1. Labor. Have you ever taken apart a Mini? If you don't know what you're doing, you'll never get it back together right. Have you ever paid someone to take apart a Mini & install RAM or HDfor you? See if that's the price difference.
They're assembling it from scratch one way or the other. It shouldn't cost them a single bean in labour to install a 500 GB hard drive instead of a 250 GB one; they both go in the same way.
The only cost difference to them is in the cost of the hardware from their suppliers.
You can't even play the "Apple quality costs premium" card. You're already paying the quality premium for the expensive basic model; there's no reason why using a different HDD should require a significant extra premium to maintain the high quality.
TFA agrees with you, and points out that they're being a little unfair. But what they really wanted to do was bitch and moan about £650 for something specced the same as an Acer Aspire Revo; and worse, ripping you off on "optional upgrades" by charging "triple the price difference".
All of which, if true, is pretty shitty. They could probably have found better "worst products of 2010" if they'd wanted to, but their criticisms of the Mac Mini seem valid enough.
Libel is a form of censorship that serves a valuable purpose.
Lets say I post to a website details that you are a violent child molesting rapist, with sufficient details to identify you. You might lose your job, your neighbours might get cross with you, women refuse to talk to you, etc. You take me to court and a court agrees that I have no reason to be saying what I'm saying. But the website I posted this too refuses to take down the offensive material. Your employers can still read it, your neighbours can still read it, your girlfriends can still read it, etc.
Libel laws are there to protect you from malicious lies. Its right and proper that a website should resist taking down content just based on random request. But they absolutely should be required to comply with court orders when it comes to malicious content.
Happens with regular journalism all the time. Just recently the Daily Telegraph in the UK carried out a sting operation on a minister (Vince Cable). They published lots of juicy gossip that they had gathered, but failed to report the most interesting part of the story; ironically, that part of the story got leaked by one of their journalists to the BBC.
Why didn't they report it? Cable was the only minister standing in the way of Murdoch buying up 100% of BSkyB television; publishing that info saw Cable stripped of his power to mediate on that deal. The Telegraph are rival to Murdoch's Times newspaper, and wanted to see their competitor knobbled.
At my place of work, all packets (emails, browser data, whatever) are checked by filter more-or-less blind and a flag is raised for manual checking if certain criteria are met. The CEO (and all directors, employees, etc.) will ave their data checked by the same mechanism if they use their corporate network account (which is the only way of accessing the vast majority of corporate data).
I work in finance, and this system of checking is mandated by Data Protection laws and FSA financial crime regulations. The directors are not just included, but targeted- they are the ones most able to commit serious financial crime.
So yeah, I sort of expect all sensitive industries and posts (including government) to be subject to a similar level of scrutiny.
D) if you did manage to do it in the "opposite" sense, it wouldn't be a big deal because magnetic polarity switches have happened hundreds of times in Earth history and there is no correlation to extinctions or much of anything else.
Although it does correlate rather strongly to Boy Scout troops going missing and aeroplanes circling aimlessly over the Atlantic ocean.
Of course, there's no evidence that homo heidelbergensis had either of those, so they may not have been overly inconvenienced.
Last I checked, reading a website is not prerequisite to sending emails- the web and email are completely unrelated. You can get hold of this guys email without even knowing he has a website.
If someone says "send me an email to name@domain.com", how many people do you think would try typing "www.domain.com" into their browser first, before mailing, just on the off chance?
By comparison, EULAs that pop-up during software installation are infinitely more defensible. And that's saying something.
In that case I think you are right to highlight how extremely suspicious said total lack of CCTV footage is. But it's actually pretty widespread for CCTV to be completely useless. They regularly don't have their tapes changed, frequently have recent tapes recorded over, frequently have tapes misfiled and lost forever, and frequently are just dirty and ill maintained so that the picture quality is worse than useless.
Its why there are so few convictions based on CCTV evidence, despite literally 100's of thousands of cameras in operation. They're a deterrent at best, and a rubbish one at that.
