...and by the way, I find it hard to believe that 'we elect a leader who isn't blatantly corrupt' is the only thing you want to happen. So, give up on that one, and focus on, oh, maybe a Supreme Court nominee that won't make the corrupt electoral system worse. Citizens United isn't the only place where the right-wing court has been whittling away at the one-person/one-vote core of our democracy.
Okay kids, it's not about how you feel - it's about what you want to happen
What I want to happen is that we elect a leader who isn't blatantly corrupt. It's kind of a pipe dream, I know, but that's what I want to happen. So it doesn't really help my goal if I go and specifically vote for someone who is corrupt.
That's where you go off the rails. Your pipe dream isn't a choice. You have a choice between 2 options (yes, corrupt 2-party blah, blah). If you decide not to make one of those choices, it will be made for you. And if you seriously can't come up with a preference between Trump and Clinton, then you're not paying attention - or you're allowing your attention to be diverted and manipulated. And please, Clinton is 'corrupt' in the sense of 'typical politician', i.e. not particularly corrupt, but needs to raise lots of money, so y'know... Trump is a whole new thing - and don't let his 'self-funded' bullshit convince you that at least he's not a typical politician - he's something much worse... And I assume you know that - that's what's so distressing.
The other thing we know is that when you start from hating Clinton first and proceed from there, every conspiracy is as good as a fact.
Of course, that conveniently overlooks that a bunch of the deleted emails were recovered by the FBI, and they were essentially no different in tone and content than the ones that were preserved. But of course there's got to be a smoking gun in there - it's a Clinton, after all...
Yes, you can vote for a smaller party. But to do that without actually supporting the policies of that party is lunacy. I imagine you are in agreement with the Libertarian party's platform (though it's hard to imagine anyone literally wanting their 'essentially no government' platform enacted. But presumably the swing, potential 3rd party vote this year is left-of-center Sanders supporters who basically (grudgingly) accept that the Clinton/Democratic platform is a pretty good approximation of Sanders' 'pull the Dems to the left' goal at the start of his campaign.
Some of these voters, though, either think Clinton won't enact any of that platform and/or that voting for a candidate that they dislike and/or distrust is worse than having a candidate they seriously dislike and distrust actually win. Okay kids, it's not about how you feel - it's about what you want to happen, and the policies you presumably care about. And as far as Clinton backtracking on the platform, that platform contains plenty that Clinton didn't have to be pulled into embracing - and probably some that she's glad to have been 'forced' to embrace.
Now maybe some think they're pursuing a fantasy strategy in which Trump wins and is so awful that a true leftist wins in 2020. Fat chance - since Dems tend to trend rightward after a big defeat. And of course, the next 4 years - and a couple of lifetime Supreme Court appointments - will make a mess that's even harder to clean up.
It's the whole 'Nader as spoiler' thing all over. Yes Nader and his apologists will claim robotically that "If Al Gore couldn't win his home state, it's not my fault", or "If it hadn't been for the ballot problems in Florida, Gore would've won anyway". But they conveniently discount the effect of Nader's running around the country saying "your choice is Coke or Pepsi" to an audience that missed all the nuance and assumed that meant electing Bush and Gore were essentially the same thing. Nader doesn't and didn't believe a Bush win was the same as a Gore win, but his message implied it. Nobody knows how much that detracted from Gore, but I suspect it had a greater effect than the direct Nader vote.
Yes, the two party system is a problem. No, voting for 3rd party spoilers within the 2 party system will not fix it.
Folks, racism involves a power imbalance and systematic oppresion. Without that it's just prejudice, or resentment... or something. Racism implies inferiority - perceived, or made up in order to justify some resentment-based discrimination.
I live on the stretch of Third Avenue that first got these kiosks. I don't care what people watch on them, but it's a pretty regular thing to see somebody camping out next to one of them. Often they've overturned a trash can or newspaper vending box to use as a seat - though I've seen some wheelchairs being used for more comfortable seating. In any case, they're there for hours at a time, and the overall effect isn't much more appealing than a homeless guy sleeping in a cardboard box...
That said, the whole kiosk thing is a backdoor insertion of extremely bright LED screen ads that draw your eyes to them as they rotate their images multiple times per block as you try to walk up the avenue. And for what? Free wi-fi that requires you to sign in, tracks you, and provides nothing that your phone isn't already providing over the cellular network. I suppose the charging ports are nice - if you're willing to stand there long enough to get a decent charge.
