I think he's saying "I thought of it, but couldn't figure out how to implement it" is not enough of an 'invention' to merit a monopoly on the idea. Is that so complicated?
I thought of the 'dual flush' toilet years before they appeared on the scene - but never bothered to build one (nor did I know how). Does that mean I deserve royalties from the other people who also thought of it and actually built them.
So stop commenting on YouTube. It's not an invasion of your privacy for them to require your real name to comment on their site. Just don't do it. I personally am fine with them using my info to direct advertising at me, but am not okay with they're using me to sell stuff to other people (oh, that's Facebook, right). Seriously, 'Anything that stops google' from what? You can still watch the videos and copy/paste the URL's to friends. When they start posting 'Joe Blow just watched Deep Throat' to all his friends like Facebook does, get back to me, and I'll sign your 'Google is Evil' petition.
So... It apparently suits their business often enough that we that like open source and open protocols can benefit greatly from their contributions. And you have a problem with that?
What I don't get is why 'select text with the mouse' can't copy to the same clipboard that Ctrl-C does. At work, I use PuTTY to get to my unix system from a Windows desktop, and have gotten so used to 'highlight == copy' that I curse other Windows apps that don't do it. So I'm glad that KDE does. But I always find myself trying to right-click/past what I've highlighted and end up pasting the wrong thing. Why on earth are these 2 clipboards not unified?
I love KDE, though I was about to post my usual rant about the indecipherability of the difference between "Special Window Settings" and "Special Applications Settings" after opening the "About KDE" dialog in Dolphin to determine that I have KDE 4.10.5. When that dialog appeared completely on top of my Dolphin window, I figured I'd go in and give it a try to get "Remember position and size" to work sanely - and y'know what, it suddenly works as I thought it should. For some reason my old settings were recorded strangely. But when I erased them and set just the "Special Window" remember position and size setting for the main Dolphin window, it worked like a charm. I swear I've tried that before and it never worked right. Also worked for Firefox, which I had thought might be a lost cause - since it's not a KDE app, and I figured must not identify its dialogs so that kwin can distinguish them from the main window.
So, yes, KDE is crazy complex, but it seems to work well these days. And while you can safely ignore most of the settings, the ones most people want are there and mostly decipherable. Mixed praise, I know, but at least it's coming from an undeterred KDE fan...
Interesting. Why was this not done for the version 3-4 transition? Were the version 3 and 4 libraries unable to coexist? In my opinion, lack of backward compatibility has been the Achilles heel of KDE and most open source desktop environments. The fact that most of the code to run on top of those environments is also open source and can be released by distros at will (if it can be built against the distros' libraries) has helped to mitigate the problem - but of course, the fact that almost no closed source code exists for those environments is largely attibutable to the lack of backward compatibility with old versions. That - plus incompatibilities between different DE's - is the chicken that laid the egg of Linux desktop near-irrelevance. And I say that as a daily user of desktop Linux (Mint 15 KDE)...
I don't think that's right. Essentially, if you go with a platinum plan, you have similar out of pocket costs to a good corporate group plan - of course you're paying the full fare, so the premiums will appear higher than for an employee. But it probably compares favorably to what was available to individuals before.
There is still a downside, though. The plans offered (in New York state, at least) do not offer any out of network coverage at all (which stinks IMO). I'm sticking with my ex-employer's plan at the full-fare retiree rate - it's still better than the exchanges. But then, I have that option.
Did I mention, single payer would've been so much easier, cheaper, etc. If it could only ever have passed. Maybe if Vermont's plan is successful reality will have its day...
Microsoft never seeks to put its competition out of business. It wants them there 1. As monopoly insurance 2. As a source of ideas to copy
What they do seek to do is ensure that all their competitors operate on the same business model as Microsoft. i.e. writing and selling software with periodic incompatible upgrades that force everyone to buy their software again and again. This is the model Microsoft spent 30 years building monopolies to support, and they know they can win against anybody else operating on this model. But the internet has thrown some big wrenches into it
Open Source bugs them, but since it generates no serious direct revenue, they have a pretty easy time fighting there. After 20 years, OpenOffice still hasn't put much of a dent in Microsoft's software revenue stream. Microsoft can keep prices just low enough to make the free stuff just incompatible enough to be not worth the bother to most users - or at least most users that are willing to pay for an office suite. And a big advertising and lobbying budget doesn't hurt when the competition has neither.
