The Nexus 5X falls into the 'it's actually a quite nice mid-range mid-sized phone if they didn't intentionally cripple it by giving it too little RAM and forcing encryption that it's not powerful enough to keep up with'. I don't know whether Google or LG is responsible for those decisions. But both the 6P and 5X prove that there's no reason Nexus devices couldn't be perfectly good.
In any case, we've reached the point where 3 year old flagships are good enough to handle the latest software - except that nobody's willing to support them. Cyanogenmod comes in handy there. I'm considering putting it on my Nexus 4 - which I would have already replaced with a 5X were it not for the issues above. Google was pretty good about updates for the N4, but they ultimately dropped it. Anyway, I sure wish Cyanogen would pursue a strategy of partnering with 'no-name' brands to handle the software for them for a fee. That could be a good business where they could be paid and not undermine Android at the same time. But their CEO makes statements that make me believe he thinks he can hijack Android from Google and become the next big thing. Tiresome at best.
There's nothing to prevent AT&T from partnering with ZTE to make a true stock Android phone and load it up with all the bloatware they want. Sure, if they want Google Play, they may need to include some other Google stuff, but presumably they're gonna put Google Play on this Cyanogen phone too. I don't think there's a viable rival app store they can use at this point. So what good does using Cyanogen do them - except maybe to get Cyanogen to handle the updates for them. Those updates will probably come much slower than stock Android updates on a Nexus device, but at least they might come...
I wonder whether Cyanogen is still dreaming of building (or helping Microsoft build) a true alternative Android ecosystem. That's not such a great idea either. But maybe they've hit on a viable business model in providing timely updates to phones that the manufacturers can't be bothered to support for any reasonable length of time. That could be a good thing. Timely bugfixes and eventual long-term OS upgrades on any phone would be a good competitive feature these days. And if ATT wants to become a known hardware brand, this could be a reasonable way to outsource the OS. Hope it's just that...
Presumably the valuable info they're collecting is all the same stuff Google's been able to collect for years based on having a search engine people actually wanted to use. Some of us may not like having given this stuff to Google, but at least we did it knowingly and mostly willingly in exchange for a service we most definitely wanted. Microsoft wants to be able to generate an ad revenue stream like Google's, but their search is compromised by a smaller user base. Though, by now their user base must be at least as big as Google's was when Google achieved dominance. In any case, nobody ever willingly signed up to help Microsoft in this way. You could say, I suppose, that users of the Win10 free upgrade are getting something in return - but what about purchasers of new PC's, who are still paying for Win10?
Of course, there's another reason Microsoft wants to out-Google Google. They want to hurt Google as a competitor. They don't want their OS to have to be free - but they're competing with a free Android OS in all the areas where they had hoped to grow, so they have little choice. it's chicken and egg. Beef up their ability to compete with Google (even through loss leaders) until they can remove the threat and go back to business as usual. Or take Google's revenue stream, take a cut of all app sales, and fork off on a new business model based on that.
Of course, Microsoft ended up pretty much ditching Win32 for tablets, so while their OS is now 'tablet friendly', it only really has apps if you use it in laptop mode. I'm not sure whether Gnome or KDE or whatever GUI toolkit Ubuntu's using for this thing is more tablet friendly (or at least potentially more friendly) than Win32 was. It's arguably more 'modern', and probably uses a layout engine that (again potentially) can make it easier for apps to adjust to touch-friendly display parameters without totally rewriting them.
True. I suppose it's possible for Ubuntu to beat Android to the punch with a low cost 'continuum' style device. Assuming Ubuntu's made its desktop stuff touch friendly enough to work on a tablet, they already have a better desktop experience than Android can provide - and fuller-featured productivity apps. Of course, Microsoft has the Windows desktop that kind of has it all. But if their continuum devices are too high-priced to have mass appeal, then this thing might have a shot... A long shot.
