Yes, attacks on civilians aiming to frighten them into changing their ways is terrorism. But attributing every such attack to "the Taliban" is a mistake (or a lazy political convenience) - the anti-occupation attacks are carried out by a wide spectrum of armed resistance.
It might also be considered terrorism to deliberately bomb civilian houses because there *might* be a Taliban commander hiding in the same village; it is a bit rich of the West to criticize the Afghan resistance for killing civilians, when Western troops do the same. Both sides consider civilians to be legitimate targets if they think they are giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy.
“In bombardments carried out by coalition forces in Logar, Kapisa, Helmand and Badghis provinces since Saturday [May 5] dozens of our innocent fellow countrymen, including women and children, lost their lives and have been martyred,”
That might sound like a quote from the Taiban - but no, it is a quote from our ally Karzai. It is a very bad sign when even your friends start to describe the victims of your actions as "martyrs".
Terrorism (except for the sort spouted about by politicians looking for a catch-phrase) comes down to intent.
That might be the case for academic/professional usage of the word, but in popular usage the word "terrorism" does vary according to the perpetrator. Salon had an interesting article about this after the Norway attacks, where some news sites actually editing their reporting to remove references to the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" after it was discovered that the perpetrator wasn't a Muslim. The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of “Terrorism” - The news reaction to the Oslo events clarifies the real meaning of "terrorism" (at the end we discover the surprising factoid that, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one — 1 out of 294 — was perpetrated by "Islamists", despite the mainstream media portraying the opposite)
I really doubt the $300 figure is a right average sallary.
As others have pointed out, the mean average is inflated by billionaires etc. More relevant is the minimum wage and mean wage for migrant workers who are in these Lenovo factory jobs. "Minimum wages in China range from 1,500 yuan ($240) per month in Shenzhen to 870 yuan ($140) in Chongqing. The average monthly wage of China's 158 million migrant workers in 2011 surged 21.2 percent from 2010 to 2,049 yuan ($327)" source... So $300 for a "regular Joe" is pretty accurate.
or they can find another party with "Donate" button AND Google ads
The GOP has Google ads and a Donate page. I suppose you may reply and be pedantic and say that the button text is "Contribute" rather than donate, but the text "Complete the form below to make a donation." makes it pretty clear that the action is considered a "donation".
The British Conservative Party uses Google ads and they have a Donate page. The text "Why Donate?" "Make a donation" makes it obvious that this is considered a donation.
And that was just the first two that I checked, I'm sure you can find more examples.
Also, from The Fine Article, it appears that Google is being inconsistent:
the Greens candidate in the state by-election, Cathy Oke, has ads running on Google despite having multiple donate buttons on her web page.
"We've sent them screenshots of the donate buttons on the ALP and the Greens sites and they've allowed all of those ads to run," she said.
Google said in an email to Patten, seen by this website, that it "doesn't allow the solicitation of funds (donations) unless they're tax exempt".
The Sex Party is an Australian political party and so, according to the ATO, donations are tax deductible. The party specifies this on its website.
Also your example of 85% in and 90% out seems a bit messed up since.85*.90 is about 76.5% which compares favorably to your pneumatic air storage system.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity "reported energy efficiency varies in practice between 70% and 80%, with some claiming up to 87%" The book Sustainable energy without the hot air suggests that 90% efficiency is probably achievable with some small technology increases.
Compressed air energy storage "The theoretical efficiency of adiabatic storage approaches 100% with perfect insulation, but in practice round trip efficiency is expected to be 70%."
The DAC in this case is inside the iDevice, rendering the claimed infringing "interface" a fancy headphone jack.
What these manufacturers have successfully argued is that because the DAC is in the iPod, rather than their devices, then they aren't infringing a patent that covers devices that convert digital audio to analog. The judge agreed that the digital to analog conversion happens inside the iDevice, so the external device is not infringing. The open question is whether Bose will now sue manufacturers who stream or transfer digital audio to external devices that do include a DAC for playback.
