They didn't give them $150million, they bought $150million of stock.
At the time it was more like a gift because Apple was going down fast.
If so, then it was surely the gift that kept on giving. How many times has Apple stock split since then (and now trading at well over $300/share)? Microsoft made a killing on the deal, even if it is only petty cash to their $40+ billion (or whatever it is these days).
except the only way to load an app on iDevice is via the app store, so if i want to sell an app for iDevices, i have to go through them. At least i can side load on android.
I maybe a special case. But I was diagnosed as a kid with ADHD. However I refused to take the medicine all of my life(I still have ADHD). But not being medicated didn't affect me. I always had top grades, and now enjoying finishing my PhD.d In physics. Anyway I am not advocating abstaining medication.
I would, in many cases. In America in particular people tend to be over-medicated. I had somewhat high blood pressure a few years ago and the doctor immediately wanted to put me on statins. I said no, did the Atkins diet instead (hey, it was a good excuse to eat lots of red meat), dropped 70 pounds, have kept it off, and now have normal blood pressure and no medication to take.
My wife has a condition that requires her to drink a lot of water (no, it's not diabetes). In the US they had her on one pill to flush the water through, and another to replace all the minerals the first pill was flushing out. In the UK they took her off of both, advised her to drink 8 pints of water each day, which she's done and she's been fine. In fact, she's been much healthier than before, and her blood work shows a far better balance across the spectrum than when she was taking those damn meds the US doctors pushed on her.
Back to ADHD -- I suspect most people diagnosed with ADHD have short attention spans not because of any deficit, dysfunction or syndrome, but simply because they are vastly more intelligent than the slow brains trying to keep their attention. Their attention wanders in order to fill the empty gaps while their slower teachers, parents, and siblings chunter on, stringing together obvious and often uninteresting commentary that the listener has already leaped ten steps ahead of, diverged from, and pursued to more interesting conclusions, and because their mind has wandered, they are diagnosed with ADHD and subsequently drugged.
That's what happened to me as a kid, and the Ritalin took all of the color out of life. Fortunately I only took it for a few months...once I was back off it, my mind was once again free to soar, and I went back to thinking circles around the people who'd drugged me in the first place. And while I'm no slouch, I've known plenty of people smarter than me that have experienced the same thing, which makes me suspect it is quite commonplace.
My wife exhibits similar traits (a tendency to tune out and think of other things). Not-so-coincidentally, she is extremely intelligent. Lucky for her, she was living in the UK before any of those mind-numbing drugs became such popular soporifics for boisterous, curious, unusually intelligent kids.
Never attribute to Evil what can be explained by stupidity (or incompetence)
That's great advice if your goal is to bias the playing field (and politics) in favor of Evil.
The inverse of what you said should also be applied:
"Never attribute to stupidity and incompetence what is (likely) a result of Evil"...with the result that, in a situation like this, we say quite unbiasedly "this DA is either Evil/Corrupt/Vicious or Incompetent/Stupid" rather than the usual "he's probably just incompetent" benefit-of-the-doubt we habitually give these people as they deconstruct and destroy our civil society.
Memes like the above are a big part of the reason why so much evil has such an easy time flourishing in this world.
This feature is really part of the upgrade to the bluetooth stack me thinks. Up until now, there was no way to do voice dialing with Android phones.
Won't matter, now that that greedy fuck Ellison has decided to wipe out Android in America with his bogus software patent lawsuit based on, of all things, Java.
Time to dump that piece of shit technology (Java) in the trash heap where it belongs, along with Oracle.
Pity--I was going to buy an Android handset in the US in about a month...now I'll stick to the cheapest non-American handset I can get. That's another chunk of economic activity software patents has cost that ever less relevant country's economy.
I mean, really, why should there be laws against fraud? I mean, someone rips you off, you just go do business with someone else (who also rips you off, because it's legal). False advertising? I mean, if companies use false advertising, it'll catch up to them and you'll do business with someone else. Your roof caves in on your family's heads because the contractor cut corners on material or workmanship, and didn't build the supporting structures right? Do business with a different contractor next time. Airlines don't maintain their planes right, and kill or disable passengers? Well, people will just do business with other airlines, right?