Well, you're right, and I guess the OP was just being wishful. But then again, what big advantage is there in loading X86 WIN32 apps via the app store, when an X86 desktop system can load them easily already? If it's simply for the sake of the distribution mechanism (and if MS is going to take a cut), I can't imagine too many wanting to take advantage.
But of course, since RT only supported the app store, and didn't provide a full WIN32 subsystem (or hid it - and reserved it for Office only), then it would be a big deal indeed if MS were opening up WIN32 (and, yes, providing a cross-compiler) to work on ARM.
I'm sure you can find such a citation on Breitbart;-)
In 2008, Hillary did imply that white, working class voters wouldn't vote for Obama, making her the safer nominee. And that's pretty nasty, but at least it was basically true - they mostly didn't vote for him. She never raised the birther issue - in fact, I don't think that came up until after Obama was actually elected. Trump didn't raise it first either, but he rode it well beyond its lifetime even as a useful lie - to the point that even now he can't even disavow it for fear of having to acknowledge what a blatantly opportunistic panderer to racists he was when he was talking about it back then.
Well, when you get Trump supporters interpreting "Make America Great Again" in clearly racist terms, then you start to understand the dog whistles that are clearly hitting their mark.
There was a CNN panel (yes, admittedly absurd sampling) where the biggest Trump supporter was saying stuff like "they give all this stuff to the illegals, that I as a regular white person can't get". First of all, the ignorance is pretty astounding. I don't know what 'stuff' she was talking about, but all government benefits are available to all qualifying citizens. And non-citizens don't qualify for any of it. But in any case, she's been fed a constant diet of 'reverse racism' against white people, and that's the mindset in which she hears "Make America Great Again". And Trump is fully aware of this - and courting it. So how is this the same as Clinton again...?
I think his point was about Microsoft having their OS pop up a window telling you not to use Chrome. It's one thing to fix a battery life issue. And feel free to advertise it. But it's another thing for your monopoly OS (yes, it's still a monopoly) to warn you off of competing applications that you launched on your own - and probably went through some effort to install.
And don't forget that the only reason they want you to use Edge is to choke off Google's income stream so they won't be able to continue to upend their plans for controlling all computing devices. Well, okay, they also want you to use Edge so they can copy Google's business model and take that income stream for themselves. That battery life warning probably doesn't mention that...
The problem with that logic is that way back when - before "everybody" thought a computer was a box that runs Windows, computers used to come with a choice of OS - or at least with a separate invoice line item for the OS. Mostly, that OS was MS-DOS (because back then, everybody thought a computer was a box that ran MS-DOS), but then Microsoft started cutting deals with OEMs to include a 'free' copy of Windows with all of their DOS computers. That turned out to be a case of illegal anti-competitive bundling, for which Microsoft received a slap on the wrist. But in turn, they were able to kill off the market for alternative OS's. Now there are no more alternative OS's, and no remedy has been provided to make it possible to use one without also paying for Windows - which makes it unlikely that any could ever become mainstream.
So your logic fits the current situation pretty well - i.e., the situation where Microsoft behaved badly and ended up being rewarded for it rather than punished.
Perhaps someone should start a 'buy a Sony and return it for refund' drive. If that's the way Sony's going to play the Microsoft EULA refund clause, then let's play it by their rules. A few thousand refunds ought to get them to take notice. Of course, they probably charge a shipping and/or restocking fee that's more than the cost of the Windows license...
Okay, so smaller indents are nice for displaying complex code without a huge monitor. But my problem is when a coder sets a non-standard small tab stop and then mixes spaces and tabs for indentation. Then anybody else that opens that file in an editor set for 8-character tab stops has to deal with an utter mess of stuff that doesn't line up. Anyone who does this should be shot - unless, of course, they're your boss...
Isn't the problem with Twitter that it's essentially a broadcast medium? These aren't private conversations - that's a different issue. The problem is allowing ISIS to use Twitter and/or Facebook or whatever as recruiting tools. As such, there's nothing anonymous about it - they're broadcasting that they're ISIS, and these tools make them easy to find for non-affiliated, potential recruits. The content itself, is anything but secret - it's propaganda, which by definition has to be as widely available as possible to be effective.
I wonder if this situation is what's motivating the TPP provision that allows companies to, in effect, veto changes to regulations that were in place when the companies set up shop in the country. Under such a treaty, would Apple be able to lock in their sweetheart deal forever?