Worth pointing out that this article was written by Florian Mueller of "Top Anti-Android Blogger Florian Mueller is Being Paid by Oracle" fame. He has been proven wrong before, and so we should probably wait for some better reporting on this story. That said, I would say he is right about the ban on Samsung extending to third parties that "act in concert" with Samsung to continue selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but he is wrong that the ban applies to really independent third parties who are selling the Tab 10.1 without "acting in concert" with Samsung (i.e. third party importers etc.). To stop those guys, Apple needs to take them to court.
This article is just anti-government spin and alarmism. It is government policy to move as much computation as possible into the *public* cloud. This report just says that the public cloud, at the moment, is probably not ready for "national security and emergency preparedness" tasks. The report goes on to give examples of some of the service level agreement requirements that would be required ("continuous monitoring of the cloud infrastructure by the provider, third-party audits, data encryption and various certifications and accreditations, including continuously evolving accreditation requirements from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program").
Anyone arguing against this is going to have to produce a coherent rationale for using the public cloud for national security and emergency preparedness tasks, and show that public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft will continue to operate effectively in a national security / emergency situation. Of course, "national security" is an over-broad umbrella that is used to shield too many places from the public view, but that is a another argument...
No, Razor and Fairlight seems to be the only old warez groups.
And Paradox. And in a parallel universe, Strider of Fairlight emigrated to the U.S. and became a Republican politician, allegedly continuing to lead Fairlight. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.
Really? 7" vs. 9.7"? Is that 2.7" size difference _really_ a make or break feature
Well, I've heard some people complaining that a 7" tablet is too small to read A4 papers on, on the other hand, Kindle seems to be doing fine with it. $199 versus $499 is what most people are going to be concerned about.
And to flip the screen size thing around, the iPhone 4S has only a 3.5" screen, Galaxy S3 has a 4.8" screen, Galaxy Note has 5.3" screen; for a phone, that does make a difference.
It's just people pissed off for one reason or another that don't really have any sort of common ideology other than a rejection of "something".
Perhaps this is how anarchism is in the U.S., but venture outside and you will find that anarchists do have a common ideology that is based primarily on the rejection of fascism, abuse and violence. I've found that the countries where anarchism is the strongest are the ones that have suffered most from fascist government and dictatorship in recent history. In contrast, the countries that have a long history of democracy are those that have the weakest support for anarchism.
It is hardly surprising, that when a government abuses the population for long enough, some of them will come to see formal government and power held by a minority as an evil in itself, and instead choose self-governance. In my experience, anarchists do not reject the concept of governance, instead their goal is more subtle - collective self-governance, rather than governance imposed by an individual or small group.
Windows 8 is fucking NICE kernel wise. I am using on a crappy el cheapo laptop with only 2 gigs of ram and a dual 1.6 ghz AMD turon with integrated graphics circa 2007. It boots in 25 seconds!
My "crappy" Wyse Winterm with 550MHz VIA CPU and 256MB RAM will boot Tiny Core Linux in less than 20 seconds. Apparently, Boot to Gecko on an ARM smartphone boots from post-firmware to running app launcher in less than one second. 25 seconds boot time for a dual 1.6 GHz desktop CPU isn't so impressive.
Citation please? I find it difficult to imagine in what universe Apple would use a half-finished, poorly marketed and mediocre system like Azure for their cloud offerings.
Could you tell the difference between a 2001 Space Odyssey tablet and an iPad from 10 feet away? Seriously, one device has "iPad" written on it and a picture of an apple, the other has "Samsung" written on it. It's not rocket science to tell them apart.
And for that matter, why are tablets getting so much attention? Could you tell the difference between a Sony digital camera and a Panasonic from 10 feet away? How about a Sony TV versus Toshiba? Or a Honda car versus a Subaru? They just look the same, right?
I didn't say anything about a proof, but merely pointed out that one man's suicide terrorist killing thousands of civilians is another man's Bible hero.
You appear to be arguing that modern Christian fundamentalists are scared of death and martyrdom. Given the history of Christianity, I'm not so convinced that is accurate. "Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don't believe.... God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I'm not. SEND ME!!!" - Mark David Uhl, a modern fundamentalist. Are you sure you would trust someone like that with a nuclear weapon?
