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...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....

To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.

In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.

Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.

Facebook has become a giant in web advertising. Their revenue was estimated at $3.8 billion in 2011 (slightly lower than their own prediction of $4b), and to reach $7b next year (2013). Similar numbers have been reported many places, but one source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1008598

Total online ad market is at $31b, so Facebook has 12% market share of the global online ad market. source: http://www.iab.net/insights_research/industry_data_and_landscape/1675/1816825 . Their market share of users and time is even higher than that - 16% -- source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-destroying-google-in-time-spent-online-chart/4183

U.S.A. demands back doors in Cisco and other routers for law enforcement.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/router-backdoors-hacked-by-chinese-part-2/926

McAfee does more than that, it just makes Intel's own computers stop working.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/defective-mcafee-update-causes-worldwide-meltdown-of-xp-pcs/2003

It's nice that you seem to think projects will get accomplished by someone with an H1-B if no one else is available. Maybe that is part of the reason 68% of IT projects fail.

I am not solely blaming H1-B for project failures, but considering what I've seen from the mass of H1-Bs that my organization has on, it certainly doesn't surprise me.

People can talk all they want about how H1-B helps companies, but in reality, that help is in extremely narrow and highly technical areas. For the vast majority of cases, there are plenty of unemployed people in this country who can do the work but the company is unwilling to pay them what they should get or train them to get them up to speed. Or both.

If Apple diverted half of the millions they spend on lawyers towards R&D, they would easily have several times the amount any of the competitors in their field has. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-r-d-spending-hits-bottom-as-percentage-of-revenue/60872

You sir, are a moron.

You probably well know (since it was an earlier slashdot story that slammed Apple) that Apple spent $100 Million dollars suing android
folks of course even that amount is probably high since the article is attributed to rumor promoted by Dan Lyons whose has about
a 0% track record of being correct about anything apple). You calim they should spend 1/2 of that which would be $50 million. And that
is over probably a couple of years of lawsuits.

The article you linked to, has a misleading headline because it is talking about a ration, where one of the values is growing
ridiculously fast, so the ratio gets smaller. So try real hard to think past knee jerk hatin' and realize that the very article
you linked to said the spent 1.78 *BILLION* dollars in 9 months. I bet that's a hell of a lot more than most of the others,
and certainly does a hell of more with the results.

I think this is a bit hyperbolic. First of all, if Apple does any R&D, I'm fully unaware of it. Even Microsoft research has produced some useful work (untrustworthy as they are) and some interesting technologies, and that's not even getting close to some of the stuff that Google's working on. If Apple diverted half of the millions they spend on lawyers towards R&D, they would easily have several times the amount any of the competitors in their field has. Source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apples-r-d-spending-hits-bottom-as-percentage-of-revenue/60872

And second, a company does not need to make $50 billion to provide substance. Samsung, Motorola, HTC have made some outstanding pieces of hardware - example: nothing I've seen comes close to beating Samsung's sAMOLED+ screen. Another example: Apple was far late to the game in providing dual-core processors in their phones. One could even say that their excessive development time holds them back, and I don't care what the sales figures are, but if the only innovation you can produce in all the time it took to create the 4S is a program that sends your voice to an AI from a company they bought out, I have to say that all that money in their coffers may as well not exist.

ZDNet article about Apple's iBook Author EULA: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360

They go into Apple's ridiculously oversized war chest, and toward R&D that ends up generating more exploitative profit centers.

Apple's R&D spending as a percent of revenue is actually close to the bottom in the industry. Relative to other tech companies, very little of their revenue and profit is going to R&D.

Any money that stockholders make comes from selling their stock, which means it comes from the next sucker to buy it, NOT the money that Apple is pulling in from sales.

I should point out that Google is the same - no dividends. They're what a friend of mine calls baseball card stocks. They have no intrinsic value, their only worth is how much you can sell them to someone else. Something to keep in mind if you're thinking of investing in AAPL or GOOG. Generally the return on a stock is considered to be its price appreciation + dividend, so a mediocre stock which pays a good dividend can beat out those two from an investment perspective.

Foxxconn case is extreme as I suspect lockins, abuse, and other reasons for an employer who calls them animals but you are entitled to jack shit.

The world was here first and it owes you nothing.

