for the APIs it supports. There are some minor differences (e.g. WINE works with binary applications directly, Android requires that Java bytecode be compiled to Dex bytecode, etc.) but the overall structure is the same.

Sure, Android only supports few Java APIs and WINE supports tons of Windows APIs, but that's the distinction fair use hangs on, how does any re-implementation of a proprietary API ever get off the ground (legally anyway)?

I suspect the distinction is that the cryptography for encrypting and signing apps is done by Apple (and they've done all the paperwork for themselves).

> On one hand, you have a population that believes that no one should be left to die if they show up at a hospital (probably due to their religion and whatnot).

Or out of simple self-interest. Having health insurance doesn't guarantee you'll always show up at an ER capable of demonstrating to the hospital's satisfaction that you are insured, with the necessary documentation (e.g. after a car accident or a mugging).

There's nothing that prevents companies from selling insurance along state lines - as long as they comply with the insurance regulations of every state they want to sell in.

See: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/meme-busting-sel...

"Selling insurance across state lines" is a misleading way of saying that companies should be allowed to sell in a state without complying with that state's regulations, just the regulations of their home state. Given the example of how this played out in other markets (e.g. credit cards), a more accurate summary would be "remove state-level insurance regulation".

My understanding is that the real leash is the H1B to green card process. The process is slow and complicated and switching companies often requires you to start over (not to mention opening doors for other problems).

As you might guess, I don't agree that Firefox breaks intents.

If you're outside the browser, intent resolution proceeds normally. What changes is that if you're in Firefox you need to take an affirmative step to raise the intent instead of going to the web page. To me, that's the sensible default.

Otherwise you end up with nonsense like the following:

1. Clicking on an intent-matching link (e.g. Play Store, Google+, Twitter)

2. Being kicked to the intent-handling app

3. The app deciding not to handle the link (it's some sort of corner case)

4. Being kicked to whatever browser the app picks (often not the one you started with)

Back when devices were sold on the Play Store (not the Google Store), I lost track of the number of times I did this dance when I just wanted to look up something about a Nexus device. The problem was the Play Store app, unsurprisingly, didn't know anything about devices even though it matched Play Store device URLs.

Yes, Firefox on Android is awesome. My favorite features:

1. The best options for delegating from websites to installed apps I've seen (via the long-press menu or by touching the Android when it appears in the URL bar).

2. Extensions. For me, browsing is practically uncivilized without Self-Destructing Cookies and there are lots of other useful ones.

3. The new "Open later" feature, where Firefox collects the URLs you click on, but doesn't load them until you switch to it. Among other things, it is a great way to collect links to look at from the Google Search app.

My only real annoyance with it are the occasional sites that make broken mobile browser assumptions so I end up spoofing Android Chrome or Mobile Safari. At least there's Phony, so the spoofing is pretty easy.

That would be foolish.

Firefox is the only major browser not controlled by one of Google's major competitors. Even without a deal for the search engine default, there are all sorts of reasons that is valuable to Google (collaboration on web standards, an insurance policy for browser design mistakes, not all Firefox users would switch to Chrome and so on).

It's not just the charger wire. I have a clear example of Apple prioritizing form over function in the charger itself:

In 2011, my wife and I bought new laptops (a MacBook Pro and a ThinkPad) around the same time - based on the same Intel chipset and with similar CPUs (might have been one speed tier apart). The setup was power-hungry, so my ThinkPad came with a proverbial charging brick - big and bulky, but it kept the laptop fed no matter what. Her MacBook came with a standard Mac charger (much smaller and lighter). But if she used her laptop when plugged in, it didn't charge much (if at all). And if she did something particularly demanding, the battery could even drain (fortunately, she didn't do that too frequently).

This seemed odd and I remember coming across an explanation online (while researching something else): It was just physics. My ThinkPad charger was something like twice as powerful as her MacBook charger, but they were both feeding roughly similar internals. Given that Lenovo concluded my ThinkPad needed the more powerful charger, it's not at all surprising her weaker MacBook charger couldn't keep up with her laptop.

On any list of functional requirements for a charger, I'd say "not letting the battery drain while plugged in" has to be pretty high on the list, so...

Why do I feel like the next line probably is:

Client: "Oh, no. We can't do that. That would violate policies ABC, XYZ and 123. Team FOO would never sign off and ...".

To be fair, when it happened, Debian rebranding Firefox as Iceweasel was an unhappy decision at the end of an acrimonious discussion. It's only with the passage of time (and by comparison to Canonical's obfuscation) that it looks like a clear and appropriate resolution to a trademark issue.

> Android security lags behind, because Google doesn't want to force OEMs and providers to provide updates.

What do OEM updates have to do with a security hole in Chrome? Despite all the merger chatter, Chrome isn't an OS-level part Android the way it is with ChromeOS.

The exploit sounds serious, but once the Chrome team understands it and comes up with a fix, all Google needs to do to deploy it is publish a new version of Chrome on the Play Store. I suppose they could add a nudge or two via Play Services (or otherwise) if people aren't installing the new version, but, in any case, that's nowhere near the effort required to get an OS update out (and neither OEMs nor carriers can block the fix).