That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do. Didn't work too well for them in the long run.
But the iPhone was running pure webapps that targeted only the iPhone, so there were some things that just weren't possible, like hardware access, and iOS won't JIT compile Javascript unless it is run in the web browser, so Javascript app performance is poor. Mozilla is developing APIs for doing everything that you could do natively, like accessing hardware etc., and submitting all of the APIs it develops to the W3C for standardisation, which means it's likely that these APIs will be implemented on Android, iOS etc., and then these apps will be cross-platform which gives them an edge over native apps. Boot to Gecko also uses a fast JIT.
Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.
And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
I guessed that this was probably something GSM related, but TFA says "It's believed that the patents in question have to do with the IEEE 802.11 WiFi standard". It's hard to imagine that Asus doesn't already have a license for essential wifi patents, they must have sold millions of devices over the last few years that have featured wifi as standard.
Bit odd that this has not been an issue until the moment that they release a Google branded device.
Sure, but that does not make it a country - but as I said, it depends on how you define "country", see Scotland is not a country for a list of reasons why Scotland might not be considered a country.
Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland are the same country
That is a particularly bad example due to the conflict over that territory and the fact that, due to that conflict, there is nothing politically linking them apart from them both joining the E.U. in the last few decades. There has been no similar civil conflict over the union of Scotland and England in recent times. How about a different example: Hawaii and Texas? Two somewhat different societies, with different political systems, different legal systems, but also represented by a unified parliament? Would you say Hawaii and Texas are two different countries? It all depends on how you define "country".
Not really. Different in name, but Scottish police officers can make arrests in England, and vice versa. It is common for police to move throughout the UK, and in times of civil strife (G8, protests, riots etc.) you will find police from London, Manchester, and elsewhere walking the streets of Scotland. During the England riots last year, Scottish police were enforcing the law and making arrests in England. This is nothing like the situation in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, where police officers from one region would have no power in the other.
Funny...This comic [xkcd.com] seems to be getting a lot of use lately.
Yes, but the great thing about Mozilla's standards is that they are open source, and they want web browsers to implement them. At the moment we have multiple standards for apps - Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian, WebOS, Bada. I'm pretty sure none of those (apart from perhaps Android) are actually open source and freely re-implementable by everyone else.
Remember when actually did have multiple protocols and document standard (MSN Classic, AOL, Compuserve etc.) competing to be the network that people would publish and browse information on? And then the Internet and HTML killed them. That is the aim of Mozilla, to do to proprietary single-platform apps what the internet and the web browser did to MSN and AOL.
No other phone will allow you to make an app directly out of HTML, JS and CSS.
Um, the iPhone. You can _absolutely_ make a web app out of HTML, JS, and CSS.
Notice the difference. With Boot 2 Gecko, the apps are "real" apps that can access hardware, make phone calls, etc. But they are also standard web apps. The aim (as far as I can tell) is to take everything that they need to implement for hardware access and standardize it, perhaps handing it over to the W3C, so that other browsers will implement it. At that point, we can have full, cross-platform apps, publishable and accessible from individual URLs, that run on every platform that Mozilla runs on. It's a big, bold goal, and if they can achieve it native apps are going to be in trouble. At the end of the day, would you rather develop your app multiple times for multiple platforms, and rely on third party app stores to distribute and take 1/3 of your revenue, or do you want to develop it once, have it run on multiple platforms and be able to keep 100% of your revenue? This is the whole reason the web was created, to give all devices and manufacturers standards that they could compete in implementing, whilst still retaining cross-platform compatibility.
You jest, but one of the interesting things about Boot 2 Gecko is that all the apps are just localled cached web apps, which means that they get "updated" seamlessly without having to interact with an app store or package manager. You get all of the updating advantages of a web app like Google Docs or Gmail, in that installation and upgrading is completely invisible to the user. Even the included apps (the launcher, the dialler, photo viewer, web browser, etc.), which would be native on any other platform, are all just web apps loaded from a particular URL - you can access the same URL using Firefox on a desktop PC, or from an Android phone running Firefox Mobile, and those apps will run. It's the cross platform solution that eliminates the need for native code (think Phone Gap).