Nobody's denying Apple's inventiveness (or at least that's a separate topic - but I'm not denying it). You seem to be implying that without the ability to pretend they're an Irish company to avoid paying taxes on their enormous profits that inventiveness would not exist. That's nonsense. Apple would be exactly the same company it is today - with perhaps less cash on hand, but still plenty successful.
And for what it's worth, the issue of their having their stuff manufactured in China is wholly separate from the fiction that all the 'intellectual property' they developed in California somehow belongs to a post office box in Dublin for tax purposes. Innovation actually does 'magically' grow in environments conducive to it - and Silicon Valley is one of those environments. Apple's not actually located in Ireland - and they're not located there for a reason...
It's my impression that Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS with some nod-and-wink help from Microsoft in order to wrest the PC business away from IBM.
This show simply implies they were building a better clone, and has nothing to do with reverse engineering the BIOS. In fact, there's a subplot about 'building a new OS that understands natural language commands'....and then the Mac happens. So, it's a bit of a mishmash of everything that was going on at the time. Now they're trying to compete with Compuserv. Go figure. Fun fact: a colleague of mine founded ECHO (a glorified BBS / 'online community') at about that time. She was non-technical, so I don't know how off the shelf the software for such things was at the time...
That whole 'we little people would be in prison if we did this' meme is such bullshit. She didn't do anything, beyond send and receive stuff she was cleared to see. The people who get prosecuted for mishandling classified stuff get prosecuted for either viewing it without security clearance - or giving it to someone else without clearance. Petreus is brought up endlessly. Y'know, the guy who gave classified stuff to his journalist girlfriend. Hillary did nothing remotely like that.
You can take issue with the private server thing. You can (sort of) take issue with (sort of) classified stuff showing up on the private server, but you ought to at least acknowledge that it was a tiny percentage of the traffic, and that stuff probably would've been sent on the unclassified DOS server had she been using that. To conflate the worst possible explanations for a bunch of separate incidents into a political scandal that put the country in danger is to lie about it.
What we have here is a witch hunt for something - anything - about Benghazi that could paint Clinton in a politically unfavorable light. Even if the Benghazi events were spun to deemphasize the terrorism aspect - and there's no proof they were - that's not illegal. Yes, Clinton is sometimes her own worst enemy, but she's not wrong about folks being out to get her. Your interpretation of the 'scandal' is typical of that. Guilty without being charged...
Not to mention that the "lock her up" cries continue to fly even after an investigation found nothing to prosecute. I imagine there are some that are still trying to get her charged with some kind of perjury for stating that 'none of my emails were marked classified' when, in fact, one thread out of the 30000 emails analyzed had some kind of partial classification marking somewhere in the body. I.e., her statement was only 99.99% truthful. Lock her up!!!!
Hard to imagine Microsoft couldn't have developed this capability on their own. And if it's going to be MS products only, then they didn't need to worry about buying market share - since they already own the Exchange market. So, unless there's something truly innovative about this company's tech (doubtful), or they really want a cross-platform product (also doubtful), it looks like Microsoft might really have bought them to take a cross-platform product off the market - and if so, sucks.
Then again, they might want to suck gmail or yahoo mail users into exchange calendaring while keeping Google's calendar from implementing something similar before Microsoft could...
True enough, but do you do your banking, internet searches and browsing, email, etc on your high-end preamp processor or printer? I didn't think so.
Smartphones are more and more becoming our primary computing devices and they're networked by definition. That makes them pretty dangerous devices to be casual about security updates on. The OEM's don't update them because nobody's pressuring them (enough) to do it. If Google simply advertised Nexus phones on the basis of their regular upgrade schedule, they might produce the kind of competition that would get the OEM's off their asses.
That said, the Android device market is a nasty space to operate in. Some OEM's have dozens of models. Whether they needed to produce them to compete in a highly competitive market - or whether they were just throwing stuff against the wall, the bottom line is that they can't practically keep them all up to date. Again, an informed public wouldn't buy them, but buy them they do. And the carriers are as much at fault for that as anyone...
True enough when there are other choices available. If Windows were able to read ext2 as well as FAT without having to load special 3rd party drivers, then you might be able to determine what the 'value' of FAT on an SD card is. And, of course, there's the issue of how insane the FAT patent is, and that the code to implement FAT in Android is not Microsoft's at all...
But, no. I wouldn't pay $100 for the ability to read an SD card. I'd load a driver and use ext2. So the value of FAT to me is quite limited.
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...and by the way, I find it hard to believe that 'we elect a leader who isn't blatantly corrupt' is the only thing you want to happen. So, give up on that one, and focus on, oh, maybe a Supreme Court nominee that won't make the corrupt electoral system worse. Citizens United isn't the only place where the right-wing court has been whittling away at the one-person/one-vote core of our democracy.