I can only see one Google TV device for sale on Amazon, and its the same price as an X-Box 360 (only $50 less than the PS3, which does double duty as a BluRay). Apple TV is half the price, but does far less (notably, lacks any sort of disk drive).
In other words, even if you never plan on buying a single computer game for the rest of your life, the consoles are still competitors for your set top dollars.
This was for my 10mbps home broadband, and was not software related, as pages were being redirected from all three of my Windows box (Firefox), my Linux box (also Firefox) and my Android smart phone (mobile version of Chrome).
It may not be on-by-default any more; perhaps they got fed up of the support line calls.
Just like to point out, Virgin Media already do this (they have it as a "Parental filter" that is on by default, but can be turned off very easily by editing your account settings (which are linked to by the "this material is blocked" placeholder page).
I turned it off immediately due to the horrendous number of false positives- ever YouTube clips with the "log in to watch" adult flag were being blocked. If this were rolled out accross the ISP landscape I'm sure most people would turn it off for a similar reason, once they find their iPlayer videos and certificate 18 films on iTunes getting nixed.
The intended selling points of the ChromeOS netbooks (but not the CR-48, which it has been made relatively clear is never intended for mass market sale) seem to be:
1) Dirt cheap (if I don't see these going for less than £100 I'll want to know why). 2) Colossal battery life (ARM plus minimal on board hardware? the screen should be pretty much the only thing drawing a current). 3) Small/light form factor (minimal hardware should allow a form factor to rival Macbook Air). 4) High degree of optimisation (no additional applications and minimal need for extra hardware should keep it lightning fast).
Like the iPad, I can't see this ever replacing "normal" computers. But then it doesn't have to, it just needs to fill a niche large enough to justify manufacture and sale.
In my opinion, the biggest killer for the ChromeOS idea is the rise of the smartphone. Not so long ago, smartphones were for business people and yuppies. Now it seems they're everywhere, and low end ones are dirt cheap. If everyone who would be interested in splashing on a Chromebook (yeah, I'm coining it) already has always-on 3G connected web browsing plus apps, plus a regular computer too, what niche does the Chromebook fill?
But then, I said the same thing about the iPad, so shows what I know.
Not that I don't feel your pain (am a UK resident myself), but honestly now, you've got no grounds to complain.
This isn't a mass market product. It's just a testbed, a proof of concept, a developer device in it's very earliest beta at best. They're a US company. Don't you think it makes sense that they'd have their very early beta testing start out locally, before they (even supposing they do) expand the test globally? Would it be such a crime if they kept their testing local, and the first taste you and I might get will be when the products hit the shelves?
My interpretation was that the device doing the rounds (CR-48) is never meant for mass market- it's generic netbook hardware with ChromeOS loaded and optimised. If you just want to try out ChromeOS on a generic netbook, it's available for download as "ChromiumOS". Go pop it on your own generic netbook and enjoy.
Not many, granted, but there are still people there. And it's not like the Gobi has much going for it in terms of natural resources or scientific research.
Hell, even Antarctica has an (admittedly rolling) population of up to 5000, and that's pretty much the least habitable place on the Earth's surface.
It's my understanding that this netbook is a proof of concept and developer device, not intended for wide release or resale. Presumably they just went with something they could get supplied quickly and cheaply.
I'd be surprised if there aren't ARM models in the line-up when these things are actually on the shelves.
....and Sarah Palin's website? These entities have a right to conduct their business however they want without undue criminal interference. Palin, whether you agree with her or not, certainly has a right to post a dissenting opinion on FB without having her place (website) smashed up by a bunch of thugs.
Last I checked, inciting the murder of a journalist is actually somewhat against the law. Try setting up a website suggesting the editor of the Washington Post be murdered by patriots and see what happens.
Claiming someone is a terrorist with no justification is probably against civil statutes too; in the UK at least, there would probably be a good case there for libel/defamation (although admittedly UK libel laws are somewhat hyperactive; probably no comment on the more relevant US laws).