Maybe your employer should be free to expose you to hazardous materials or unsafe working conditions? I mean, you can always quit and go work for someone else, right?
You have just perfectly described the crux of Libertarian/Teabagger groupthink.
If no one actually bootlegs the event, who pays the monetary damages and attorney fees?
The innocent single mother whose daughter's IP address is "erroneously" identified as an offender (more accurately: framed for the offense), and is forced to settle for a few thousand or face permanent bankruptcy.
Welcome to twenty-first century justice American Style(tm), where you've been found guilty, before you even get out of bed, of a dozen offenses you've never committed. Land of the Free, home of the Brave (as they cower before a legion of Hollywood attorneys and FBI agents jumping over the trussed up bodies of thousands of missing persons to get to hypothetical copyright violators before they get a chance to prove their innocence, but I digress).
While I used to often boast about having learned at least as much on the net as I did in class, the net is no substitution for a formal education. There is value to the structure of coursework, to the demands of learning material and being tested on it, and to requirement to learn to think and apply logic. There is also value in the advise and teaching of professors, as well as the social and academic interaction you have with other students.
The Internet is a wonderful tool, and may become something much greater, but it is certainly no replacement for a university education just yet.
Obama is? He took three months to consider his general's report, then gave the man LESS than the MINIMUM number of troops the general asked for-- as if to claim that he somehow knew better.
My point is this: don't pin it on W. All of our leaders are rife with incompetence.
That may as be (I certainly think Clinton would have made a vastly better president than Obama--his inexperience is showing rather painfully in many venues), but that is irrelevant to this wikileaks leak.
All of the documentation covers a time prior to Obama taking office, so the grandparent is correct: this reflects entirely on Dubya and his administration, not Obama, whatever Obama's failings may be.
Well there's a tangible benefit to 3D right there! No more supertrendyshakycam!
You say that in jest, but I would seriously like supertrendyshakycam shots to die the death they've so richly deserved these last 10 years or so, and if 3-d kills that, it's well worth the darker, dimmer imagery.
You mean the system where each state has to pay the bulk of the maintenance and many can't even keep the roads to a state that won't rip the undercarriage out from under you? Sounds like a great idea!
Yes. It is vastly better than the monopolistic privately-owned infrastructure that has left the US with abysmal internet connectivity when compared to the rest of the developed world, and like the highway system, would be a huge boon to business.
OK, fine. If the telco monopolists are going to claim that basic regulation of their service to maintain network neutrality and ensure a sensible, working Internet constitutes an exercise of eminent domain (though somehow, similar regulation of voice signaling does not...like to see the pretzel-brains that can argue that with a straight face), then fuck 'em. Congress should just nationalize the entire telco grid and have the FCC lease back access to any comers on a common price basis, reducing the telcos to value-added providers and making them compete with any and all ISP start-ups on a level playing field. Kind of like our national highway system...
Come to think of it, that's a pretty good idea no matter how the courts rule.
So the cost of innovation becomes incredibly expensive for the small guy, and any legal disagreement gets resolved in favor of the ones with deepest pockets. The system as it is is flawed, and deeply skewed towards the party who has more money.
What, you believed just because the told you patents were to promote progress in the sciences, that that is their real reason?
I've got new for you: the patent system is working precisely as designed.
Namely: 1. Innovation is successfully limited to (mostly) large enterprises 2. Smaller innovators can be sued or shut down on demand, or allowed to flourish if the appropriate corporate or political pockets are lined 3. Technological advancement is prevented from going exponential. Indeed, it is slowed to a relative, governable crawl, ensuring those in power stay there in perpetuity.
So far, little hiccups like the emergence of the Internet aside, the patent system is delivering precisely the results its designers and administrators intend. The only losers are the rest of humanity, and we are not, quite frankly, of any concern to the ruling class.
As others have noted, if you need special punctuation for sarcasm, you aren't doing it right.