Okay kids, it's not about how you feel - it's about what you want to happen
What I want to happen is that we elect a leader who isn't blatantly corrupt. It's kind of a pipe dream, I know, but that's what I want to happen. So it doesn't really help my goal if I go and specifically vote for someone who is corrupt.
That's where you go off the rails. Your pipe dream isn't a choice. You have a choice between 2 options (yes, corrupt 2-party blah, blah). If you decide not to make one of those choices, it will be made for you. And if you seriously can't come up with a preference between Trump and Clinton, then you're not paying attention - or you're allowing your attention to be diverted and manipulated. And please, Clinton is 'corrupt' in the sense of 'typical politician', i.e. not particularly corrupt, but needs to raise lots of money, so y'know... Trump is a whole new thing - and don't let his 'self-funded' bullshit convince you that at least he's not a typical politician - he's something much worse... And I assume you know that - that's what's so distressing.
The other thing we know is that when you start from hating Clinton first and proceed from there, every conspiracy is as good as a fact.
Of course, that conveniently overlooks that a bunch of the deleted emails were recovered by the FBI, and they were essentially no different in tone and content than the ones that were preserved. But of course there's got to be a smoking gun in there - it's a Clinton, after all...
Yes, you can vote for a smaller party. But to do that without actually supporting the policies of that party is lunacy. I imagine you are in agreement with the Libertarian party's platform (though it's hard to imagine anyone literally wanting their 'essentially no government' platform enacted. But presumably the swing, potential 3rd party vote this year is left-of-center Sanders supporters who basically (grudgingly) accept that the Clinton/Democratic platform is a pretty good approximation of Sanders' 'pull the Dems to the left' goal at the start of his campaign.
Some of these voters, though, either think Clinton won't enact any of that platform and/or that voting for a candidate that they dislike and/or distrust is worse than having a candidate they seriously dislike and distrust actually win. Okay kids, it's not about how you feel - it's about what you want to happen, and the policies you presumably care about. And as far as Clinton backtracking on the platform, that platform contains plenty that Clinton didn't have to be pulled into embracing - and probably some that she's glad to have been 'forced' to embrace.
Now maybe some think they're pursuing a fantasy strategy in which Trump wins and is so awful that a true leftist wins in 2020. Fat chance - since Dems tend to trend rightward after a big defeat. And of course, the next 4 years - and a couple of lifetime Supreme Court appointments - will make a mess that's even harder to clean up.
It's the whole 'Nader as spoiler' thing all over. Yes Nader and his apologists will claim robotically that "If Al Gore couldn't win his home state, it's not my fault", or "If it hadn't been for the ballot problems in Florida, Gore would've won anyway". But they conveniently discount the effect of Nader's running around the country saying "your choice is Coke or Pepsi" to an audience that missed all the nuance and assumed that meant electing Bush and Gore were essentially the same thing. Nader doesn't and didn't believe a Bush win was the same as a Gore win, but his message implied it. Nobody knows how much that detracted from Gore, but I suspect it had a greater effect than the direct Nader vote.
Yes, the two party system is a problem. No, voting for 3rd party spoilers within the 2 party system will not fix it.
Well, to be fair, they didn't include one unabashed Hillary fan on the panel.
Folks, racism involves a power imbalance and systematic oppresion. Without that it's just prejudice, or resentment... or something. Racism implies inferiority - perceived, or made up in order to justify some resentment-based discrimination.
I live on the stretch of Third Avenue that first got these kiosks. I don't care what people watch on them, but it's a pretty regular thing to see somebody camping out next to one of them. Often they've overturned a trash can or newspaper vending box to use as a seat - though I've seen some wheelchairs being used for more comfortable seating. In any case, they're there for hours at a time, and the overall effect isn't much more appealing than a homeless guy sleeping in a cardboard box...
That said, the whole kiosk thing is a backdoor insertion of extremely bright LED screen ads that draw your eyes to them as they rotate their images multiple times per block as you try to walk up the avenue. And for what? Free wi-fi that requires you to sign in, tracks you, and provides nothing that your phone isn't already providing over the cellular network. I suppose the charging ports are nice - if you're willing to stand there long enough to get a decent charge.
Well, you're right, and I guess the OP was just being wishful. But then again, what big advantage is there in loading X86 WIN32 apps via the app store, when an X86 desktop system can load them easily already? If it's simply for the sake of the distribution mechanism (and if MS is going to take a cut), I can't imagine too many wanting to take advantage.