I have been unemployed for 10 months. I lost my car, wife, home, all my posessions except a computer and a few pieces of clothes. It has been devestating and a real eye opener and is something I would not wish upon my worst enemy. I just got hired this week! I love WORK NOW. I love working extra hours off the clock. I love going overboard and 150% just to prove I can keep my job. I love being underpaid 30% as it beats McDonalds right? I love coming home to my parents house at my late age knowing I did not need to bash myself for my lot in life anymore and soon can move back out again as I work to build myself back up.

Westerners are spoiled and need to appreciate what they have. I used to have the sick feeling in my stomach Sunday night, stare at the clock all day at work, bitch and whine how life was so unfair before. But I am no better than the person at McDonalds or Foxconn and neither are you AngryDuece. Be thankful you work because I would LOVE to take your job away and work 12 hours a day because frankly the next geek at BestBuy who makes $17,000 a year and wants a real white collar job again like he had pre-2008 will also do the same etc. I am not being a dick, but just am desperate and want a better life.

You can't tell all 20 million of us working these crappy jobs to stand up and feel entitled and make a middle class salary. Lol. This is not going to happen.

Until there are more jobs than applicants your salary is worth less and you need to be thankfull take it in and be willing to work longer hours for free or your boss can find someone else who will. I would never do the things I did this week but after being laid off fired and having to work shit jobs and last being unemployed it changed me like it did our grandparents in the great depression.

You can't change the system so adjust and get a skill or invent something no one else can do or few can and you will be rich and you can have your own people working off the clock lining your pockets and you can enjoy the same lifestyle your parents had.

1. Are they allowed to leave?
2. Are they beatened or threatened?
3. Are they locked in or in debt/servitude?

If the answer is yes to any one of these, this is no free market and is a slavery and Apple executives need to be arrested and held accountantble! Especially for an abusive employer who calls their own workers animals.

The average wage for factory work in China is $1.30/hr. Foxxconn pays $.33? Hmm something is not right. I read an article last year that these factories have to hire Vietnamese immigrants for any work near $1/hr as the workers refuse to put up with backbreaking work without more justification.

Also workers at Foxconn must remain silent at all times and are not allowed to talk in the 8-10 room dorms. Is it because of unions or because they might find out Lui got a job that paid $1.25 an hour down the street?

In a free market economy the workers have rights to tell the employer to fuck off and quit and work a better job for more money and I wonder why these workers do not do this? My guess is they can't and are beaten or locked in. $.33 an hour plus charging rent for a place where you still are working but being paid (if they have the power to tell you what to do) does not make sense in modern China. I smell a rat.

That makes Apple's US workers more productive than Foxconn's Chinese laborers. I think you may be conflating productivity and employment. Apple's model (of doing the design and marketing themselves, and farming out the manufacturing to lower-margin contractors) just doesn't require that many workers, leading to low unemployment in Shenzhen and high unemployment in Detroit (and the US manufacturing sector in general).

Whether we could duplicate the manufacturing supply chain in the US is another matter, even if we could convince US workers to work (and live) under conditions like those at Foxconn. (Foxconn chairman compares his workforce to ‘animals’ .)

Take these little gems as evidence of a real, vicious problem in geek culture:

"It’s by far the worst coding-related experience I ever went through. That made me retire from Open Source." http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/when-software-offends-the-pantyshot-package-controversy/509

“I was trying not to, but it needed to be said.” http://skepchick.org/2011/12/reddit-makes-me-hate-atheists/

"c'mon. you're not a girl if u don't show us pics." http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_17/109-OMG-Girlz-Dont-Exist-on-teh-Intarweb-1

If you don't want to turn off then setup the access point to NOT broadcast the SSID (network name).

Don't.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/the-six-dumbest-ways-to-secure-a-wireless-lan/43 "SSID hiding: There is no such thing as "SSID hiding". You're only hiding SSID beaconing on the Access Point. There are 4 other mechanisms that also broadcast the SSID over the 2.4 or 5 GHz spectrum. The 4 mechanisms are; probe requests, probe responses, association requests, and re-association requests. Essentially, youre talking about hiding 1 of 5 SSID broadcast mechanisms. Nothing is hidden and all youve achieved is cause problems for Wi-Fi roaming when a client jumps from AP to AP. "

And this, boys and girls, is how we end up with Windows 7/64 guzzling two gigs of memory after start-up.