Mozilla is aiming to produce a platform that will make apps just an extension of the web. And to standardize everything that they need to do, so that other platforms can implement their APIs. Is it possible for everything? Perhaps not. Does it feel like we are throwing away decades of work on native code? Perhaps, but the web stack of HTML and Javascript is the only cross-platform, globally accepted solution we have. Google tried to add native code to Chrome - it's impressive, it works, but nobody's using it. We had Java applets on the web, but those are effectively dead now. There are projects now that can compile from native code to Javascript - see this amazing demo of Sauerbraten in Javascript running with accelerated WebGL. It's not difficult to imagine a world where Javascript is basically the common bytecode, and with bridges to native APIs it becomes possible to access all hardware, do anything, from a web app that is running on any platform, be it iOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc.
As I wrote in another comment: the current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.
It became clear a few seconds after I turned it on and didn't see the typical iOS home screen that the device in my hands was not an iPad, but was actually a Galaxy Tab 10.1
So what you're saying is that, despite all of the supposed similarities and alleged copying going on at the UI and software level, it was immediately obvious to you upon inspecting a running Samsung tablet that it was not an iPad?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, attacks on civilians aiming to frighten them into changing their ways is terrorism. But attributing every such attack to "the Taliban" is a mistake (or a lazy political convenience) - the anti-occupation attacks are carried out by a wide spectrum of armed resistance.
It might also be considered terrorism to deliberately bomb civilian houses because there *might* be a Taliban commander hiding in the same village; it is a bit rich of the West to criticize the Afghan resistance for killing civilians, when Western troops do the same. Both sides consider civilians to be legitimate targets if they think they are giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy.
“In bombardments carried out by coalition forces in Logar, Kapisa, Helmand and Badghis provinces since Saturday [May 5] dozens of our innocent fellow countrymen, including women and children, lost their lives and have been martyred,”
That might sound like a quote from the Taiban - but no, it is a quote from our ally Karzai. It is a very bad sign when even your friends start to describe the victims of your actions as "martyrs".
Terrorism (except for the sort spouted about by politicians looking for a catch-phrase) comes down to intent.
That might be the case for academic/professional usage of the word, but in popular usage the word "terrorism" does vary according to the perpetrator. Salon had an interesting article about this after the Norway attacks, where some news sites actually editing their reporting to remove references to the words "terrorist" and "terrorism" after it was discovered that the perpetrator wasn't a Muslim. The omnipotence of Al Qaeda and meaninglessness of “Terrorism” - The news reaction to the Oslo events clarifies the real meaning of "terrorism" (at the end we discover the surprising factoid that, of 294 Terrorist attacks attempted or executed on European soil in 2009 as counted by the EU, a grand total of one — 1 out of 294 — was perpetrated by "Islamists", despite the mainstream media portraying the opposite)
I really doubt the $300 figure is a right average sallary.
As others have pointed out, the mean average is inflated by billionaires etc. More relevant is the minimum wage and mean wage for migrant workers who are in these Lenovo factory jobs. "Minimum wages in China range from 1,500 yuan ($240) per month in Shenzhen to 870 yuan ($140) in Chongqing. The average monthly wage of China's 158 million migrant workers in 2011 surged 21.2 percent from 2010 to 2,049 yuan ($327)" source ... So $300 for a "regular Joe" is pretty accurate.
or they can find another party with "Donate" button AND Google ads
The GOP has Google ads and a Donate page. I suppose you may reply and be pedantic and say that the button text is "Contribute" rather than donate, but the text "Complete the form below to make a donation." makes it pretty clear that the action is considered a "donation".
The British Conservative Party uses Google ads and they have a Donate page. The text "Why Donate?" "Make a donation" makes it obvious that this is considered a donation.
And that was just the first two that I checked, I'm sure you can find more examples.