From how its being described in this thread (long travel times, attempted player-driven economy, long-winded quests), it sounds like they tried to do a swords-and-sorcery version of EVE Online, rather than yet another WoW clone.
I liked EVE Online; I welcome imitators. There's no saving it if it's a shitty implementation though; a bad game is a bad game.
NOW we have to move on to landing back on the Moon and Mars.
Whatever happened to our pioneering spirit in space? Are we just going to build un-manned shuttles and satellites for the next 50 years?
And the fact we have robots crawling around the surface of Mars, and orbiters studying the depths of the Venusian atmosphere, doesn't impress you?
Sending meaty fleshy humans to distant worlds is exciting, and certainly can get things done. But in terms of pure science, I think we're following the right track with our robots. There's not much scientific gain in sending yet another can of humans to the Moon; you get far more scientific bang for your buck with swarms of probes.
... but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.
It's possible that funding could come from traditional research centres, such as Universities with corporate goodwill backing- but you'd be talking about an awful lot of interested Uni's needing to club together to afford a decent interplanetary research project.
But then, there's no reason why the science shouldn't continue to be government funded. I know "small government" sentiment is scarily prevalent in some US political circles, but there's really nothing wrong with scientists (i.e., working on projects for the grater public good) shouldn't be tax-payer funded.
It's exciting that governments can start to take a back seat in terms of rocket development and manufacture, and it's exciting that we now have private technologies capable of launching manned orbitals of their own design, but there's no reason to be disappointed that tax-funded space agencies are going to be their biggest customer.
Quoting from the article in The Independent that another poster linked to:
She was in regular contact with Mr Assange before his move to Sweden, helping to organise his appearances at lectures as well as agreeing to let him use her flat while he was in Stockholm.
They first met in person on the afternoon of 14 August, when she returned to her flat after a few days away from the capital. According to her testimony, which was leaked to the Swedish media, the pair went out for dinner and returned to the flat, where they had sex. At some point a condom broke, a fact that neither side denies, although the woman alleges that it was broken deliberately by Mr Assange.
Mr Assange's first accuser made no immediate attempt to contact the authorities. It was only when she was contacted by the second accuser four days later that the pair decided to go to the police.
Instead the first woman arranged a "crayfish party" – a traditional Swedish summer get-together – for the following evening in honour of the WikiLeaks founder in her flat. In an entry on the woman's Twitter account, which she later tried to erase, Mr Assange's first accuser described her joy at hosting a party for the world's most famous cyber activist. "Sitting outside nearly freezing with the world's coolest people," she wrote. "It's pretty amazing."
To sum up: She had been a supporter of Wikileaks and Assange for some time. They had consensual sex, during which the condom broke (how do you even "break a condom deliberately", anyhow? Those things are pretty durable, right up until they're not). Aterwards, she threw a party, and tweeted about what a wonderful time she was having and how much she was enjoying the company of her alleged molester-er. After finding out Assange had been knocking off another woman at the same time, she went to the police.
Although I'm reserving judgement (it's not like I was there), it doesn't exactly sound like a tale of criminal persecution to me.
All of what you say is true, and you've laid it out in perhaps the clearest and most rational way I've seen. But you do miss out a few of the other facts.
The man is wanted for questioning for a relatively minor personal crime against two people. Why, then, have Visa and MasterCard refused to do business with the (still completely legal, as far as I'm aware) website for whom he acts as a spokesperson? Why have bank accounts been frozen? Why have PayPal cut off their account? Why have their web hosts and DNS provider given them the cold shoulder? Why do leading US politicians advocate cold blooded murder by government troops? Why are US legislators promising to change the law to make his journalistic, first amendment protected actions retroactively against the law?
It all seems very out of proportion for a journalist who may or may not have committed some minor personal crime.
If I were the subject of such focused vitriol, I'd be nervous about being in custody too.
The differences in TFA seem largely arbitrary to me.
1) Android is for touch devices (despite the fact it works great with a keyboard, as demonstrated on netbooks), while ChromeOS will have no touch-screen capabilities (despite the fact there are no obstacles to implementing the relatively light-weight Android solution in ChromeOS as an option).