RAM is there to be used, not hoarded.

In short, Windows 7 (unlike XP and earlier Windows versions) goes by the philosophy that empty RAM is wasted RAM and tries to keep it as full as possible, without impacting performance.

Windows 7 memory usage: What's the best way to measure? [Feb 25, 2010]

I am not a Microsoft fan, but Windows 7 is actually a very well-written OS, in my experience. If you have lots of RAM then it uses it, there's no sense in having 8GB of RAM if it's only using 250MB and paging the rest of what it needs.

As a point of reference, have a look at this article. If you only have 512MB of RAM then Win7/64 will only use about 200MB of RAM.

Unemployment is high right now, not because companies can't find good people, but because companies are afraid to take on the responsibility (and liability) of expanding and hiring until they absolutely have to, due to a messed up political and financial environment.

IT unemployment is low! (I've heard ~2% more recently)

However, despite the huge variety of android tablets on the market, none of them have really been all that successful in gaining market share.

Google has enormous resources, and yet hasn't succeeded in gaining significant market share in tablets in competition with Apple; Microsoft is gearing up to make a play in that market. Microsoft has enormous resources, and hasn't succeeded in gaining significant market share in smartphones, in competition with Apple and Google.

As far as I know, Canonical has a tiny staff, little in the way of resources, no revenue model that's proven to work, and relies upon the contributions of its user community. This last is important, and is as it should be for FOSS. The trouble is, Canonical has been risking the loss of its user community by pushing major changes to the default user interface, apparently in an effort to move to a unified user experience across desktops, mobile devices, and entertainment devices. Personally, I like the Unity interface, but I'm unhappy with the way Canonical has ignored criticism of it.

So tiny Canonical is going to make a play in markets that are hotly contested by some of the wealthiest, most powerful, and most ambitious corporations in the world, and in so doing, is apparently sacrificing its greatest strength. All in all, this seems like a suicidal move, and a sorry end to a promising effort at popularizing Linux.

I'm going to take the plunge this summer when I can safely back up all my data and take a few days to play with it...

So you have yet to even use Ubuntu on the desktop, yet you can confidently declare it "has no chance of being a serious player". That conclusion is premature at best. Never mind that you have no idea what their tablet implementation will ultimately look/feel like.

Apple is firmly established as the tablet giant right now, there is no doubt about that. However, despite the huge variety of android tablets on the market, none of them have really been all that successful in gaining market share. I think Silber is probably right that there is room for a new player, and if they can enter the market soon with a good product, they might have a chance. I wish them luck!

Android phones originally looked like this [imgur.com].

Ah, it wouldn't be Slashdot without sly misdirection and deceptive practices.

There are TWO Android prototypes, one the image you've liked to, the other a (still ugly) candybar touchscreen device. Anyone who's used the emulator in the SDK will be familiar with the touchscreen version http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/android-emulator.jpg.

Wow, there actually was an Android touchscreen emulator less than a year after the iPhone was announced? And that the actual prototypes that were shown later all lacked the touchscreen is actually a fluke?

What was that again about sly misdirection and deceptive practices again?

Android phones originally looked like this [imgur.com].

Ah, it wouldn't be Slashdot without sly misdirection and deceptive practices.

There are TWO Android prototypes, one the image you've liked to, the other a (still ugly) candybar touchscreen device. Anyone who's used the emulator in the SDK will be familiar with the touchscreen version http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/android-emulator.jpg.

And since I've seen postings where this has been pointed out to you before, I can only conclude you're deliberately lying to mislead anyone who reads your posts. Most likely to persuade people to believe Google didn't plan on touchscreens from the start.

What's your motivation for this? Can you explain why it's so important for you to repeatedly lie in a public forum?

This has been debunked over, and over, and over again.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-desktop-apps-will-run-on-windows-8-on-arm/10756

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/service-oriented/java-tops-list-of-software-skills-in-demand-
employer-survey/8326 says Java tops list of software skills. Maybe not for long?

Try this, not a dump but some more info http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have-rim-nokia-apple-provided-indian-military-with-backdoor-access-to-cellular-comm/838

That's not more info, it's just the "Indian blogger from ZDNet" referred to, and linked to, by the posting. The original documents are under the "posted on the Net" link in the posting.