On the other hand, Google perfected the advertising-supported software model. Their model makes tons of money, and when used to fund loss leader free software, it drives Microsoft nuts. Google Docs doesn't hold a candle to OpenOffice functionality or price-wise, but it was enough to bring Office 365 into being. And that's Google's general direction - show that it's possible to compete with even a behemoth like Microsoft when you adopt the web-based paradigm. Web-based apps are probably not as 'good' as desktop apps, but the ease of deployment makes them a win in many cases nonetheless. And then there's Android. The first application of this model to become a viable platform competitor to Windows. Google must be stopped!!!! iOS was never a threat. Apple could keep it's 15% market share, while serving as Microsoft's R&D department. That was the old model, and it seems pretty quaint today.
The only time I've actually seen the Koch name on anything is at Lincoln Center, and while it pisses me off that David Koch can buy some respectability with a big donation to the arts, I'm not about to boycott Lincoln Center's performances over it...
Well, there's one DDOS attack that's perfectly legal. Boycott Koch Industries and all their products. Of course it'd take some hunting to find out just what Koch does besides drill for oil, foul the environment and inject tons of money to corrupt the political system to their ends.
Some of them do, some of them don't. I agree that the website doesn't make it very easy to find out. But that's an indictment of the insurance industry - not obamacare's version of the health insurance industry. Obamacare attempts to solve the 'what's covered' part, but does nothing to get you into any particular doctor's office. A truly universal system would be much better. Let it have copays, deductables, whatever disincentives the fiscal scolds deem necesasry to keep usage down. But there need to be standards of coverage and universal acceptance by providers. Without that, you still have a hellish industry of healthcare denial massquerading as healthcare delivery.
Well, it doesn't list the premium, but I'll take your word for that. It's an HMO with zero out of network coverage, so you'd better hope their network is really good. That's the problem with health insurance (premium and post Obamacare). No way to do an apples to apples comparison.
I'm kind of skeptical that you got a 'better than platinum' plan for $165/month. I get better than platinum from my employer, and that costs me about $165/month for my share of the premium. But the actual premium is much higher. Since you seem eager to blame your new high premium on the birth control mandate, I'll just write you down as a confirmed right winger (or perhaps libertarian) that just wants to trash the system. Birth control probably brings prices down for everybody - childbirth isn't cheap.
But for yucks, I just went on to the New York state exchange to see what's available. The prices aren't bad (compared to the Cobra rates for my employer's group plan), but the coverage is pretty shitty. There is no coverage at all for out of network providers in any of the plans offered to me in NYS. Not sure if different people get offered different plans, but that's part of the problem. That's one thing about the exchanges that made the websites a pain to build and a nasty to use - they insist on getting your info upfront and only show you what's available to you. I'm sure the insurance industry's flunkies insisted on that being part of the law. No transparancy on what's being offered to anybody else - but at least they don't ask about pre-existing conditions. In any case, to the extent that this system was constructed to fit the needs of the insurance industry, it's, shall we say, less than optimal.
They don't care if it 'fails'. After a year or two and the fuss starts dying down, machines start breaking and needing to be replaced, and voila - the desktop monopoly kicks in, and windows 8.whatever is a smashing success (regardless of how many users want to smash their computers). Meanwhile, Windows Phone garners whatever market share it can manage based on a trickle of developers starting to code to the Metro UI. May not be enough to make WP a success, but without it, WP would've been a complete non-starter. None of which did Nokia any good, but Microsoft could care less about Nokia's collapse. They can afford to operate on a longer time frame, and if their partners can't, well that's not their problem.