On the other hand, what a great way to dodge accusations of libel alt+U0161
President (Bush | Obama) has sex with baby chickens every Sunday while listening to old 8-tracks of Jerry Fallwell alt+U0161
PROSECUTION: You have deceived millions of your fellow Americans into believing their (former president | president) engages in sexual relations with assorted poultry while taking communion.
DEFENSE: No I didn't. It's obvious I didn't mean what I said, because I put a alt+U0161 on the end of the sentence.
JUDGE: Case dismissed.
Now replace with a plausible accusation (I have proof that June is sleeping with Joe's husband), yet defamatory, aimed at a colleague or local figure, rather than a national politician. Rinse, lather, and repeat for an easy recipe to defame with no legal liability. After all, we all know punctuation speaks louder than words, alt+U0161
And once again, idealistic people get behind an inferior technology for ideological reasons while everyone else moves forward.
What a crock. Avoiding patent lawsuits and patent trolls is as important as any other licensing constraints. It has nothing to do with idealogy and everything to do with practical and pragmatic legal and business realities.
VP8 may or may not be technically inferior to H264--an article comparing encoders tweaked to support specific benchmarks against one that is not is hardly a definitive study on the topic, but it is most certainly "good enough" and vastly more suitable than H264 for anyone interested in avoiding patent lawsuits or licensing issues in the future, which is close to 100% of the non-proprietary world and a sizable percentage of the proprietary world.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal place for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal environment for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal environment for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
You believe the government has a duty to protect you?
Why, yes, actually. Ever heard of "social contract"?
Or the police? Or the coastguard? Or the military?
One of the primary duties of government is to protect its citizens, in any number of contexts. The extreme right/libertarian crowd have either forgotten (or never learned) the key difference between civilization and the jungle, and what makes a society a society rather than a rubble-strewn city such as Mogadishu. One of the dangers of learning your socioeconomic from a fiction writer like Ayn Rand and closing your mind to anything not conforming to her toxic ideology, but I digress.
I think that point is that if Apple did this it wouldn't just be shrugged off. The Android fanbois would be coming out of the wordwork to howl about how Apple is messing with people's phones.
As one who is leaning strongly toward Android and won't buy an Apple iPhone for a number of reasons, some technical, some philosophical, some practical, I have to agree with this.
Having anything removed or tampered with by any outside agency on hardware I have purchased is unacceptable, full stop. I don't care what ToS conditions are buried forty pages down in the Android App store's click-through screen, in two-point type.
Google should not get a free pass on this, any more than Apple would, and it's made me reconsider my intended purchase very carefully. Not that I'm about to become an iSlave to Jobs... but I am equally unwilling to become a gSlave to Google. This kind of unilateral tampering with other people's property, ToS or not, simply should not be condoned or tolerated, whatever their motivation.
Is there a straightforward howto on this. I'm planning my next phone to be an Android phone, swayed in no small part by the openness of the android platform. However, the idea that google can uninstall anything on my phone isn't acceptable at all (but neither is becoming an iSlave to Jobs, or an eSlave to Microsoft--so much for competition).
What I'd like to be able to do is
1. Download an app from an android app store 2. install it in such a way that the app store has no permissions to delete the app 3. still be notified of any updates and update, manually if that's what it takes to ensure #2 above.
In your experience with that plaform, is that doable with a reasonable amount of simplicity?
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They didn't give them $150million, they bought $150million of stock.
At the time it was more like a gift because Apple was going down fast.
If so, then it was surely the gift that kept on giving. How many times has Apple stock split since then (and now trading at well over $300/share)? Microsoft made a killing on the deal, even if it is only petty cash to their $40+ billion (or whatever it is these days).
except the only way to load an app on iDevice is via the app store, so if i want to sell an app for iDevices, i have to go through them. At least i can side load on android.
Yup. A good reason not to pander to iSlaves.[1]
said that, if you don't agree with laws please go forth and make them change. this is a democracy after all.
I would refer you to this profoundly insightful and informative George Carlin clip.
"It's a big club, and you're not in it."