Try this, not a dump but some more info http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/have-rim-nokia-apple-provided-indian-military-with-backdoor-access-to-cellular-comm/838

I think we've arrived at something like agreement on the DBMS point. FYI SQL query optimizers are very different from JIT compilers. The basic reason is the 3-6 orders of magnitude difference between the speed of the CPU and that of the I/O. Index creation is too expensive and slow to be done dynamically to answer queries.

I agree that for all its faults COBOL makes screen handling easy. I don't remember the syntax anymore, but it's stupifyingly easy to read/write the fields by name on a form. I've never seen anything so, um, simple in GUI programming or web programming. And I wish the folks who developed HTTP/HTML had heard of a Communication Area and pseudo-converstational connections.

You actually can't do in COBOL everything you can do in C because it lacks explicit pointers. Without pointers you can't reference arbitrary locations in memory. That's why the only CICS system I ever designed had an assembler module for the non-standard stuff.

As for ditching TCP/IP, while I don't doubt Infiniband has its place, your reasoning has a few problems.

1. Security-through-obscurity is thoroughly discredited. At least, Whitfield Diffie thinks so. David Wheeler's book is online and not a bad place to start if you want to update yourself on security.
2. If you think "most IP stacks today are about 99.9995% secure" and you (implicitly) agree with my argument that bug counts decrease as code is used, why do you think your infiniband stack will be better?
3. Using IP doesn't automatically mean the webserver is connected to "the network". That's a design descision. Nothing prevents segregating the networks.

Widely used, well tested software such as your IP stack is bound to be more secure than whatever you would replace it with, despite the fact that the attacker knows what you're using and may even have the source code to it.

If they hacked the security on the web server through IP, they can very likely find a way to hack the security of the database server using a similar exploit.

That's a big if. I don't know what "99.9995% secure" means (what the denominator?) but I don't believe there's ever been an exploit via the TCP stack. It's one of those highly improbable events that, if it ever did happen, would suddenly subject millions of machines to attack. Your database server would be the least of your worries.

Nearly infinitely more likely, I'm sure you agree, is something much more pedestrian: social engineering, MD5 leaks, etc. Whatever it is, it doesn't follow that the same vehicle will exist on the DBMS host, nor should it.

Finally, since we're both fans of simplicity in programming, I leave you with this:

There are two methods in software design. One is to make the program so simple, there are obviously no errors. The other is to make it so complicated, there are no obvious errors.
— C. A. R. Hoare

Echostar comes to mind and I don' think this last one was their first payout to Tivo. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/tivos-500-million-patent-settlement-with-echostar-dish-disappoints-some/48102

Troll? Strawman? I don't know. Either way, completely wrong.

IE9 is a completely good browser.

Users said the same thing about IE6, so you're obviously not a web developer.

It's on par with Chrome, but in fact it offers even more features and security than Firefox does currently, like sandboxing. It's also standards compliant and supports HTML5.

  IE9 is nowhere near Chrome or Firefox. You should be modded down for misinformation.

In terms of features, here's a quick comparison.
IE9 vs Firefox 9
http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=ie+9&b2=firefox+9

IE9 vs Chrome 16
http://caniuse.com/#compare=y&b1=ie+9&b2=chrome+16

IE9's performance is also way behind - It barely wins on Sunspider and then loses badly on Kraken and V8 being up to 400% slower. Their 64bit build is even worse and the author didn't bother posting the results because they're so bad.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/the-big-browser-benchmark-chrome-1615-vs-opera-11-vs-ie9-vs-firefox-98-vs-safari-5/17367

There's nothing to hate about IE9.

Sure there are. Besides not being as fast and not supporting standards as well as the others, it also only runs on Windows Vista and Windows 7. You're out of luck if you're running Windows XP, Linux or OS X. IE9 also has a new but buggy rendering engine. Here's one that I ran into a few days ago. http://www.ncf.ca/ncf/support/ie9_issue/index.html. Here's another http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6392826/mobile-table-crashes-ie9. There are more of these types of bugs in IE than all the other browsers combined. I still hate IE.

It's possible but unlikely. The Android phone business model guarantees that updates will be a mess. Putting Android updates on older phones decreases the likelihood that people will buy new phones, and it costs them support and engineering to put out an update.