For what it's worth, my company just bought Surface Pro's for all the sales force. Mostly as party favors handed out at a big 'how much money can we waste in one week' resort conference. But interestingly, management has taken an 'all our future products need to be cloud based' stance. And they still gave out Surfaces. To be fair, I guess, the Surface can probably run cloud stuff as well as any other tablet OS. In any case, it appears the corporate stranglehold may be starting to work its magic in the 'business mobile' arena...
I thought moving stuff to Play services was to get around the OEM's refusal to update the OS. They couldn't get their latest OS versions out to the public, causing enought API fragmentation to make trouble for developers - and PR trouble with reviewers (if not customers). So they moved new functionality to a user-upgradeable module releasable via Play. If that module happens to be closed source - because it's part of Play itself, I don't think you can assume that the purpose was to take Android proprietary. I guess we'll see if they keep stuff bundled that way, but for now, I'd assume that this is a transition step to get functionality out to users and render the old 'fragmentation' argument moot.
Closed source development can stop even when it does make money. The company I work for is run on a serial mergers and acquisitions model. They sell the company to a group of investors which proceeds to buy up a bunch of competing products with the intention of sucking them dry in order to fund development of the next generation. That next generation gets built only to the extent that they can sell the company to the next fool. But in the meantime one or more of the acquired products gets shut down as customers migrate away - to the competition. This amazing business model has survived 6 generations of M&A's.
Who said the cloud servers have to be Google's? Any application based off of a central database has no business being built as a desktop application. The support of web-based apps is just orders of magnitude simpler, and they work better than fat-client apps when deployed across multiple locations. Anything that makes building this kind of app easier and cross-platform, while producing a richer user experience than existing HTML stuff is a good thing. You don't have to use it for everything, but why are you so opposed to it existing?
Perhaps, but at least Chrome is available on multiple platforms. Microsoft non-compliance was aimed at lock-in to Windows. Google's seems to be aimed at making it possible to do most everything from a 'web browser'. A loftier goal and hard to call 'evil'. Where do new standards come from if not this kind of experimentaion?
Right. If anything, having an MSOffice-compatible app on Android phones just deepens the entrenchment of MSOffice, ratifying it's document formats as the one and only standard. Not saying they're not already enough of a standard that it's not important to be able to work with them - just that this isn't a challenge to Office. More of a challenge to using Office as a competitive advantage for Windows phone.
All this does is check the box of being able to open and make small edits to MSO documents on your phone. Assuming no app is going to provide full-featured support for editing office docs (on a phone - tablets with keyboards are another story), this is probably enough to prevent some free MS-provided app from giving Windows Phone a leg up that they wouldn't have without the MS desktop/office monopolies. If anybody is hurt by this, it'd be Apple, which doesn't have a similar free tool (yet?).
I'm not denying Android was a clone of iOS. Only denying that that's somehow illegal - except for violations of vague patents that should never have been issued in the first place. What Android is not is a fake Louis Vuitton bag trying to either fool the customer that they're buying the real thing or conspiring with the customer to fool their friends that they're carrying the real thing. Android is a touch-screen smartphone, like the iPhone, but different. Just like Levis skinny jeans are skinny jeans - like whatever designer 'invented' the concept of skinny jeans, but different enough as to not be deceptive.
And in every other realm besides technology these days, that definition of 'deceptively similar' illegal cloning holds. There's nothing deceptive about Android's similarity to iOS. Google did not steal any Apple code to build Android. You could possibly argue that Samsung dressed up their early Android phones to look deceptively like iPhones, though even that's a stretch. I don't think anybody buying a Samsung phone ever thought they were buying an iPhone - or that it could run apps written for the iPhone. I suppose somebody's friend might on casual glance have thought their friend's Samsung phone was a 'genuine' iPhone, but it's not as though they slapped an Apple logo on the thing.
Anyway, the issue at hand is one of bogus patents. You can defend the patent office if you like, but don't expect much support here on Slashdot for your position.