I didn't say you're a racist idiot. I said you're a racist apologist, counting on your audience's stupidity for your argument to go over. If you totally ignore the reason there is a Black Lives Matter movement - that unarmed black people keep getting shot by the police for minor offenses based, presumably, on the racist notion that black people are inherently dangerous wild cards and can only be subdued by killing them - then, sure. Feel free to make semantic arguments and totally disregard the issue at hand. Whether that makes you a racist or not, it certainly has you making specious arguments to prevent a serious discussion of racism. So why the fuck are you making it?
Because "All lives matter" is inclusive in only a literal sense that completely ignores, and in the process negates, the argument at hand. It's a supremely vacuous rhetorical trick that nonetheless seems to hold sway with right wing apologists. If it weren't transparently idiotic, it might be worth responding to directly. But the only appropriate response is to point out that you're not fooling anyone. As far as why you feel it's necessary to treat "Black Lives Matter" as an affront, well, I'll leave that soul searching job to you - though you seem particularly ill-equipped to handle it.
Because only idiots respond to "Black Lives Matter" with "All Lives Matter". Black Lives Matter is short for 'Black Lives Matter, too", not "Only Black Lives Matter". Only a moron or a Republican apologist would totally ignore context to interpret it that wan.
It's not about 'for you'. It's about 'for us'. The general public gets to vote on appropriate expenditures and appropriate ways to pay for them. Just because demagogues have convinced a sizeable portion of the public that progressive taxation isn't an appropriate way to pay for stuff doesn't mean that the public really believes it. They've really just been convinced that the money gets thrown down the drain (i.e., given away to poor people). And they believe that because they've been lied too. You (I assume) and I and Warren Buffet all know that the portion of money going to food stamps and welfare is a drop in the bucket. Medicaid costs more, but Social Security, Medicare and the military dwarf the rest of it - and the people will not vote to get rid of them just to please you.
So what if it's hypocritical. It's also correct. Infrastructure work needs to be done, and it will be good for the economy, not bad. So, all these guys are saying is that when they're forced to help pay for it along with everybody else, they won't mind it. And they think you shouldn't mind it, either - or wouldn't if you really looked at the effects of infrastructure spending objectively instead of through Grover Norquist's warped ideology.
And they have some standing to say all this, because they stand to pay a lot - and they've actually looked at the issue, and understand how the economy works. All the recent attempts at austerity have aimed at the wrong targets - and hurt the economy in the process. The 'right' targets for austerity are also bad ones - if you think Social Security, Medicare and the military are worthy things to pay for. And if you don't think they're worth paying for, just bear in mind that the vast majority of voters do.
And that, my friends, is why Trump, Sanders or a newly progressive Hillary Clinton will be our next president. And Trump is just a protest vote against the Republican party for having fooled working class whites in the past that their interests were aligned with the Koch's. Of course, he's an awful protest vote, if only because he stands for more of the same tax-cutting ooga booga as the rest of the Republicans, but nobody ever said it was a smart protest vote.
Perhaps. But your chemical patents were patents on actual inventions that your company, presumably, intended to manufacture and sell. Microsoft's patents are on ideas that are not particularly inventive - or original, and intended largely to stifle competition. The granddaddy of Microsoft moneymaking patents is the one they have on the FAT32 long/short filename setup. That patent is not there to prevent someone else from designing a crazy long/short filename scheme. It's there because that scheme is used by Windows, and anyone who wants their removable storage device to work with Windows PC's is pretty much forced to use it. So that patent was applied for and those lawyers were paid in order to enable extortion based on a form of monopoly tying that shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
If the software in question were significant enough to get people to pay for it instead of implementing it themselves, Microsoft could sell that software instead of extorting patent royalties. In the case of Windows itself, that's true. Anyone who wants Windows functionality has to pay Microsoft for the copyrighted OS software. Anyone who simply wants to plug an SD card into their Android device can use free software to do that.