I maybe a special case. But I was diagnosed as a kid with ADHD. However I refused to take the medicine all of my life(I still have ADHD). But not being medicated didn't affect me. I always had top grades, and now enjoying finishing my PhD.d In physics. Anyway I am not advocating abstaining medication.
I would, in many cases. In America in particular people tend to be over-medicated. I had somewhat high blood pressure a few years ago and the doctor immediately wanted to put me on statins. I said no, did the Atkins diet instead (hey, it was a good excuse to eat lots of red meat), dropped 70 pounds, have kept it off, and now have normal blood pressure and no medication to take.
My wife has a condition that requires her to drink a lot of water (no, it's not diabetes). In the US they had her on one pill to flush the water through, and another to replace all the minerals the first pill was flushing out. In the UK they took her off of both, advised her to drink 8 pints of water each day, which she's done and she's been fine. In fact, she's been much healthier than before, and her blood work shows a far better balance across the spectrum than when she was taking those damn meds the US doctors pushed on her.
Back to ADHD -- I suspect most people diagnosed with ADHD have short attention spans not because of any deficit, dysfunction or syndrome, but simply because they are vastly more intelligent than the slow brains trying to keep their attention. Their attention wanders in order to fill the empty gaps while their slower teachers, parents, and siblings chunter on, stringing together obvious and often uninteresting commentary that the listener has already leaped ten steps ahead of, diverged from, and pursued to more interesting conclusions, and because their mind has wandered, they are diagnosed with ADHD and subsequently drugged.
That's what happened to me as a kid, and the Ritalin took all of the color out of life. Fortunately I only took it for a few months...once I was back off it, my mind was once again free to soar, and I went back to thinking circles around the people who'd drugged me in the first place. And while I'm no slouch, I've known plenty of people smarter than me that have experienced the same thing, which makes me suspect it is quite commonplace.
My wife exhibits similar traits (a tendency to tune out and think of other things). Not-so-coincidentally, she is extremely intelligent. Lucky for her, she was living in the UK before any of those mind-numbing drugs became such popular soporifics for boisterous, curious, unusually intelligent kids.
I work for a federal contractor; you have NO idea how stupid civil servants can be.
Or how evil and capricious their bosses (and, to be frank, some of them) can be.
Never attribute to Evil what can be explained by stupidity (or incompetence)
That's great advice if your goal is to bias the playing field (and politics) in favor of Evil.
The inverse of what you said should also be applied:
"Never attribute to stupidity and incompetence what is (likely) a result of Evil" ...with the result that, in a situation like this, we say quite unbiasedly "this DA is either Evil/Corrupt/Vicious or Incompetent/Stupid" rather than the usual "he's probably just incompetent" benefit-of-the-doubt we habitually give these people as they deconstruct and destroy our civil society.
Memes like the above are a big part of the reason why so much evil has such an easy time flourishing in this world.
This feature is really part of the upgrade to the bluetooth stack me thinks. Up until now, there was no way to do voice dialing with Android phones.
Won't matter, now that that greedy fuck Ellison has decided to wipe out Android in America with his bogus software patent lawsuit based on, of all things, Java.
Time to dump that piece of shit technology (Java) in the trash heap where it belongs, along with Oracle.
Pity--I was going to buy an Android handset in the US in about a month...now I'll stick to the cheapest non-American handset I can get. That's another chunk of economic activity software patents has cost that ever less relevant country's economy.
I mean, really, why should there be laws against fraud? I mean, someone rips you off, you just go do business with someone else (who also rips you off, because it's legal). False advertising? I mean, if companies use false advertising, it'll catch up to them and you'll do business with someone else. Your roof caves in on your family's heads because the contractor cut corners on material or workmanship, and didn't build the supporting structures right? Do business with a different contractor next time. Airlines don't maintain their planes right, and kill or disable passengers? Well, people will just do business with other airlines, right?
Maybe your employer should be free to expose you to hazardous materials or unsafe working conditions? I mean, you can always quit and go work for someone else, right?
You have just perfectly described the crux of Libertarian/Teabagger groupthink.