2) ChromeOS won't have compatibility with Linux apps (despite being Linux based and running on the same hardware) or Android apps (despite them being Java-on-Linux based, and therefore shouldn't pose a challenge to compatibility if it were desired).
3) Chrome will get more version updates than Android (a policy decision; nothing Ubuntu hasn't already dealt with with their LTS/non-LTS releases).
In other words, no differences that aren't artificially enforced.
ChromeOS seems like basically a thin client OS. I can't see why you'd want a thin client OS on full-fat hardware; it seems like such a waste of good resources. ChromeOS might make sense on special, ultra-cheap hardware (will we see a new age in £50 "thin" netbooks? I hope so), but not on what I would understand as a "desktop" or a traditional "notebook".
For conventional netbook hardware, the Android model seems to make vastly more sense.
I'm intrigued- I've got a question that's been bugging me ever since the Wikileaks drama started, and I'm interested if anyone can shed any light.
Wikileaks is basically filling the same role as a newspaper- someone has sent them classified documents, now they're publishing them. If a government wants to stop a newspaper publishing something, they usually apply for an injunction order in a civil court. Failure to comply with injunctions can result in criminal charges, such as contempt of court.
Why has the US government not applied for an injunction on Wikileaks? The site hasn't actually done anything wrong yet; disobeying an injunction would be something they could actually nail them with. Why on Earth have we gone straight from "we don't like it" to "murder him in his sleep" without any intermediate legal steps?
Injunctions would presumably be easier to get than trying to smear Assange with sexual offences or take the site down with DDOS attacks. If Wikileaks were a newspaper it would certainly have been the first move by the government, instead of trying to strong arm them with illegal and semi-legal attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Labor. Have you ever taken apart a Mini? If you don't know what you're doing, you'll never get it back together right. Have you ever paid someone to take apart a Mini & install RAM or HDfor you? See if that's the price difference.
They're assembling it from scratch one way or the other. It shouldn't cost them a single bean in labour to install a 500 GB hard drive instead of a 250 GB one; they both go in the same way.
The only cost difference to them is in the cost of the hardware from their suppliers.
You can't even play the "Apple quality costs premium" card. You're already paying the quality premium for the expensive basic model; there's no reason why using a different HDD should require a significant extra premium to maintain the high quality.
TFA agrees with you, and points out that they're being a little unfair. But what they really wanted to do was bitch and moan about £650 for something specced the same as an Acer Aspire Revo; and worse, ripping you off on "optional upgrades" by charging "triple the price difference".
All of which, if true, is pretty shitty. They could probably have found better "worst products of 2010" if they'd wanted to, but their criticisms of the Mac Mini seem valid enough.
If I understand TFA correctly, the 3rd party website doesn't even allow the post authors to remove their own posts.
Taking the defamer to court will achieve precisely nothing if the content can't be removed once the court case is complete.
Libel is a form of censorship that serves a valuable purpose.
Lets say I post to a website details that you are a violent child molesting rapist, with sufficient details to identify you. You might lose your job, your neighbours might get cross with you, women refuse to talk to you, etc. You take me to court and a court agrees that I have no reason to be saying what I'm saying. But the website I posted this too refuses to take down the offensive material. Your employers can still read it, your neighbours can still read it, your girlfriends can still read it, etc.
Libel laws are there to protect you from malicious lies. Its right and proper that a website should resist taking down content just based on random request. But they absolutely should be required to comply with court orders when it comes to malicious content.
Happens with regular journalism all the time. Just recently the Daily Telegraph in the UK carried out a sting operation on a minister (Vince Cable). They published lots of juicy gossip that they had gathered, but failed to report the most interesting part of the story; ironically, that part of the story got leaked by one of their journalists to the BBC.
Why didn't they report it? Cable was the only minister standing in the way of Murdoch buying up 100% of BSkyB television; publishing that info saw Cable stripped of his power to mediate on that deal. The Telegraph are rival to Murdoch's Times newspaper, and wanted to see their competitor knobbled.