There are plenty of examples of software patents that have been shown to be bogus based on prior art and rubber stamping 'inventions' that are simply not understood well enough by the P.O. employees to evaluate them properly. As a Slashdot reader, I assume you know this.
But even if you allow that some software patents are truly valid, how do you assign a cost to licensing them? Microsoft is currently charging Android device makers as much to license their unspecified patents as they used to charge for their own OS, which implemented those patents - as well as a whole mess of other stuff, including y'know, an OS... These days they don't even charge for their own OS. So how can the courts support charging for someone else's implementation of a patent that has no monetary value? Okay, I guess there's some value to the ability to threaten to keep a competitors products off the shelves, but is that really what patent licensing was supposed to be about?
Actually, it's not the ad that compromised the computers - it's the piece of software that the ad prompted the users to download and install. Presumably antivirus software could protect against that without blocking the ad. I assume malware that hijacks a computer is illegal, and presumably ad networks don't accept ads anonymously (or do they?). If so, how do they get paid? It shouldn't be too hard to track down someone trying to distribute malware this way...
Just because 'death by terrorist' is rare, doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to prevent it. Whether making Apple help decrypt the phone of a known terrorist is a step too far down a slippery slope, or whether our courts can be counted on to limit the access just to cases like this is a valid discussion. 'Don't worry because terrorists don't kill a lot of people in the US' is pretty lame. If nothing else, terrorists caused the US to spend a trillion or so dollars that could've been better used elsewhere. And hundreds of millions of us to have to take our shoes and belts off to get onto an airplane. Terrorism is more than just the lives lost - that's the whole point. To induce, y'know, terror. And, yes, maybe overreactions. But still...
Off topic a bit, but does anybody but me think the 'erase phone after 10 bad password tries' feature takes 'security' too far? I'm not nuts about a feature that lets any arbitrary malicious person with physical access to my phone wipe the whole thing by simply entering 10 bad passwords. How about just making them wait a few hours after 10 bad passwords - perhaps increasing that delay after each 10 bad tries until the correct password has been entered. That'd make a brute force crack impossible, but still protect my phone from a nasty prankster - which is a more likely scenario, after all, than the FBI with a search warrant.
So far, the ads are not animated. They change periodically, and are pretty bright - so it's a bit of new noise in the neighborhood. Haven't used the wifi yet for anything other than verifying that it works, and it automatically picks you up as you progress up the street - though it does cut out between kiosks, so the range doesn't seem to be seemless. Remains to be seen how useful this is - unless, you live withing wifi range and can use it as a free ISP...
Edward Snowden took knowingly classified stuff and released it to the press. That's clearly illegal. The fact that you think this is a remotely valid comparison just underscores your anti-Clinton derangement.
It seems to me that read-write ext filesystem support on Windows would be a more important accomplishment - enabling ext-formatted SD cards to be used on mobile devices and eliminating one of the more egregious bits of Microsoft patent blackmail. Obviously, nobody uses FAT for any other reason than Windows compatibility. Besides the silliness of allowing a patent on what is essentially a kludgy workaround for an ancient filesystem, the thing is a de-facto standard (see above - nobody would use it on the merits). If it must be patentable, then if ever there were a case for a FRAND licensing requirement, this is it. It boggles the mind that the license paid by the SD card manufacturer isn't enough to cover actually using the card - but our patent system boggles the mind in many ways...
In any case, a reliable ext driver for Windows would make it practical for device manufacturers to use the free ext filesystems.
Hillary is not going to jail - that's not even a remote possibility. She may not win the nomination - and yes, batshit like this may be part of why. But Hillary's not under indictment - or even suspicion - of a crime. The FBI is looking into whether any secrets were compromised - not whether stuff that later became classified was sent to HRC via email. The private email server wasn't even against regulations when she was in office. There was a recommendation to only use the government email - but it wasn't codified into a regulation until Kerry got in. And yes, for the zillionth time Powell and Rice both used personal email addresses - and both received emails that were later classified. And neither leaked any classified info to anyone who wasn't supposed to have it. Neither did Hillary. General Patraeus - yep, gave stuff to his journalist girlfriend. That's a crime - not a double standard.