But of course, since RT only supported the app store, and didn't provide a full WIN32 subsystem (or hid it - and reserved it for Office only), then it would be a big deal indeed if MS were opening up WIN32 (and, yes, providing a cross-compiler) to work on ARM.
I'm sure you can find such a citation on Breitbart ;-)
In 2008, Hillary did imply that white, working class voters wouldn't vote for Obama, making her the safer nominee. And that's pretty nasty, but at least it was basically true - they mostly didn't vote for him. She never raised the birther issue - in fact, I don't think that came up until after Obama was actually elected. Trump didn't raise it first either, but he rode it well beyond its lifetime even as a useful lie - to the point that even now he can't even disavow it for fear of having to acknowledge what a blatantly opportunistic panderer to racists he was when he was talking about it back then.
Well, when you get Trump supporters interpreting "Make America Great Again" in clearly racist terms, then you start to understand the dog whistles that are clearly hitting their mark.
There was a CNN panel (yes, admittedly absurd sampling) where the biggest Trump supporter was saying stuff like "they give all this stuff to the illegals, that I as a regular white person can't get". First of all, the ignorance is pretty astounding. I don't know what 'stuff' she was talking about, but all government benefits are available to all qualifying citizens. And non-citizens don't qualify for any of it. But in any case, she's been fed a constant diet of 'reverse racism' against white people, and that's the mindset in which she hears "Make America Great Again". And Trump is fully aware of this - and courting it. So how is this the same as Clinton again...?
So if Chrome ends up surpassing Edge in battery life, will that message still show up?
I think his point was about Microsoft having their OS pop up a window telling you not to use Chrome. It's one thing to fix a battery life issue. And feel free to advertise it. But it's another thing for your monopoly OS (yes, it's still a monopoly) to warn you off of competing applications that you launched on your own - and probably went through some effort to install.
And don't forget that the only reason they want you to use Edge is to choke off Google's income stream so they won't be able to continue to upend their plans for controlling all computing devices. Well, okay, they also want you to use Edge so they can copy Google's business model and take that income stream for themselves. That battery life warning probably doesn't mention that...
The problem with that logic is that way back when - before "everybody" thought a computer was a box that runs Windows, computers used to come with a choice of OS - or at least with a separate invoice line item for the OS. Mostly, that OS was MS-DOS (because back then, everybody thought a computer was a box that ran MS-DOS), but then Microsoft started cutting deals with OEMs to include a 'free' copy of Windows with all of their DOS computers. That turned out to be a case of illegal anti-competitive bundling, for which Microsoft received a slap on the wrist. But in turn, they were able to kill off the market for alternative OS's. Now there are no more alternative OS's, and no remedy has been provided to make it possible to use one without also paying for Windows - which makes it unlikely that any could ever become mainstream.
So your logic fits the current situation pretty well - i.e., the situation where Microsoft behaved badly and ended up being rewarded for it rather than punished.
Perhaps someone should start a 'buy a Sony and return it for refund' drive. If that's the way Sony's going to play the Microsoft EULA refund clause, then let's play it by their rules. A few thousand refunds ought to get them to take notice. Of course, they probably charge a shipping and/or restocking fee that's more than the cost of the Windows license...
Okay, so smaller indents are nice for displaying complex code without a huge monitor. But my problem is when a coder sets a non-standard small tab stop and then mixes spaces and tabs for indentation. Then anybody else that opens that file in an editor set for 8-character tab stops has to deal with an utter mess of stuff that doesn't line up. Anyone who does this should be shot - unless, of course, they're your boss...
Isn't the problem with Twitter that it's essentially a broadcast medium? These aren't private conversations - that's a different issue. The problem is allowing ISIS to use Twitter and/or Facebook or whatever as recruiting tools. As such, there's nothing anonymous about it - they're broadcasting that they're ISIS, and these tools make them easy to find for non-affiliated, potential recruits. The content itself, is anything but secret - it's propaganda, which by definition has to be as widely available as possible to be effective.
I wonder if this situation is what's motivating the TPP provision that allows companies to, in effect, veto changes to regulations that were in place when the companies set up shop in the country. Under such a treaty, would Apple be able to lock in their sweetheart deal forever?