At my place of work, all packets (emails, browser data, whatever) are checked by filter more-or-less blind and a flag is raised for manual checking if certain criteria are met. The CEO (and all directors, employees, etc.) will ave their data checked by the same mechanism if they use their corporate network account (which is the only way of accessing the vast majority of corporate data).
I work in finance, and this system of checking is mandated by Data Protection laws and FSA financial crime regulations. The directors are not just included, but targeted- they are the ones most able to commit serious financial crime.
So yeah, I sort of expect all sensitive industries and posts (including government) to be subject to a similar level of scrutiny.
D) if you did manage to do it in the "opposite" sense, it wouldn't be a big deal because magnetic polarity switches have happened hundreds of times in Earth history and there is no correlation to extinctions or much of anything else.
Although it does correlate rather strongly to Boy Scout troops going missing and aeroplanes circling aimlessly over the Atlantic ocean.
Of course, there's no evidence that homo heidelbergensis had either of those, so they may not have been overly inconvenienced.
Last I checked, reading a website is not prerequisite to sending emails- the web and email are completely unrelated. You can get hold of this guys email without even knowing he has a website.
If someone says "send me an email to name@domain.com", how many people do you think would try typing "www.domain.com" into their browser first, before mailing, just on the off chance?
By comparison, EULAs that pop-up during software installation are infinitely more defensible. And that's saying something.
In that case I think you are right to highlight how extremely suspicious said total lack of CCTV footage is. But it's actually pretty widespread for CCTV to be completely useless. They regularly don't have their tapes changed, frequently have recent tapes recorded over, frequently have tapes misfiled and lost forever, and frequently are just dirty and ill maintained so that the picture quality is worse than useless.
Its why there are so few convictions based on CCTV evidence, despite literally 100's of thousands of cameras in operation. They're a deterrent at best, and a rubbish one at that.
I can only see one Google TV device for sale on Amazon, and its the same price as an X-Box 360 (only $50 less than the PS3, which does double duty as a BluRay). Apple TV is half the price, but does far less (notably, lacks any sort of disk drive).
In other words, even if you never plan on buying a single computer game for the rest of your life, the consoles are still competitors for your set top dollars.
This was for my 10mbps home broadband, and was not software related, as pages were being redirected from all three of my Windows box (Firefox), my Linux box (also Firefox) and my Android smart phone (mobile version of Chrome).
It may not be on-by-default any more; perhaps they got fed up of the support line calls.
Just like to point out, Virgin Media already do this (they have it as a "Parental filter" that is on by default, but can be turned off very easily by editing your account settings (which are linked to by the "this material is blocked" placeholder page).
I turned it off immediately due to the horrendous number of false positives- ever YouTube clips with the "log in to watch" adult flag were being blocked. If this were rolled out accross the ISP landscape I'm sure most people would turn it off for a similar reason, once they find their iPlayer videos and certificate 18 films on iTunes getting nixed.
The intended selling points of the ChromeOS netbooks (but not the CR-48, which it has been made relatively clear is never intended for mass market sale) seem to be:
1) Dirt cheap (if I don't see these going for less than £100 I'll want to know why).
2) Colossal battery life (ARM plus minimal on board hardware? the screen should be pretty much the only thing drawing a current).
3) Small/light form factor (minimal hardware should allow a form factor to rival Macbook Air).
4) High degree of optimisation (no additional applications and minimal need for extra hardware should keep it lightning fast).
Like the iPad, I can't see this ever replacing "normal" computers. But then it doesn't have to, it just needs to fill a niche large enough to justify manufacture and sale.
In my opinion, the biggest killer for the ChromeOS idea is the rise of the smartphone. Not so long ago, smartphones were for business people and yuppies. Now it seems they're everywhere, and low end ones are dirt cheap. If everyone who would be interested in splashing on a Chromebook (yeah, I'm coining it) already has always-on 3G connected web browsing plus apps, plus a regular computer too, what niche does the Chromebook fill?
But then, I said the same thing about the iPad, so shows what I know.