Except that Chrome on Android works much better than Firefox. I like and use Firefox on Windows, where it works fine - and I use Chrome on Linux where Firefox doesn't work as well. In any case, it would be a good thing if the default browser on most Android devices supported ad blocking. And 'acceptable ads' are just that - acceptable. I don't think 'no ads' is a viable model for free internet content. Do you?
They kind of have to do this. As mobile takes over, AdBlock is less and less prevalent - and the web is less and less usable. It's potentially interesting that Google has signed on to this. Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus. And Apple's support for ad blockers on iOS, is definitely a shot across Google's bow that they're going to have to address. Google's ads are probably as close to the 'acceptable ads' standards as any - basically because their site is funded by getting you to click ads - not simply getting you to see them. And, of course, by the very nature of the services they offer, they're 'tracking' you anyway - though not directly on behalf of their advertisers (don't get me started...).
They could've easily provided tools to let you port WIN32 code to ARM. They didn't want to. Instead they wanted to move to an app store model (just like Apple, duh) based around Metro stuff. Didn't work, and maybe they're kicking themselves now. Or maybe not - there may have been compelling reasons not to support WIN32 code on ARM - but in any case, that's why RT failed.
Maybe they want it for Surface tablets (and other detachables). They may have lost the phone war, but they're making a dent in the touchscreen world with these 2-in-1 laptops - and Android's hot on their tail there. The Pixel C is a proof of concept that's not viable today, but let's just say it has a more viable future as a competitor for Windows laptops than Windows Phone has as a competitor for Android and iOS...
I'm surprised there's still a 'market' for SwiftKey these days. The native Google keyboard in Android does the same stuff pretty well nowadays. I'd be surprised if Apple didn't also do the same.
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The Nexus 5X falls into the 'it's actually a quite nice mid-range mid-sized phone if they didn't intentionally cripple it by giving it too little RAM and forcing encryption that it's not powerful enough to keep up with'. I don't know whether Google or LG is responsible for those decisions. But both the 6P and 5X prove that there's no reason Nexus devices couldn't be perfectly good.
In any case, we've reached the point where 3 year old flagships are good enough to handle the latest software - except that nobody's willing to support them. Cyanogenmod comes in handy there. I'm considering putting it on my Nexus 4 - which I would have already replaced with a 5X were it not for the issues above. Google was pretty good about updates for the N4, but they ultimately dropped it. Anyway, I sure wish Cyanogen would pursue a strategy of partnering with 'no-name' brands to handle the software for them for a fee. That could be a good business where they could be paid and not undermine Android at the same time. But their CEO makes statements that make me believe he thinks he can hijack Android from Google and become the next big thing. Tiresome at best.
There's nothing to prevent AT&T from partnering with ZTE to make a true stock Android phone and load it up with all the bloatware they want. Sure, if they want Google Play, they may need to include some other Google stuff, but presumably they're gonna put Google Play on this Cyanogen phone too. I don't think there's a viable rival app store they can use at this point. So what good does using Cyanogen do them - except maybe to get Cyanogen to handle the updates for them. Those updates will probably come much slower than stock Android updates on a Nexus device, but at least they might come...
I wonder whether Cyanogen is still dreaming of building (or helping Microsoft build) a true alternative Android ecosystem. That's not such a great idea either. But maybe they've hit on a viable business model in providing timely updates to phones that the manufacturers can't be bothered to support for any reasonable length of time. That could be a good thing. Timely bugfixes and eventual long-term OS upgrades on any phone would be a good competitive feature these days. And if ATT wants to become a known hardware brand, this could be a reasonable way to outsource the OS. Hope it's just that...