Yes - the only reason to invest development time is to create revenue, and it's pretty hard to draw a straight line between a phone update and revenue - beyond generating loyalty from 1%ers like Slashdotters.

If all the glaring bugs and defects are fixed, the kinds of things that make the average subscriber say "this stupid phone" "my phone sucks" and switch carriers, then why would SprATTVerizonMobile invest expensive development hours in a handset, particularly after that handset is no longer being sold?

The carriers are wise to invest development hours in getting the very latest versions of Android on the very newest handsets only. This can be advertised and drive revenue.

It's an inherent weakness in the fragmented Android platform.

It's possible but unlikely. The Android phone business model guarantees that updates will be a mess. Putting Android updates on older phones decreases the likelihood that people will buy new phones, and it costs them support and engineering to put out an update.

Carriers don't want you to buy a new phone; they want you to pay a monthly bill. Android gives the carriers control over your phone. This is part of the problem with the argument that Android is about freedom and choice. For contrast, note that the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS because Apple maintains strict control over the hardware platform to the benefit of the customer, and Microsoft has similar control over Windows Phones to align third-party devices with an OS roadmap.

Android has greater total marketshare due to an abundance of budget phones, but marketshare isn't what drives business; it's profits and customer satisfaction, and the iPhone is the top-selling handset because of the control Apple enforces on its platform as well as the one making the most profit. The narrative is not Android versus Apple, as if Android is some big company--it's Apple versus Samsung versus HTC versus Motorola versus Acer versus Asus verus Coby versus Coby vs. Sony-Ericsson versus Fusion Garage versus RIM versus HP versus Archos.

Seamless experiences always win out over time. We saw it when gaming shifted from PCs to consoles, and now the industry is shifting from desktops to mobile devices. Fragmentation is a huge for users.

Also
London stock Exchange woes were not Linuxs fault!
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/london-stock-exchange-woes-not-linuxs-fault/8358

yet more "OMG someone using linux has problems - blame linux" FUD.

I'm no Apple fan, but their R&D has been increasing year after year - the percentage is dropping because they are making more...

$2,398,000,000 (2.2% of est $109,000,000,000) 2011
$1,760,400,000 (2.7% of $65,200,000,000) 2010
$1,329,900,000 (3.1% of $42,900,000,000) 2009
$1,105,000,000 (3.4% of $32,500,000,000) 2008
$792,000,000 (3.3% of $24,000,000,000) 2007
$714,100,000 (3.7% of $19,300,000,000) 2006
$556,000,000 (4% of $13,900,000,000) 2005
$331,200,000 (4% of $8,280,000,000) 2004
$496,000,000 (8% of $6,200,000,000) 2003
$437,600,000 (8% of $5,470,000,000) 2002
$428,800,000 (8% of $5,360,000,000) 2001
$399,000,000 (5% of $7,980,000,000) 2000

(same link)

it's OK for HTC to use frivolous patent lawsuits and injunction requests to try and destroy another company.

Who said anything about destroy Apple? Some dude called Steve Jobs did say something about destroying Android..

HTC didn't start the war and they are still willing to negotiate and settle the legal issues, hell they even paid off Microsoft's extortion racket, I bet they would even pay Apple for their ridiculous patents.

So if Apple were to assert that HTC attacked first by blatantly ripping off Apple's inventions, and that Apple was merely "retaliating" against HTC by asserting their legal property rights, you would defend Apple?

No I wouldn't, because Apple's 'inventions' are mostly trivial and/or have tonnes of prior art e.g. slide to unlock, multi touch

It's not for you to decide whether a patent is trivial or ridiculous. From reading other comments, most Slashbots don't even know the details of the patent, let alone the subtleties of patent law.

That's the biggest load of crap I ever read. When the words of patent lawyers and Florian Muller count for everything and those of John Carmack and Linus Torvalds count for nothing, we are truly f##ked. And by we I mean the west, and especially the U.S. because China and the rest of Asia will go on without being encumbered by such stupidity. I have read and tried to understand more than enough of these patents and the words of patent lawyers to know that what you're spreading is pure FUD. You're insulting the intelligence of people on slashdot by trying to tell them that a software patent on a simple algorithm or process is beyond their comprehension because it is clouded in pages of incomprehensible legalese and entirely superfluous details (e.g. describing the inner working of an operating system and the mobile device which have no bearing on the funcitonality described)--that stuff is to fool the morons in the patent office (and the people who approve these patents are morons, I don't care if they are overworked underpaid morons, they're morons) and the courts. It doesn't fool us.