Not that I don't feel your pain (am a UK resident myself), but honestly now, you've got no grounds to complain.
This isn't a mass market product. It's just a testbed, a proof of concept, a developer device in it's very earliest beta at best. They're a US company. Don't you think it makes sense that they'd have their very early beta testing start out locally, before they (even supposing they do) expand the test globally? Would it be such a crime if they kept their testing local, and the first taste you and I might get will be when the products hit the shelves?
My interpretation was that the device doing the rounds (CR-48) is never meant for mass market- it's generic netbook hardware with ChromeOS loaded and optimised. If you just want to try out ChromeOS on a generic netbook, it's available for download as "ChromiumOS". Go pop it on your own generic netbook and enjoy.
Not to put to fine a point on it, but they do: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/236545/Gobi/47958/People-and-economy
Not many, granted, but there are still people there. And it's not like the Gobi has much going for it in terms of natural resources or scientific research.
Hell, even Antarctica has an (admittedly rolling) population of up to 5000, and that's pretty much the least habitable place on the Earth's surface.
It's my understanding that this netbook is a proof of concept and developer device, not intended for wide release or resale. Presumably they just went with something they could get supplied quickly and cheaply.
I'd be surprised if there aren't ARM models in the line-up when these things are actually on the shelves.
....and Sarah Palin's website? These entities have a right to conduct their business however they want without undue criminal interference. Palin, whether you agree with her or not, certainly has a right to post a dissenting opinion on FB without having her place (website) smashed up by a bunch of thugs.
Last I checked, inciting the murder of a journalist is actually somewhat against the law. Try setting up a website suggesting the editor of the Washington Post be murdered by patriots and see what happens.
Claiming someone is a terrorist with no justification is probably against civil statutes too; in the UK at least, there would probably be a good case there for libel/defamation (although admittedly UK libel laws are somewhat hyperactive; probably no comment on the more relevant US laws).
Why did solving this come with an award?
To generate PR, obviously. Why else do you think we're even talking about it? It probably amounts to some pretty dirt-cheap advertising.
From how its being described in this thread (long travel times, attempted player-driven economy, long-winded quests), it sounds like they tried to do a swords-and-sorcery version of EVE Online, rather than yet another WoW clone.
I liked EVE Online; I welcome imitators. There's no saving it if it's a shitty implementation though; a bad game is a bad game.
Then again, maybe one EVE Online is enough.
NOW we have to move on to landing back on the Moon and Mars.
Whatever happened to our pioneering spirit in space? Are we just going to build un-manned shuttles and satellites for the next 50 years?
And the fact we have robots crawling around the surface of Mars, and orbiters studying the depths of the Venusian atmosphere, doesn't impress you?
Sending meaty fleshy humans to distant worlds is exciting, and certainly can get things done. But in terms of pure science, I think we're following the right track with our robots. There's not much scientific gain in sending yet another can of humans to the Moon; you get far more scientific bang for your buck with swarms of probes.
... but for everything else like sending out probes, going back to the Moon or to Mars there's not really been many realistic business plans, even if you count on playboy billionaires.
It's possible that funding could come from traditional research centres, such as Universities with corporate goodwill backing- but you'd be talking about an awful lot of interested Uni's needing to club together to afford a decent interplanetary research project.
But then, there's no reason why the science shouldn't continue to be government funded. I know "small government" sentiment is scarily prevalent in some US political circles, but there's really nothing wrong with scientists (i.e., working on projects for the grater public good) shouldn't be tax-payer funded.
It's exciting that governments can start to take a back seat in terms of rocket development and manufacture, and it's exciting that we now have private technologies capable of launching manned orbitals of their own design, but there's no reason to be disappointed that tax-funded space agencies are going to be their biggest customer.
Quoting from the article in The Independent that another poster linked to:
She was in regular contact with Mr Assange before his move to Sweden, helping to organise his appearances at lectures as well as agreeing to let him use her flat while he was in Stockholm.