Presumably the valuable info they're collecting is all the same stuff Google's been able to collect for years based on having a search engine people actually wanted to use. Some of us may not like having given this stuff to Google, but at least we did it knowingly and mostly willingly in exchange for a service we most definitely wanted. Microsoft wants to be able to generate an ad revenue stream like Google's, but their search is compromised by a smaller user base. Though, by now their user base must be at least as big as Google's was when Google achieved dominance. In any case, nobody ever willingly signed up to help Microsoft in this way. You could say, I suppose, that users of the Win10 free upgrade are getting something in return - but what about purchasers of new PC's, who are still paying for Win10?
Of course, there's another reason Microsoft wants to out-Google Google. They want to hurt Google as a competitor. They don't want their OS to have to be free - but they're competing with a free Android OS in all the areas where they had hoped to grow, so they have little choice. it's chicken and egg. Beef up their ability to compete with Google (even through loss leaders) until they can remove the threat and go back to business as usual. Or take Google's revenue stream, take a cut of all app sales, and fork off on a new business model based on that.
Of course, Microsoft ended up pretty much ditching Win32 for tablets, so while their OS is now 'tablet friendly', it only really has apps if you use it in laptop mode. I'm not sure whether Gnome or KDE or whatever GUI toolkit Ubuntu's using for this thing is more tablet friendly (or at least potentially more friendly) than Win32 was. It's arguably more 'modern', and probably uses a layout engine that (again potentially) can make it easier for apps to adjust to touch-friendly display parameters without totally rewriting them.
True. I suppose it's possible for Ubuntu to beat Android to the punch with a low cost 'continuum' style device. Assuming Ubuntu's made its desktop stuff touch friendly enough to work on a tablet, they already have a better desktop experience than Android can provide - and fuller-featured productivity apps. Of course, Microsoft has the Windows desktop that kind of has it all. But if their continuum devices are too high-priced to have mass appeal, then this thing might have a shot... A long shot.
I didn't say you're a racist idiot. I said you're a racist apologist, counting on your audience's stupidity for your argument to go over. If you totally ignore the reason there is a Black Lives Matter movement - that unarmed black people keep getting shot by the police for minor offenses based, presumably, on the racist notion that black people are inherently dangerous wild cards and can only be subdued by killing them - then, sure. Feel free to make semantic arguments and totally disregard the issue at hand. Whether that makes you a racist or not, it certainly has you making specious arguments to prevent a serious discussion of racism. So why the fuck are you making it?
Because "All lives matter" is inclusive in only a literal sense that completely ignores, and in the process negates, the argument at hand. It's a supremely vacuous rhetorical trick that nonetheless seems to hold sway with right wing apologists. If it weren't transparently idiotic, it might be worth responding to directly. But the only appropriate response is to point out that you're not fooling anyone. As far as why you feel it's necessary to treat "Black Lives Matter" as an affront, well, I'll leave that soul searching job to you - though you seem particularly ill-equipped to handle it.
Because only idiots respond to "Black Lives Matter" with "All Lives Matter". Black Lives Matter is short for 'Black Lives Matter, too", not "Only Black Lives Matter". Only a moron or a Republican apologist would totally ignore context to interpret it that wan.
It's not about 'for you'. It's about 'for us'. The general public gets to vote on appropriate expenditures and appropriate ways to pay for them. Just because demagogues have convinced a sizeable portion of the public that progressive taxation isn't an appropriate way to pay for stuff doesn't mean that the public really believes it. They've really just been convinced that the money gets thrown down the drain (i.e., given away to poor people). And they believe that because they've been lied too. You (I assume) and I and Warren Buffet all know that the portion of money going to food stamps and welfare is a drop in the bucket. Medicaid costs more, but Social Security, Medicare and the military dwarf the rest of it - and the people will not vote to get rid of them just to please you.
So what if it's hypocritical. It's also correct. Infrastructure work needs to be done, and it will be good for the economy, not bad. So, all these guys are saying is that when they're forced to help pay for it along with everybody else, they won't mind it. And they think you shouldn't mind it, either - or wouldn't if you really looked at the effects of infrastructure spending objectively instead of through Grover Norquist's warped ideology.