If no one actually bootlegs the event, who pays the monetary damages and attorney fees?
The innocent single mother whose daughter's IP address is "erroneously" identified as an offender (more accurately: framed for the offense), and is forced to settle for a few thousand or face permanent bankruptcy.
Welcome to twenty-first century justice American Style(tm), where you've been found guilty, before you even get out of bed, of a dozen offenses you've never committed. Land of the Free, home of the Brave (as they cower before a legion of Hollywood attorneys and FBI agents jumping over the trussed up bodies of thousands of missing persons to get to hypothetical copyright violators before they get a chance to prove their innocence, but I digress).
I think they were kidding about that.
Exactly. Your first clue is the Onion citation.
While I used to often boast about having learned at least as much on the net as I did in class, the net is no substitution for a formal education. There is value to the structure of coursework, to the demands of learning material and being tested on it, and to requirement to learn to think and apply logic. There is also value in the advise and teaching of professors, as well as the social and academic interaction you have with other students.
The Internet is a wonderful tool, and may become something much greater, but it is certainly no replacement for a university education just yet.
Obama is? He took three months to consider his general's report, then gave the man LESS than the MINIMUM number of troops the general asked for-- as if to claim that he somehow knew better.
My point is this: don't pin it on W. All of our leaders are rife with incompetence.
That may as be (I certainly think Clinton would have made a vastly better president than Obama--his inexperience is showing rather painfully in many venues), but that is irrelevant to this wikileaks leak.
All of the documentation covers a time prior to Obama taking office, so the grandparent is correct: this reflects entirely on Dubya and his administration, not Obama, whatever Obama's failings may be.
Well there's a tangible benefit to 3D right there! No more supertrendyshakycam!
You say that in jest, but I would seriously like supertrendyshakycam shots to die the death they've so richly deserved these last 10 years or so, and if 3-d kills that, it's well worth the darker, dimmer imagery.
You mean the system where each state has to pay the bulk of the maintenance and many can't even keep the roads to a state that won't rip the undercarriage out from under you? Sounds like a great idea!
Yes. It is vastly better than the monopolistic privately-owned infrastructure that has left the US with abysmal internet connectivity when compared to the rest of the developed world, and like the highway system, would be a huge boon to business.
OK, fine. If the telco monopolists are going to claim that basic regulation of their service to maintain network neutrality and ensure a sensible, working Internet constitutes an exercise of eminent domain (though somehow, similar regulation of voice signaling does not...like to see the pretzel-brains that can argue that with a straight face), then fuck 'em. Congress should just nationalize the entire telco grid and have the FCC lease back access to any comers on a common price basis, reducing the telcos to value-added providers and making them compete with any and all ISP start-ups on a level playing field. Kind of like our national highway system...
Come to think of it, that's a pretty good idea no matter how the courts rule.
So the cost of innovation becomes incredibly expensive for the small guy, and any legal disagreement gets resolved in favor of the ones with deepest pockets. The system as it is is flawed, and deeply skewed towards the party who has more money.
What, you believed just because the told you patents were to promote progress in the sciences, that that is their real reason?
I've got new for you: the patent system is working precisely as designed.
Namely:
1. Innovation is successfully limited to (mostly) large enterprises
2. Smaller innovators can be sued or shut down on demand, or allowed to flourish if the appropriate corporate or political pockets are lined
3. Technological advancement is prevented from going exponential. Indeed, it is slowed to a relative, governable crawl, ensuring those in power stay there in perpetuity.
So far, little hiccups like the emergence of the Internet aside, the patent system is delivering precisely the results its designers and administrators intend. The only losers are the rest of humanity, and we are not, quite frankly, of any concern to the ruling class.
As others have noted, if you need special punctuation for sarcasm, you aren't doing it right.
On the other hand, what a great way to dodge accusations of libel alt+U0161
President (Bush | Obama) has sex with baby chickens every Sunday while listening to old 8-tracks of Jerry Fallwell alt+U0161
PROSECUTION: You have deceived millions of your fellow Americans into believing their (former president | president) engages in sexual relations with assorted poultry while taking communion.