> Isn't that how most every exploit and virus seen on Android work?

Actually, no. Stagefright was about exploiting holes in the parsing of malformed media files (no installation required). Tons of other vulnerabilities were of the form "thing that shouldn't be accessible via JavaScript in the browser/WebView is".

Not that there isn't malware that spreads via installation, but Google's "Verify Apps" service (for sideloaded apps) has been quite effective:

http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2015/04/android-sec...

> Too bad the TPP didn't include EU countries (I know), maybe there would have been ONE benefit.

You think the TPP including the EU would have led to better privacy protections? To it seems obvious that the point of addressing privacy in the TPP would have been watering down the EU's existing protections, not trying to increase the privacy protections available anywhere else.

As does Google. Or has "fastboot boot" stopped working on Nexus (and many other bootloader-unlocked) devices?

ALWAYS?

I wouldn't be so sure about that: http://daringfireball.net/2008/11/google_mobile_uses_private...

Yes, the theoretical availability of public defenders satisfies the literal text of the amendment. That being said, effectively banning most private counsel (except those working for free or possibly on contingency) and, in practice, forcing most defendants to rely on a government-employed counsel means locking up the spirit and throwing away the key.

Full programmer control and preventing bugs, security holes and so on are not fundamentally opposed. It's not like most programmers go to work trying to make sure their software has a certain number of buffer overflows in it. It just turns out that preventing that in C is really, really hard.

To take the car analogy further, whether your car is manual or automatic, seat belts and airbags are valuable. Neither of them compromises a driver's full control of their car.

Yes and no. From a customer perspective, I'm sure declining quality did them in. But that declining quality didn't happen in a vacuum.

From what I remember, Dell did a much better job of managing supply chain costs than Gateway did. I suspect that the declining quality was Gateway cutting corners to remain price-competitive with them. It's quite possible Gateway could have maintained quality at higher prices, but that would have just been a different way to die (and quite possibly a faster one - declining quality takes more time to recognize than higher prices, plus Apple's resurgence would have complicated any plan to go after the high end). Either way, pressure from Dell is what backed Gateway into that corner in the first place, so it is entirely reasonable to attribute Gateway's problems to them.

The closest you get to a good, small Android is Sony's Xperia Z(1,3,5) Compact series. They're about 1 cm shorter than an iPhone 6/6S mainly because they don't have the home button, but that's still about 0.5 cm taller and 1 cm wider than a 4" iPhone.

By that standard, Amazon should be able to do pretty much what they please too, but we know they can't (see: in-app Kindle store / link to web store, etc.).

Considering how frequently and heavily Apple pushes developers for other updates (e.g. new iOS version support, 64-bit support, etc.) I'd be shocked if future support were any consideration in the rejection. I'd expect Apple to be perfectly happy to deprecate and/or replace an API, allow changes in undefined behavior in future models and so on. If the app breaks, so be it.

If weight on the screen often breaks the force touch sensors without breaking the screen, that's an ugly UI problem. Even with a low "force touch / no screen" accident rate (< 1%), there could easily be tens or hundreds of thousands of users walking around with broken force touch sensors that have no idea their phone has a problem - because there's no visible signal that anything's wrong. They'll just think force touch is broken and/or unreliable. That's no way to promote the adoption of a new feature.

Image recognition is improving all the time. Don't give them any ideas...

> Pay content creators who don't participate and are on monetised accounts as if the Red views had been seeing adverts, show adverts to everyone else.

Doesn't Google's ability to do that depend on the details of the old agreement? Does anyone know those details?

I could imagine an agreement along the following lines:

1. YouTube will show ads on all of creator's videos.

2. YouTube will pay creator based on some formula (in terms of ad revenue, plays, etc.).

Nothing in that would let YouTube (a) not show ads on the creator's videos or (b) pay the creator based on the hypothetical revenue the ad they didn't show would have earned. YouTube could try to get content owners to sign onto a new agreement that included that, but, um...

Well, sure, you could not roll out a new revenue model that millions of users are interested in because of some holdout content creators [1], but, um, somehow I don't think that's how that meeting would go...

[1] This comment claims that YouTube said over 98% of content watched is signed up ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10429470 ).

Since running YouTube isn't cheap and Google isn't a charity, that seems practically equivalent to shutting down YouTube altogether (after some reasonable notice period).

In that future, even an EU company may not be enough if that company does business in the US (or, in the most extreme case, accepts and/or makes a significant amount of USD payments). The US government can coerce them too (and in some cases already does today e.g. sanctions and FATCA).

While I applaud the spirit, I don't think actually implementing it like GateKeeper is a good idea:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/09/drop-dead-simple-exp...

Exactly. The point of the page is to pique your interest, ideally to the point where you decide to sign up for email updates. In many ways, giving more concrete information works against that goal, so the page doesn't do that.