And they have some standing to say all this, because they stand to pay a lot - and they've actually looked at the issue, and understand how the economy works. All the recent attempts at austerity have aimed at the wrong targets - and hurt the economy in the process. The 'right' targets for austerity are also bad ones - if you think Social Security, Medicare and the military are worthy things to pay for. And if you don't think they're worth paying for, just bear in mind that the vast majority of voters do.
And that, my friends, is why Trump, Sanders or a newly progressive Hillary Clinton will be our next president. And Trump is just a protest vote against the Republican party for having fooled working class whites in the past that their interests were aligned with the Koch's. Of course, he's an awful protest vote, if only because he stands for more of the same tax-cutting ooga booga as the rest of the Republicans, but nobody ever said it was a smart protest vote.
Perhaps. But your chemical patents were patents on actual inventions that your company, presumably, intended to manufacture and sell. Microsoft's patents are on ideas that are not particularly inventive - or original, and intended largely to stifle competition. The granddaddy of Microsoft moneymaking patents is the one they have on the FAT32 long/short filename setup. That patent is not there to prevent someone else from designing a crazy long/short filename scheme. It's there because that scheme is used by Windows, and anyone who wants their removable storage device to work with Windows PC's is pretty much forced to use it. So that patent was applied for and those lawyers were paid in order to enable extortion based on a form of monopoly tying that shouldn't be allowed in the first place.
If the software in question were significant enough to get people to pay for it instead of implementing it themselves, Microsoft could sell that software instead of extorting patent royalties. In the case of Windows itself, that's true. Anyone who wants Windows functionality has to pay Microsoft for the copyrighted OS software. Anyone who simply wants to plug an SD card into their Android device can use free software to do that.
There are plenty of examples of software patents that have been shown to be bogus based on prior art and rubber stamping 'inventions' that are simply not understood well enough by the P.O. employees to evaluate them properly. As a Slashdot reader, I assume you know this.
But even if you allow that some software patents are truly valid, how do you assign a cost to licensing them? Microsoft is currently charging Android device makers as much to license their unspecified patents as they used to charge for their own OS, which implemented those patents - as well as a whole mess of other stuff, including y'know, an OS... These days they don't even charge for their own OS. So how can the courts support charging for someone else's implementation of a patent that has no monetary value? Okay, I guess there's some value to the ability to threaten to keep a competitors products off the shelves, but is that really what patent licensing was supposed to be about?
Actually, it's not the ad that compromised the computers - it's the piece of software that the ad prompted the users to download and install. Presumably antivirus software could protect against that without blocking the ad. I assume malware that hijacks a computer is illegal, and presumably ad networks don't accept ads anonymously (or do they?). If so, how do they get paid? It shouldn't be too hard to track down someone trying to distribute malware this way...
Just because 'death by terrorist' is rare, doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to prevent it. Whether making Apple help decrypt the phone of a known terrorist is a step too far down a slippery slope, or whether our courts can be counted on to limit the access just to cases like this is a valid discussion. 'Don't worry because terrorists don't kill a lot of people in the US' is pretty lame. If nothing else, terrorists caused the US to spend a trillion or so dollars that could've been better used elsewhere. And hundreds of millions of us to have to take our shoes and belts off to get onto an airplane. Terrorism is more than just the lives lost - that's the whole point. To induce, y'know, terror. And, yes, maybe overreactions. But still...
Off topic a bit, but does anybody but me think the 'erase phone after 10 bad password tries' feature takes 'security' too far? I'm not nuts about a feature that lets any arbitrary malicious person with physical access to my phone wipe the whole thing by simply entering 10 bad passwords. How about just making them wait a few hours after 10 bad passwords - perhaps increasing that delay after each 10 bad tries until the correct password has been entered. That'd make a brute force crack impossible, but still protect my phone from a nasty prankster - which is a more likely scenario, after all, than the FBI with a search warrant.