And somehow if Android had come out as a BlackBerry clone, that wouldn't have been a problem? Apparently, cloning is only a problem when the thing cloned is yours (and yours doesn't happen to be a clone of something else). Android and iOS have nothing in common other than the fact that both combine similar bits of existing technology into a package with similar functionality. Apple did it first. Congratulations. Their first mover advantage meant that they owned the market. If they lost a big chunk of it, it's due to their own missteps. If they were being undercut on price, they could've addressed the low-price market segment. They didn't want to. Too bad. The only lesson they seem to have learned from being trounced by Microsoft's inferior, but cheaper, desktop OS is that they should've patented the Mac. Sad.
The only thing in this that seems remotely patentable is the bit about "includes correlating, as a function of a fuzzy logic algorithm", in that the actual algorithm discussed might be truly inventive. But the patent doesn't seem to apply to the specific algorithm involved. Instead it seeks to patent the idea to use of an algorithm to enhance search. That is inane - as, apparently, is the US Patent Office.
I'll bet GS4 or HTC One users spend as much as iPhone users. Maybe they need to charge different rates based on the specific device being used. Advertisers aren't going to ditch Android altogether. Like it or not, that's where the mass of users are. Come to think of it, if only the flagship devices were subject to an ad barrage, I'd go with the cheapest Chinese slab of plastic that's powerful enough to get the job done. More likely, you'd get just as many ads - just a lower class of adds on the cheap devices - like late night TV.
I think the fear (and probable reality) is that your email is being read to better target ads when you search Google or when you use YouTube or some other Google site that uses display advertising. Of course, you're going to see ads on those sites anyway, so the issue is whether the technology to target those ads is unacceptably intrusive. For now, I'm taking Google's word that this is all done robotically, and no other nefarious use is being made of the resulting information. And if it were, and people found out, Google's business could vanish overnight (once we all got over our bouts of cold turkey). Hell, the more paranoid among us are already trying to opt out. Post-Snowden, I can't blame them - though I'm still (pretty) confident the NSA's not looking for me...
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I think he's saying "I thought of it, but couldn't figure out how to implement it" is not enough of an 'invention' to merit a monopoly on the idea. Is that so complicated?
I thought of the 'dual flush' toilet years before they appeared on the scene - but never bothered to build one (nor did I know how). Does that mean I deserve royalties from the other people who also thought of it and actually built them.
So stop commenting on YouTube. It's not an invasion of your privacy for them to require your real name to comment on their site. Just don't do it. I personally am fine with them using my info to direct advertising at me, but am not okay with they're using me to sell stuff to other people (oh, that's Facebook, right). Seriously, 'Anything that stops google' from what? You can still watch the videos and copy/paste the URL's to friends. When they start posting 'Joe Blow just watched Deep Throat' to all his friends like Facebook does, get back to me, and I'll sign your 'Google is Evil' petition.
So... It apparently suits their business often enough that we that like open source and open protocols can benefit greatly from their contributions. And you have a problem with that?
What I don't get is why 'select text with the mouse' can't copy to the same clipboard that Ctrl-C does. At work, I use PuTTY to get to my unix system from a Windows desktop, and have gotten so used to 'highlight == copy' that I curse other Windows apps that don't do it. So I'm glad that KDE does. But I always find myself trying to right-click/past what I've highlighted and end up pasting the wrong thing. Why on earth are these 2 clipboards not unified?
I love KDE, though I was about to post my usual rant about the indecipherability of the difference between "Special Window Settings" and "Special Applications Settings" after opening the "About KDE" dialog in Dolphin to determine that I have KDE 4.10.5. When that dialog appeared completely on top of my Dolphin window, I figured I'd go in and give it a try to get "Remember position and size" to work sanely - and y'know what, it suddenly works as I thought it should. For some reason my old settings were recorded strangely. But when I erased them and set just the "Special Window" remember position and size setting for the main Dolphin window, it worked like a charm. I swear I've tried that before and it never worked right. Also worked for Firefox, which I had thought might be a lost cause - since it's not a KDE app, and I figured must not identify its dialogs so that kwin can distinguish them from the main window.