Say what you want about Apple, they *do* spend billions researching new technology.

Apple is pretty close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to R&D spending by tech companies in recent years. I think this is part of the reason they so irk technology enthusiasts. We don't like having proof that marketing > technology rubbed in our faces.

It has already happened in an article by Emil Protalinski (the guy in the headline photo):
Facebook is suing Mark Zuckerberg

Tablets are more oriented towards media consumption -- games, video, that sort of thing.

Wow, someone still labors under that misconception? Who thawed you out of cyro-sleep?

First of all, tablets never had the problems you mentioned. Even back in the distant days of Windows tablets artists liked them. Now with the iPad that is still true, but it's useful for so much more content creation beyond art - movies, music, and even REAL writers find they like to use the iPad for serious writing.

Those of you who were following the hearing, what do you think was the best part?

Either +1 Insightful or +1 Funny. Or even -1 FUCKING WRONG

My favorite part was how Sheila Jackson Lee's tantrum over a tweet from a opponent lawmaker delayed things - but not the fact the person was tweeting about being bored and surfing the internet.

"We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson [sic] has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet."
http://www.zdnet.com/news/sopa-votes-derailed-by-politicians-offensive-tweet/6334156

The funny thing is that even Windows Phone market has comparatively more developers, apps and games.

Citation please.

Are you counting in your figures the number former Windows mobile developers? Or former Nokia developers? I can't imagine anyone, in the know, making his kind of statement with a straight face. With the Windows Phone Marketshare crashing from 2.7% to just 1.5% this Q3 2011, I don't think many Windows Phone Developers are happy these days, and I very much doubt any of the claims you're making about their numbers, their number of mobile apps, and their number of mobile games, are true at all.

They provide great tools, XNA, Silverlight and you can code with .NET.

Also, you may be a huge fan of Microsoft, but I question the fact that you're even Windows Phone Mobile developer yourself, or that you're even friends with any. Otherwise, you'd know that Microsoft just basically gave up on Silverlight in favor of HTML5, much to the loud objections of the thousands developers that were already invested Silverlight.

Sure, as long as Google decides to release the source code you want to download:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/google/google-android-30-honeycomb-open-source-no-more/2845

Too many people fear a ticket for talking, and they compensate by texting from their lap (or below the level of window).

Arab culture has a solution for that. A few severed hands hanging from streetlights in the mode of the Appian autobahn and plenty of attentive drivers with the left-handed 12 o'clock grip would reset priorities pronto. For example: compensating to the considered realization that this type of multitasking exposes others to grievous bodily harm by being less of a shithead instead of doubling down.

The argument from shithead never impresses me. "Oh, but the shitheads!" Checkmate.

After we mandate turning cars into wireless network nodes for all drivers (because there are too many shitheads out there to ask politely) it will become possible for the car to detect human real-time response violations, pull you over to the side of the road using the Google boot (which automatically adds a minus to your plus page), while issuing the cell-phone self-destruct code.

Shitheads retaliate by stuffing rags into their gasoline filler tubes and clicking their Zippos.

Fine, we've been looking for a good reason to ban gasoline.

[...] if you look at both of the videos you linked to, Neither of them have any visible label to indicate where the product gets shipped to. This is a pretty good indication that they did not arrive just in that brown box, as none of the carriers will ship packages without a destination label.

That's because neither of the two videos show the underside of the box (why would they?). You can see it in other reviews like this one, starting at 1:28. You can also see a glimpse of the label on the underside in this photo.

Old news.
Cisco used the 'iPhone' trademark before Apple: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/burnette/ciscoapple-the-dog-that-did-not-bark-in-the-night/239?tag=content;siu-container

There's a reasonable chance that the Windows 8 ARM tablet version will be metro only

The laws need to be clarified because the world has changed and no amount of head burying will allow you to escape this fact -- Even worms have Twitter Feeds these days...

The founding fathers smathers -- They didn't have an Internet or Computers. I assure you the laws would have been very different if they had.