So far, the ads are not animated. They change periodically, and are pretty bright - so it's a bit of new noise in the neighborhood. Haven't used the wifi yet for anything other than verifying that it works, and it automatically picks you up as you progress up the street - though it does cut out between kiosks, so the range doesn't seem to be seemless. Remains to be seen how useful this is - unless, you live withing wifi range and can use it as a free ISP...
Edward Snowden took knowingly classified stuff and released it to the press. That's clearly illegal. The fact that you think this is a remotely valid comparison just underscores your anti-Clinton derangement.
It seems to me that read-write ext filesystem support on Windows would be a more important accomplishment - enabling ext-formatted SD cards to be used on mobile devices and eliminating one of the more egregious bits of Microsoft patent blackmail. Obviously, nobody uses FAT for any other reason than Windows compatibility. Besides the silliness of allowing a patent on what is essentially a kludgy workaround for an ancient filesystem, the thing is a de-facto standard (see above - nobody would use it on the merits). If it must be patentable, then if ever there were a case for a FRAND licensing requirement, this is it. It boggles the mind that the license paid by the SD card manufacturer isn't enough to cover actually using the card - but our patent system boggles the mind in many ways...
In any case, a reliable ext driver for Windows would make it practical for device manufacturers to use the free ext filesystems.
Hillary is not going to jail - that's not even a remote possibility. She may not win the nomination - and yes, batshit like this may be part of why. But Hillary's not under indictment - or even suspicion - of a crime. The FBI is looking into whether any secrets were compromised - not whether stuff that later became classified was sent to HRC via email. The private email server wasn't even against regulations when she was in office. There was a recommendation to only use the government email - but it wasn't codified into a regulation until Kerry got in. And yes, for the zillionth time Powell and Rice both used personal email addresses - and both received emails that were later classified. And neither leaked any classified info to anyone who wasn't supposed to have it. Neither did Hillary. General Patraeus - yep, gave stuff to his journalist girlfriend. That's a crime - not a double standard.
Who continued to pay these lawyers all this time? And what did they hope to accomplish?
Except that Chrome on Android works much better than Firefox. I like and use Firefox on Windows, where it works fine - and I use Chrome on Linux where Firefox doesn't work as well. In any case, it would be a good thing if the default browser on most Android devices supported ad blocking. And 'acceptable ads' are just that - acceptable. I don't think 'no ads' is a viable model for free internet content. Do you?
They kind of have to do this. As mobile takes over, AdBlock is less and less prevalent - and the web is less and less usable. It's potentially interesting that Google has signed on to this. Whether you love or hate them, it'd be really nice if Chrome on Android supported AdBlock Plus. And Apple's support for ad blockers on iOS, is definitely a shot across Google's bow that they're going to have to address. Google's ads are probably as close to the 'acceptable ads' standards as any - basically because their site is funded by getting you to click ads - not simply getting you to see them. And, of course, by the very nature of the services they offer, they're 'tracking' you anyway - though not directly on behalf of their advertisers (don't get me started...).
They could've easily provided tools to let you port WIN32 code to ARM. They didn't want to. Instead they wanted to move to an app store model (just like Apple, duh) based around Metro stuff. Didn't work, and maybe they're kicking themselves now. Or maybe not - there may have been compelling reasons not to support WIN32 code on ARM - but in any case, that's why RT failed.
Maybe they want it for Surface tablets (and other detachables). They may have lost the phone war, but they're making a dent in the touchscreen world with these 2-in-1 laptops - and Android's hot on their tail there. The Pixel C is a proof of concept that's not viable today, but let's just say it has a more viable future as a competitor for Windows laptops than Windows Phone has as a competitor for Android and iOS...
I'm surprised there's still a 'market' for SwiftKey these days. The native Google keyboard in Android does the same stuff pretty well nowadays. I'd be surprised if Apple didn't also do the same.