Also, from The Fine Article, it appears that Google is being inconsistent:
the Greens candidate in the state by-election, Cathy Oke, has ads running on Google despite having multiple donate buttons on her web page. "We've sent them screenshots of the donate buttons on the ALP and the Greens sites and they've allowed all of those ads to run," she said. Google said in an email to Patten, seen by this website, that it "doesn't allow the solicitation of funds (donations) unless they're tax exempt". The Sex Party is an Australian political party and so, according to the ATO, donations are tax deductible. The party specifies this on its website.
Also your example of 85% in and 90% out seems a bit messed up since .85*.90 is about 76.5% which compares favorably to your pneumatic air storage system.
Pumped-storage hydroelectricity "reported energy efficiency varies in practice between 70% and 80%, with some claiming up to 87%" The book Sustainable energy without the hot air suggests that 90% efficiency is probably achievable with some small technology increases.
Compressed air energy storage "The theoretical efficiency of adiabatic storage approaches 100% with perfect insulation, but in practice round trip efficiency is expected to be 70%."
The DAC in this case is inside the iDevice, rendering the claimed infringing "interface" a fancy headphone jack.
What these manufacturers have successfully argued is that because the DAC is in the iPod, rather than their devices, then they aren't infringing a patent that covers devices that convert digital audio to analog. The judge agreed that the digital to analog conversion happens inside the iDevice, so the external device is not infringing. The open question is whether Bose will now sue manufacturers who stream or transfer digital audio to external devices that do include a DAC for playback.
Btw, here's the patent.
The iPad 3
Officially there's no such thing as an "iPad 3" - it's just "the New iPad". It might be the worst product name ever, but it is what it is.
Worth pointing out that this article was written by Florian Mueller of "Top Anti-Android Blogger Florian Mueller is Being Paid by Oracle" fame. He has been proven wrong before, and so we should probably wait for some better reporting on this story. That said, I would say he is right about the ban on Samsung extending to third parties that "act in concert" with Samsung to continue selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1, but he is wrong that the ban applies to really independent third parties who are selling the Tab 10.1 without "acting in concert" with Samsung (i.e. third party importers etc.). To stop those guys, Apple needs to take them to court.
This article is just anti-government spin and alarmism. It is government policy to move as much computation as possible into the *public* cloud. This report just says that the public cloud, at the moment, is probably not ready for "national security and emergency preparedness" tasks. The report goes on to give examples of some of the service level agreement requirements that would be required ("continuous monitoring of the cloud infrastructure by the provider, third-party audits, data encryption and various certifications and accreditations, including continuously evolving accreditation requirements from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program").
Anyone arguing against this is going to have to produce a coherent rationale for using the public cloud for national security and emergency preparedness tasks, and show that public cloud providers like Amazon and Microsoft will continue to operate effectively in a national security / emergency situation. Of course, "national security" is an over-broad umbrella that is used to shield too many places from the public view, but that is a another argument...
No, Razor and Fairlight seems to be the only old warez groups.
And Paradox. And in a parallel universe, Strider of Fairlight emigrated to the U.S. and became a Republican politician, allegedly continuing to lead Fairlight. Sometimes life is stranger than fiction.
Really? 7" vs. 9.7"? Is that 2.7" size difference _really_ a make or break feature
Well, I've heard some people complaining that a 7" tablet is too small to read A4 papers on, on the other hand, Kindle seems to be doing fine with it. $199 versus $499 is what most people are going to be concerned about.
And to flip the screen size thing around, the iPhone 4S has only a 3.5" screen, Galaxy S3 has a 4.8" screen, Galaxy Note has 5.3" screen; for a phone, that does make a difference.
It's just people pissed off for one reason or another that don't really have any sort of common ideology other than a rejection of "something".
Perhaps this is how anarchism is in the U.S., but venture outside and you will find that anarchists do have a common ideology that is based primarily on the rejection of fascism, abuse and violence. I've found that the countries where anarchism is the strongest are the ones that have suffered most from fascist government and dictatorship in recent history. In contrast, the countries that have a long history of democracy are those that have the weakest support for anarchism.
It is hardly surprising, that when a government abuses the population for long enough, some of them will come to see formal government and power held by a minority as an evil in itself, and instead choose self-governance. In my experience, anarchists do not reject the concept of governance, instead their goal is more subtle - collective self-governance, rather than governance imposed by an individual or small group.