So, yes, KDE is crazy complex, but it seems to work well these days. And while you can safely ignore most of the settings, the ones most people want are there and mostly decipherable. Mixed praise, I know, but at least it's coming from an undeterred KDE fan...
Interesting. Why was this not done for the version 3-4 transition? Were the version 3 and 4 libraries unable to coexist? In my opinion, lack of backward compatibility has been the Achilles heel of KDE and most open source desktop environments. The fact that most of the code to run on top of those environments is also open source and can be released by distros at will (if it can be built against the distros' libraries) has helped to mitigate the problem - but of course, the fact that almost no closed source code exists for those environments is largely attibutable to the lack of backward compatibility with old versions. That - plus incompatibilities between different DE's - is the chicken that laid the egg of Linux desktop near-irrelevance. And I say that as a daily user of desktop Linux (Mint 15 KDE)...
I don't think that's right. Essentially, if you go with a platinum plan, you have similar out of pocket costs to a good corporate group plan - of course you're paying the full fare, so the premiums will appear higher than for an employee. But it probably compares favorably to what was available to individuals before.
There is still a downside, though. The plans offered (in New York state, at least) do not offer any out of network coverage at all (which stinks IMO). I'm sticking with my ex-employer's plan at the full-fare retiree rate - it's still better than the exchanges. But then, I have that option.
Did I mention, single payer would've been so much easier, cheaper, etc. If it could only ever have passed. Maybe if Vermont's plan is successful reality will have its day...
Microsoft never seeks to put its competition out of business. It wants them there
1. As monopoly insurance
2. As a source of ideas to copy
What they do seek to do is ensure that all their competitors operate on the same business model as Microsoft. i.e. writing and selling software with periodic incompatible upgrades that force everyone to buy their software again and again. This is the model Microsoft spent 30 years building monopolies to support, and they know they can win against anybody else operating on this model. But the internet has thrown some big wrenches into it
Open Source bugs them, but since it generates no serious direct revenue, they have a pretty easy time fighting there. After 20 years, OpenOffice still hasn't put much of a dent in Microsoft's software revenue stream. Microsoft can keep prices just low enough to make the free stuff just incompatible enough to be not worth the bother to most users - or at least most users that are willing to pay for an office suite. And a big advertising and lobbying budget doesn't hurt when the competition has neither.
On the other hand, Google perfected the advertising-supported software model. Their model makes tons of money, and when used to fund loss leader free software, it drives Microsoft nuts. Google Docs doesn't hold a candle to OpenOffice functionality or price-wise, but it was enough to bring Office 365 into being. And that's Google's general direction - show that it's possible to compete with even a behemoth like Microsoft when you adopt the web-based paradigm. Web-based apps are probably not as 'good' as desktop apps, but the ease of deployment makes them a win in many cases nonetheless. And then there's Android. The first application of this model to become a viable platform competitor to Windows. Google must be stopped!!!! iOS was never a threat. Apple could keep it's 15% market share, while serving as Microsoft's R&D department. That was the old model, and it seems pretty quaint today.
I was afraid of that.
The only time I've actually seen the Koch name on anything is at Lincoln Center, and while it pisses me off that David Koch can buy some respectability with a big donation to the arts, I'm not about to boycott Lincoln Center's performances over it...
Well, there's one DDOS attack that's perfectly legal. Boycott Koch Industries and all their products. Of course it'd take some hunting to find out just what Koch does besides drill for oil, foul the environment and inject tons of money to corrupt the political system to their ends.
Some of them do, some of them don't. I agree that the website doesn't make it very easy to find out. But that's an indictment of the insurance industry - not obamacare's version of the health insurance industry. Obamacare attempts to solve the 'what's covered' part, but does nothing to get you into any particular doctor's office. A truly universal system would be much better. Let it have copays, deductables, whatever disincentives the fiscal scolds deem necesasry to keep usage down. But there need to be standards of coverage and universal acceptance by providers. Without that, you still have a hellish industry of healthcare denial massquerading as healthcare delivery.