Yep, they set up a court system to arbitrate things... JUDGES should NOT be the last word in Law -- People Should Be! The founders also gave the people just ONE check to balance against the Judicial & Lawmaking branches: Jury Nullification -- Go ahead and try to use that in court. Guess what? THE JUDGES PRE-SCREEN JURORS FOR THAT. I was called for jury, the judge read a bit of law and asked us all to raise our hands if we would uphold this law -- No one raised their hands. Rather indignantly he said: "Well, I guess we'll just need a whole new batch of jurors!" -- I was nearly held in contempt of court for the outburst this caused me.

Don't talk to me about founding fathers -- You could power the whole nation by harnessing the speed at which they're rolling in their graves!

The Agency Model is a racket that takes away a seller's ability to price ebooks how they see fit.

This is bad for the consumer since it means that market forces have less sway and there is little to distinguish one store from another. You will not find ebooks on sale and there is no point in "shopping around" since the price is the same everywhere.

If similar agreements were in place for other products, it would cause lawsuits. Imagine if all of the oil products sold by Shell or BP were given fixed prices. Media companies would love to have their own profit-guaranteed cartel and will push for illegal agreements to defend their aging business model.

Oops. copy-n-paste screwed up the link - the article showing the Nexus S uses the existing buttons in ICS is here.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/what-android-can-learn-from-the-iphone-os-updated/6991 6. Copy & paste. Apple took forever to deliver it, but it works really well. Android has had it forever but it’s a kludge to the point that I don’t use it.

To whom do these laws apply? All U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens, entities and organizations located in or out of the United States (including any subsidiary or foreign offices overseas) must comply with the USA PATRIOT Act, Executive Order 13224, and Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations. Further, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373 and other resolutions have the force of international law binding on all member states.

http://www.mott.org/resources/patriotact/faqs.aspx#q6

Whether the Patriot Act could be used to compel a U.S. parent to disclose records held by a Canadian subsidiary remains a matter of debate. The B.C. Commissioner Report found that it is a “reasonable possibility” that the FISA Court would order production of documents that are within the custody or control of a U.S. company, such as a U.S. parent with access to records held by a Canadian subsidiary.[14] If a U.S.-linked company makes a disclosure to U.S. authorities without the consent of the Canadian individuals named, this could result in the Canadian organization that transferred the information breaching Canadian privacy legislation unless the disclosure meets an exception in the applicable Canadian privacy legislation. http://library.findlaw.com/2005/May/10/245866.html

Any company that is wholly-owned by a U.S.-based corporation cannot guarantee that the data will not leave its customer-designated datacenters or servers. Google would not budge from its first and final response, and Microsoft could not offer guarantees to not move data outside the EU under any circumstances. These subsidiary companies and their U.S.-parent corporations cannot provide the assurances that data is safe in the UK or the EEA, because the USA PATRIOT Act not only affects the U.S.-based corporations but also their worldwide wholly-owned subsidiary companies based within and outside the European Union.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/case-study-how-the-usa-patriot-act-can-be-used-to-access-eu-data/8805?pg=4&tag=content;siu-container

Oh how nice of you to lump Google into this. I wonder if you are just pro trolling, or some fanboy of some type. . THis event has nothing to do with Google.

"How Google–and everyone else–gets Wi-Fi location data" http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/how-google-8211and-everyone-else-8211gets-wi-fi-location-data/1664

Check the mirror. There you will find your fan boy.

Calling a government "stable" when they're creating an uncontrollably deadly super flu is a bit of a stretch. I don't think that any genuinely stable government would do this.

Because no stable government would want to respond rapidly and effectively against new flu viruses, saving lives? These researchers aren't hoping to obtain "superweapons." Could this research help those who are? Maybe so. But this is true of most any immunological research*. On the other hand, natural mutation of influenza viruses has in the past been a far more significant threat to human life than "weaponization," so the cost in lives lost due to overreaction to the risks of otherwise-useful research "falling into the wrong hands" could be quite significant. Hence the debate.

"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."

* One need not stop there. Finite-element analysis could have been helpful in planning the 9/11 attacks. Should we similarly restrict research in applied mathematics, cluster computing, and 3D visualization?

What about a serious look at white listing?

You mean, like this? Are you sure that you want that?