Windows 8 is fucking NICE kernel wise. I am using on a crappy el cheapo laptop with only 2 gigs of ram and a dual 1.6 ghz AMD turon with integrated graphics circa 2007. It boots in 25 seconds!
My "crappy" Wyse Winterm with 550MHz VIA CPU and 256MB RAM will boot Tiny Core Linux in less than 20 seconds. Apparently, Boot to Gecko on an ARM smartphone boots from post-firmware to running app launcher in less than one second. 25 seconds boot time for a dual 1.6 GHz desktop CPU isn't so impressive.
Citation please? I find it difficult to imagine in what universe Apple would use a half-finished, poorly marketed and mediocre system like Azure for their cloud offerings.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=icloud+azure
Could you tell the difference between a 2001 Space Odyssey tablet and an iPad from 10 feet away? Seriously, one device has "iPad" written on it and a picture of an apple, the other has "Samsung" written on it. It's not rocket science to tell them apart.
And for that matter, why are tablets getting so much attention? Could you tell the difference between a Sony digital camera and a Panasonic from 10 feet away? How about a Sony TV versus Toshiba? Or a Honda car versus a Subaru? They just look the same, right?
(who wasn't even Christian)
But he is considered a Hero of The Bible, and whilst I doubt that most Christians even realise that he wasn't Christian, the ones that do still go through mental gymnastics to include Samson as one of their own ("Therefore Samson was a Jew and so are you and I if we call ourselves Christians.")
You appear to be arguing that modern Christian fundamentalists are scared of death and martyrdom. Given the history of Christianity, I'm not so convinced that is accurate. "Christians, fear of death, fear of death. The fear of death shows you don't believe.... God needs soldiers to fight so his children may live free. Are you afraid??? I'm not. SEND ME!!!" - Mark David Uhl, a modern fundamentalist. Are you sure you would trust someone like that with a nuclear weapon?
That was originally what the iPhone was supposed to do. Didn't work too well for them in the long run.
But the iPhone was running pure webapps that targeted only the iPhone, so there were some things that just weren't possible, like hardware access, and iOS won't JIT compile Javascript unless it is run in the web browser, so Javascript app performance is poor. Mozilla is developing APIs for doing everything that you could do natively, like accessing hardware etc., and submitting all of the APIs it develops to the W3C for standardisation, which means it's likely that these APIs will be implemented on Android, iOS etc., and then these apps will be cross-platform which gives them an edge over native apps. Boot to Gecko also uses a fast JIT.
Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were upon the roof about three thousand men and women, that beheld while Samson made sport.
And Samson called unto the LORD, and said, O Lord GOD, remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once, O God, that I may be at once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes. And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood, and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand, and of the other with his left. And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
p.s. Silver Surfer was a suicide bomber. Shocked that a Hollywood movie would glorify such acts?
I guessed that this was probably something GSM related, but TFA says "It's believed that the patents in question have to do with the IEEE 802.11 WiFi standard". It's hard to imagine that Asus doesn't already have a license for essential wifi patents, they must have sold millions of devices over the last few years that have featured wifi as standard.
Bit odd that this has not been an issue until the moment that they release a Google branded device.
Sure, but that does not make it a country - but as I said, it depends on how you define "country", see Scotland is not a country for a list of reasons why Scotland might not be considered a country.
(Texas and Hawaii also have their own Senate and Constitution etc. but that does not make them countries).
Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland are the same country
That is a particularly bad example due to the conflict over that territory and the fact that, due to that conflict, there is nothing politically linking them apart from them both joining the E.U. in the last few decades. There has been no similar civil conflict over the union of Scotland and England in recent times. How about a different example: Hawaii and Texas? Two somewhat different societies, with different political systems, different legal systems, but also represented by a unified parliament? Would you say Hawaii and Texas are two different countries? It all depends on how you define "country".
Separate parliament
Parliament of the United Kingdom
police force,
Not really. Different in name, but Scottish police officers can make arrests in England, and vice versa. It is common for police to move throughout the UK, and in times of civil strife (G8, protests, riots etc.) you will find police from London, Manchester, and elsewhere walking the streets of Scotland. During the England riots last year, Scottish police were enforcing the law and making arrests in England. This is nothing like the situation in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, where police officers from one region would have no power in the other.
legal system...