Nobody's denying Apple's inventiveness (or at least that's a separate topic - but I'm not denying it). You seem to be implying that without the ability to pretend they're an Irish company to avoid paying taxes on their enormous profits that inventiveness would not exist. That's nonsense. Apple would be exactly the same company it is today - with perhaps less cash on hand, but still plenty successful.
And for what it's worth, the issue of their having their stuff manufactured in China is wholly separate from the fiction that all the 'intellectual property' they developed in California somehow belongs to a post office box in Dublin for tax purposes. Innovation actually does 'magically' grow in environments conducive to it - and Silicon Valley is one of those environments. Apple's not actually located in Ireland - and they're not located there for a reason...
It's my impression that Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS with some nod-and-wink help from Microsoft in order to wrest the PC business away from IBM.
This show simply implies they were building a better clone, and has nothing to do with reverse engineering the BIOS. In fact, there's a subplot about 'building a new OS that understands natural language commands'. ...and then the Mac happens. So, it's a bit of a mishmash of everything that was going on at the time. Now they're trying to compete with Compuserv. Go figure. Fun fact: a colleague of mine founded ECHO (a glorified BBS / 'online community') at about that time. She was non-technical, so I don't know how off the shelf the software for such things was at the time...
That whole 'we little people would be in prison if we did this' meme is such bullshit. She didn't do anything, beyond send and receive stuff she was cleared to see. The people who get prosecuted for mishandling classified stuff get prosecuted for either viewing it without security clearance - or giving it to someone else without clearance. Petreus is brought up endlessly. Y'know, the guy who gave classified stuff to his journalist girlfriend. Hillary did nothing remotely like that.
You can take issue with the private server thing. You can (sort of) take issue with (sort of) classified stuff showing up on the private server, but you ought to at least acknowledge that it was a tiny percentage of the traffic, and that stuff probably would've been sent on the unclassified DOS server had she been using that. To conflate the worst possible explanations for a bunch of separate incidents into a political scandal that put the country in danger is to lie about it.
What we have here is a witch hunt for something - anything - about Benghazi that could paint Clinton in a politically unfavorable light. Even if the Benghazi events were spun to deemphasize the terrorism aspect - and there's no proof they were - that's not illegal. Yes, Clinton is sometimes her own worst enemy, but she's not wrong about folks being out to get her. Your interpretation of the 'scandal' is typical of that. Guilty without being charged...
And, apparently, 3. Does it cast someone we don't like in an embarrassing light.
It must be hard to maintain neutrality when you are a vindictive shit given the power to act out on your grudges. I feel for Assange...
Not to mention that the "lock her up" cries continue to fly even after an investigation found nothing to prosecute. I imagine there are some that are still trying to get her charged with some kind of perjury for stating that 'none of my emails were marked classified' when, in fact, one thread out of the 30000 emails analyzed had some kind of partial classification marking somewhere in the body. I.e., her statement was only 99.99% truthful. Lock her up!!!!
Hard to imagine Microsoft couldn't have developed this capability on their own. And if it's going to be MS products only, then they didn't need to worry about buying market share - since they already own the Exchange market. So, unless there's something truly innovative about this company's tech (doubtful), or they really want a cross-platform product (also doubtful), it looks like Microsoft might really have bought them to take a cross-platform product off the market - and if so, sucks.
Then again, they might want to suck gmail or yahoo mail users into exchange calendaring while keeping Google's calendar from implementing something similar before Microsoft could...
True enough, but do you do your banking, internet searches and browsing, email, etc on your high-end preamp processor or printer? I didn't think so.
Smartphones are more and more becoming our primary computing devices and they're networked by definition. That makes them pretty dangerous devices to be casual about security updates on. The OEM's don't update them because nobody's pressuring them (enough) to do it. If Google simply advertised Nexus phones on the basis of their regular upgrade schedule, they might produce the kind of competition that would get the OEM's off their asses.
That said, the Android device market is a nasty space to operate in. Some OEM's have dozens of models. Whether they needed to produce them to compete in a highly competitive market - or whether they were just throwing stuff against the wall, the bottom line is that they can't practically keep them all up to date. Again, an informed public wouldn't buy them, but buy them they do. And the carriers are as much at fault for that as anyone...
True enough when there are other choices available. If Windows were able to read ext2 as well as FAT without having to load special 3rd party drivers, then you might be able to determine what the 'value' of FAT on an SD card is. And, of course, there's the issue of how insane the FAT patent is, and that the code to implement FAT in Android is not Microsoft's at all...
But, no. I wouldn't pay $100 for the ability to read an SD card. I'd load a driver and use ext2. So the value of FAT to me is quite limited.