I meant pre and post.
Well, it doesn't list the premium, but I'll take your word for that. It's an HMO with zero out of network coverage, so you'd better hope their network is really good. That's the problem with health insurance (premium and post Obamacare). No way to do an apples to apples comparison.
I'm kind of skeptical that you got a 'better than platinum' plan for $165/month. I get better than platinum from my employer, and that costs me about $165/month for my share of the premium. But the actual premium is much higher. Since you seem eager to blame your new high premium on the birth control mandate, I'll just write you down as a confirmed right winger (or perhaps libertarian) that just wants to trash the system. Birth control probably brings prices down for everybody - childbirth isn't cheap.
But for yucks, I just went on to the New York state exchange to see what's available. The prices aren't bad (compared to the Cobra rates for my employer's group plan), but the coverage is pretty shitty. There is no coverage at all for out of network providers in any of the plans offered to me in NYS. Not sure if different people get offered different plans, but that's part of the problem. That's one thing about the exchanges that made the websites a pain to build and a nasty to use - they insist on getting your info upfront and only show you what's available to you. I'm sure the insurance industry's flunkies insisted on that being part of the law. No transparancy on what's being offered to anybody else - but at least they don't ask about pre-existing conditions. In any case, to the extent that this system was constructed to fit the needs of the insurance industry, it's, shall we say, less than optimal.
They don't care if it 'fails'. After a year or two and the fuss starts dying down, machines start breaking and needing to be replaced, and voila - the desktop monopoly kicks in, and windows 8.whatever is a smashing success (regardless of how many users want to smash their computers). Meanwhile, Windows Phone garners whatever market share it can manage based on a trickle of developers starting to code to the Metro UI. May not be enough to make WP a success, but without it, WP would've been a complete non-starter. None of which did Nokia any good, but Microsoft could care less about Nokia's collapse. They can afford to operate on a longer time frame, and if their partners can't, well that's not their problem.
For what it's worth, my company just bought Surface Pro's for all the sales force. Mostly as party favors handed out at a big 'how much money can we waste in one week' resort conference. But interestingly, management has taken an 'all our future products need to be cloud based' stance. And they still gave out Surfaces. To be fair, I guess, the Surface can probably run cloud stuff as well as any other tablet OS. In any case, it appears the corporate stranglehold may be starting to work its magic in the 'business mobile' arena...
I thought moving stuff to Play services was to get around the OEM's refusal to update the OS. They couldn't get their latest OS versions out to the public, causing enought API fragmentation to make trouble for developers - and PR trouble with reviewers (if not customers). So they moved new functionality to a user-upgradeable module releasable via Play. If that module happens to be closed source - because it's part of Play itself, I don't think you can assume that the purpose was to take Android proprietary. I guess we'll see if they keep stuff bundled that way, but for now, I'd assume that this is a transition step to get functionality out to users and render the old 'fragmentation' argument moot.
Closed source development can stop even when it does make money. The company I work for is run on a serial mergers and acquisitions model. They sell the company to a group of investors which proceeds to buy up a bunch of competing products with the intention of sucking them dry in order to fund development of the next generation. That next generation gets built only to the extent that they can sell the company to the next fool. But in the meantime one or more of the acquired products gets shut down as customers migrate away - to the competition. This amazing business model has survived 6 generations of M&A's.
I'd mod myself 'funny' if it weren't all true...
Who said the cloud servers have to be Google's?
Any application based off of a central database has no business being built as a desktop application. The support of web-based apps is just orders of magnitude simpler, and they work better than fat-client apps when deployed across multiple locations. Anything that makes building this kind of app easier and cross-platform, while producing a richer user experience than existing HTML stuff is a good thing. You don't have to use it for everything, but why are you so opposed to it existing?
Perhaps, but at least Chrome is available on multiple platforms. Microsoft non-compliance was aimed at lock-in to Windows. Google's seems to be aimed at making it possible to do most everything from a 'web browser'. A loftier goal and hard to call 'evil'. Where do new standards come from if not this kind of experimentaion?