Yes, different legal system.
Funny...This comic [xkcd.com] seems to be getting a lot of use lately.
Yes, but the great thing about Mozilla's standards is that they are open source, and they want web browsers to implement them. At the moment we have multiple standards for apps - Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian, WebOS, Bada. I'm pretty sure none of those (apart from perhaps Android) are actually open source and freely re-implementable by everyone else.
Remember when actually did have multiple protocols and document standard (MSN Classic, AOL, Compuserve etc.) competing to be the network that people would publish and browse information on? And then the Internet and HTML killed them. That is the aim of Mozilla, to do to proprietary single-platform apps what the internet and the web browser did to MSN and AOL.
No other phone will allow you to make an app directly out of HTML, JS and CSS.
Um, the iPhone. You can _absolutely_ make a web app out of HTML, JS, and CSS.
Notice the difference. With Boot 2 Gecko, the apps are "real" apps that can access hardware, make phone calls, etc. But they are also standard web apps. The aim (as far as I can tell) is to take everything that they need to implement for hardware access and standardize it, perhaps handing it over to the W3C, so that other browsers will implement it. At that point, we can have full, cross-platform apps, publishable and accessible from individual URLs, that run on every platform that Mozilla runs on. It's a big, bold goal, and if they can achieve it native apps are going to be in trouble. At the end of the day, would you rather develop your app multiple times for multiple platforms, and rely on third party app stores to distribute and take 1/3 of your revenue, or do you want to develop it once, have it run on multiple platforms and be able to keep 100% of your revenue? This is the whole reason the web was created, to give all devices and manufacturers standards that they could compete in implementing, whilst still retaining cross-platform compatibility.
You jest, but one of the interesting things about Boot 2 Gecko is that all the apps are just localled cached web apps, which means that they get "updated" seamlessly without having to interact with an app store or package manager. You get all of the updating advantages of a web app like Google Docs or Gmail, in that installation and upgrading is completely invisible to the user. Even the included apps (the launcher, the dialler, photo viewer, web browser, etc.), which would be native on any other platform, are all just web apps loaded from a particular URL - you can access the same URL using Firefox on a desktop PC, or from an Android phone running Firefox Mobile, and those apps will run. It's the cross platform solution that eliminates the need for native code (think Phone Gap).
Mozilla is aiming to produce a platform that will make apps just an extension of the web. And to standardize everything that they need to do, so that other platforms can implement their APIs. Is it possible for everything? Perhaps not. Does it feel like we are throwing away decades of work on native code? Perhaps, but the web stack of HTML and Javascript is the only cross-platform, globally accepted solution we have. Google tried to add native code to Chrome - it's impressive, it works, but nobody's using it. We had Java applets on the web, but those are effectively dead now. There are projects now that can compile from native code to Javascript - see this amazing demo of Sauerbraten in Javascript running with accelerated WebGL. It's not difficult to imagine a world where Javascript is basically the common bytecode, and with bridges to native APIs it becomes possible to access all hardware, do anything, from a web app that is running on any platform, be it iOS, Windows, Android, Linux, etc.
As I wrote in another comment: the current situation with apps is a bit of a throwback - can you imagine if viewing a web site required you to install it through an app store? And for an author, updating their web site required them to push their site to Dell, who would then approve it and push it out to people with Dell computers? But you need a different web site for people with Asus computers, and you have to push your Asus-build site to them for approval and redistribution? It's crazy, if that were the situation with the web it would've never taken off. Making apps more like the web, or expanding the web to consume apps, whichever way you look at it, is a good thing.
It became clear a few seconds after I turned it on and didn't see the typical iOS home screen that the device in my hands was not an iPad, but was actually a Galaxy Tab 10.1
So what you're saying is that, despite all of the supposed similarities and alleged copying going on at the UI and software level, it was immediately obvious to you upon inspecting a running Samsung tablet that it was not an iPad?