They first met in person on the afternoon of 14 August, when she returned to her flat after a few days away from the capital. According to her testimony, which was leaked to the Swedish media, the pair went out for dinner and returned to the flat, where they had sex. At some point a condom broke, a fact that neither side denies, although the woman alleges that it was broken deliberately by Mr Assange.
Mr Assange's first accuser made no immediate attempt to contact the authorities. It was only when she was contacted by the second accuser four days later that the pair decided to go to the police.
Instead the first woman arranged a "crayfish party" – a traditional Swedish summer get-together – for the following evening in honour of the WikiLeaks founder in her flat. In an entry on the woman's Twitter account, which she later tried to erase, Mr Assange's first accuser described her joy at hosting a party for the world's most famous cyber activist. "Sitting outside nearly freezing with the world's coolest people," she wrote. "It's pretty amazing."
To sum up:
She had been a supporter of Wikileaks and Assange for some time.
They had consensual sex, during which the condom broke (how do you even "break a condom deliberately", anyhow? Those things are pretty durable, right up until they're not).
Aterwards, she threw a party, and tweeted about what a wonderful time she was having and how much she was enjoying the company of her alleged molester-er.
After finding out Assange had been knocking off another woman at the same time, she went to the police.
Although I'm reserving judgement (it's not like I was there), it doesn't exactly sound like a tale of criminal persecution to me.
All of what you say is true, and you've laid it out in perhaps the clearest and most rational way I've seen. But you do miss out a few of the other facts.
The man is wanted for questioning for a relatively minor personal crime against two people. Why, then, have Visa and MasterCard refused to do business with the (still completely legal, as far as I'm aware) website for whom he acts as a spokesperson? Why have bank accounts been frozen? Why have PayPal cut off their account? Why have their web hosts and DNS provider given them the cold shoulder? Why do leading US politicians advocate cold blooded murder by government troops? Why are US legislators promising to change the law to make his journalistic, first amendment protected actions retroactively against the law?
It all seems very out of proportion for a journalist who may or may not have committed some minor personal crime.
If I were the subject of such focused vitriol, I'd be nervous about being in custody too.
The differences in TFA seem largely arbitrary to me.
1) Android is for touch devices (despite the fact it works great with a keyboard, as demonstrated on netbooks), while ChromeOS will have no touch-screen capabilities (despite the fact there are no obstacles to implementing the relatively light-weight Android solution in ChromeOS as an option).
2) ChromeOS won't have compatibility with Linux apps (despite being Linux based and running on the same hardware) or Android apps (despite them being Java-on-Linux based, and therefore shouldn't pose a challenge to compatibility if it were desired).
3) Chrome will get more version updates than Android (a policy decision; nothing Ubuntu hasn't already dealt with with their LTS/non-LTS releases).
In other words, no differences that aren't artificially enforced.
ChromeOS seems like basically a thin client OS. I can't see why you'd want a thin client OS on full-fat hardware; it seems like such a waste of good resources. ChromeOS might make sense on special, ultra-cheap hardware (will we see a new age in £50 "thin" netbooks? I hope so), but not on what I would understand as a "desktop" or a traditional "notebook".
For conventional netbook hardware, the Android model seems to make vastly more sense.
I'm intrigued- I've got a question that's been bugging me ever since the Wikileaks drama started, and I'm interested if anyone can shed any light.
Wikileaks is basically filling the same role as a newspaper- someone has sent them classified documents, now they're publishing them. If a government wants to stop a newspaper publishing something, they usually apply for an injunction order in a civil court. Failure to comply with injunctions can result in criminal charges, such as contempt of court.
Why has the US government not applied for an injunction on Wikileaks? The site hasn't actually done anything wrong yet; disobeying an injunction would be something they could actually nail them with. Why on Earth have we gone straight from "we don't like it" to "murder him in his sleep" without any intermediate legal steps?
Injunctions would presumably be easier to get than trying to smear Assange with sexual offences or take the site down with DDOS attacks. If Wikileaks were a newspaper it would certainly have been the first move by the government, instead of trying to strong arm them with illegal and semi-legal attacks.