DEFENSE: No I didn't. It's obvious I didn't mean what I said, because I put a alt+U0161 on the end of the sentence.
JUDGE: Case dismissed.
Now replace with a plausible accusation (I have proof that June is sleeping with Joe's husband), yet defamatory, aimed at a colleague or local figure, rather than a national politician. Rinse, lather, and repeat for an easy recipe to defame with no legal liability. After all, we all know punctuation speaks louder than words, alt+U0161
And once again, idealistic people get behind an inferior technology for ideological reasons while everyone else moves forward.
What a crock. Avoiding patent lawsuits and patent trolls is as important as any other licensing constraints. It has nothing to do with idealogy and everything to do with practical and pragmatic legal and business realities.
VP8 may or may not be technically inferior to H264--an article comparing encoders tweaked to support specific benchmarks against one that is not is hardly a definitive study on the topic, but it is most certainly "good enough" and vastly more suitable than H264 for anyone interested in avoiding patent lawsuits or licensing issues in the future, which is close to 100% of the non-proprietary world and a sizable percentage of the proprietary world.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal place for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal environment for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
I grew up on a farm, and the only people who had air conditioning were living in town. I didn't even know what allergies were; none of my friends or anyone in their family had them, until I started making friends with people who lived in town and had air conditioning and super clean houses. THEY had allergies.
Your unscientific anecdote is negated by my own equally unscientific anecdote:
I grew up in a small farming village, a tiny population in a state with one of the lowest levels of air pollution, with no air conditioning whatsoever. I had absolutely terrible allergies, up to and including asthma, eyes glued shut due to "sleep" (secretions), and the need for serious medicine that didn't really help much.
The best thing I ever did was move to a city, get air conditioning, and stay the fuck away from the grass, trees, and other foliage that made my life a living hell. I didn't get allergies from living in the city as you so erroneously imply, I got them from being exposed to pollen in the first place, and short of paving the planet, a large city with relatively little green space is in my experience an ideal environment for those who suffer from Hay Fever, pollution notwithstanding.
You believe the government has a duty to protect you?
Why, yes, actually. Ever heard of "social contract"?
Or the police? Or the coastguard? Or the military?
One of the primary duties of government is to protect its citizens, in any number of contexts. The extreme right/libertarian crowd have either forgotten (or never learned) the key difference between civilization and the jungle, and what makes a society a society rather than a rubble-strewn city such as Mogadishu. One of the dangers of learning your socioeconomic from a fiction writer like Ayn Rand and closing your mind to anything not conforming to her toxic ideology, but I digress.
No, inbreeding accounts for that fact.
You're confusing Indiana with Utah.
I think that point is that if Apple did this it wouldn't just be shrugged off. The Android fanbois would be coming out of the wordwork to howl about how Apple is messing with people's phones.
As one who is leaning strongly toward Android and won't buy an Apple iPhone for a number of reasons, some technical, some philosophical, some practical, I have to agree with this.
Having anything removed or tampered with by any outside agency on hardware I have purchased is unacceptable, full stop. I don't care what ToS conditions are buried forty pages down in the Android App store's click-through screen, in two-point type.
Google should not get a free pass on this, any more than Apple would, and it's made me reconsider my intended purchase very carefully. Not that I'm about to become an iSlave to Jobs ... but I am equally unwilling to become a gSlave to Google. This kind of unilateral tampering with other people's property, ToS or not, simply should not be condoned or tolerated, whatever their motivation.
Is there a straightforward howto on this. I'm planning my next phone to be an Android phone, swayed in no small part by the openness of the android platform. However, the idea that google can uninstall anything on my phone isn't acceptable at all (but neither is becoming an iSlave to Jobs, or an eSlave to Microsoft--so much for competition).
What I'd like to be able to do is
1. Download an app from an android app store
2. install it in such a way that the app store has no permissions to delete the app
3. still be notified of any updates and update, manually if that's what it takes to ensure #2 above.
In your experience with that plaform, is that doable with a reasonable amount of simplicity?