Right. If anything, having an MSOffice-compatible app on Android phones just deepens the entrenchment of MSOffice, ratifying it's document formats as the one and only standard. Not saying they're not already enough of a standard that it's not important to be able to work with them - just that this isn't a challenge to Office. More of a challenge to using Office as a competitive advantage for Windows phone.
All this does is check the box of being able to open and make small edits to MSO documents on your phone. Assuming no app is going to provide full-featured support for editing office docs (on a phone - tablets with keyboards are another story), this is probably enough to prevent some free MS-provided app from giving Windows Phone a leg up that they wouldn't have without the MS desktop/office monopolies. If anybody is hurt by this, it'd be Apple, which doesn't have a similar free tool (yet?).
I'm not denying Android was a clone of iOS. Only denying that that's somehow illegal - except for violations of vague patents that should never have been issued in the first place. What Android is not is a fake Louis Vuitton bag trying to either fool the customer that they're buying the real thing or conspiring with the customer to fool their friends that they're carrying the real thing. Android is a touch-screen smartphone, like the iPhone, but different. Just like Levis skinny jeans are skinny jeans - like whatever designer 'invented' the concept of skinny jeans, but different enough as to not be deceptive.
And in every other realm besides technology these days, that definition of 'deceptively similar' illegal cloning holds. There's nothing deceptive about Android's similarity to iOS. Google did not steal any Apple code to build Android. You could possibly argue that Samsung dressed up their early Android phones to look deceptively like iPhones, though even that's a stretch. I don't think anybody buying a Samsung phone ever thought they were buying an iPhone - or that it could run apps written for the iPhone. I suppose somebody's friend might on casual glance have thought their friend's Samsung phone was a 'genuine' iPhone, but it's not as though they slapped an Apple logo on the thing.
Anyway, the issue at hand is one of bogus patents. You can defend the patent office if you like, but don't expect much support here on Slashdot for your position.
And somehow if Android had come out as a BlackBerry clone, that wouldn't have been a problem? Apparently, cloning is only a problem when the thing cloned is yours (and yours doesn't happen to be a clone of something else). Android and iOS have nothing in common other than the fact that both combine similar bits of existing technology into a package with similar functionality. Apple did it first. Congratulations. Their first mover advantage meant that they owned the market. If they lost a big chunk of it, it's due to their own missteps. If they were being undercut on price, they could've addressed the low-price market segment. They didn't want to. Too bad. The only lesson they seem to have learned from being trounced by Microsoft's inferior, but cheaper, desktop OS is that they should've patented the Mac. Sad.
The only thing in this that seems remotely patentable is the bit about "includes correlating, as a function of a fuzzy logic algorithm", in that the actual algorithm discussed might be truly inventive. But the patent doesn't seem to apply to the specific algorithm involved. Instead it seeks to patent the idea to use of an algorithm to enhance search. That is inane - as, apparently, is the US Patent Office.
I'll bet GS4 or HTC One users spend as much as iPhone users. Maybe they need to charge different rates based on the specific device being used. Advertisers aren't going to ditch Android altogether. Like it or not, that's where the mass of users are. Come to think of it, if only the flagship devices were subject to an ad barrage, I'd go with the cheapest Chinese slab of plastic that's powerful enough to get the job done. More likely, you'd get just as many ads - just a lower class of adds on the cheap devices - like late night TV.
I think the fear (and probable reality) is that your email is being read to better target ads when you search Google or when you use YouTube or some other Google site that uses display advertising. Of course, you're going to see ads on those sites anyway, so the issue is whether the technology to target those ads is unacceptably intrusive. For now, I'm taking Google's word that this is all done robotically, and no other nefarious use is being made of the resulting information. And if it were, and people found out, Google's business could vanish overnight (once we all got over our bouts of cold turkey). Hell, the more paranoid among us are already trying to opt out. Post-Snowden, I can't blame them - though I'm still (pretty) confident the NSA's not looking for me...