I don't see why Android patches that aren't more or less universal in installation target should be in the mainline kernel. Isn't that exactly what source tree branches are for? Regardless of their quality (which should only determine whether they're committed, not where they're committed) if their features are out of scope of the mainstream, why would they be committed to the mainstream branch?
Android's source is (currently) open, and its Dalvik JVM is Apache licensed. But what about the Java class libraries to which apps link in order to run? Is their source open? Because Android's development model makes those libraries as much a part of the OS as is any of the rest of the SW Google added to the Linux kernel (ie. substituting for the GNU SW that's in most popular "Linux" distros).
You are correct. That's why the FTC does an investigation. Otherwise, any first mover in a market could be slammed by the Feds called in by a lazy first competitor.
There is over a century of antitrust investigation and enforcement, and many examples of trusts that escaped the system to cause damage. Monopolism is the ultimate evil of capitalism, so an aggressive FTC acting according to the lessons learned about its targets is essential business for our government.
Running the Terminal Emulator shell app gives "permission denied" to any invocation of any executable or attempt to read any dir or file. Maybe rooting the phone before installing it would help, but that's my point about how the OS is not open.
So Motorola/HTC/etc are the ones who closed the Android instance on the phone. That doesn't argue that it's open, it explains how it is closed, which therefore agrees that it's closed.
I'm not talking about who's to blame, I'm talking about the condition of the OS instance on the phone, the inarguable reality for most people.
A machine that I own and use that doesn't allow me root access is not open. If I have to reinstall or otherwise hack the OS to be granted root access, then the OS is not open - I had to open it, despite the OS.
Google isn't free. Google is an advertising agency that is paid by all its advertisers, for whom others compete.
Those prices could be manipulated by Google to protect its ability to manipulate those prices, by its power of market dominance and other advantages that aren't simply competing. Likewise Google could be using other such advantages that aren't simply competing, to interfere with advertising competition.
And besides, the free searching and other features all support that advertising, which in turn supports the free searching. If other search companies cannot compete because of Google's dominance of either or both ads and searching, that is also anti-competitive.
Monopolies are complex, not just dangerous. That's why an FTC antitrust investigation is more complex than just "what's its market share?" Gaming a market is often a sophisticated racket. Which is bad for consumers, bad for competitors, and bad for the entire market. With Google at the center of so many essential markets, which are the center of so many essential economies, industries and daily lives, we need the FTC ensuring that it's competition, and not some other synthetic advantage, that determines who wins in Google's businesses.
Any company that gets as big as Google should be investigated for being a monopoly, trust or anchor of a cartel. By "big" I mean both market share and sheer size in either revenue, profit, market cap or assets. Because when a corporation is that big, it probably is distorting the market substantially in those ways. All the other businesses, and of course the people, are paying taxes and expecting as citizens their government protect them from such abuses.
There's plenty of research the FTC could do automatically on any company that gets that big without causing any costs beyond routine compliance processing all its competitors also do. They should, and any substantial evidence of something more serious should automatically trigger a fuller investigation. The government should not have people whose discretion protects favored corporations from these compulsory reviews, who are obviously going to be corrupted by companies too big to stop. They should not get too big to stop before the government starts stopping them.
FWIW every president should have an impeachment committee fired up and researching impeachable offenses starting the day they're elected. These various executives have far too much power to corrupt, delay and stop investigations that are the people's only defense from their crimes.
Until my phone's Android lets me run the Android Perl shell app on it without rooting, it's not "open", no matter what Google says. The source code might be open, at least "open readonly", and the binary might be "open execute" by hackers onto unauthorized hardware. But the OS instance is not open if it's not open to me as a user to invoke its API with an app that can do the job.
This neverending boondoggle is fit to destroy only budgets. Long before the bank-puppets in Washington threaten to cut Social Security (which doesn't create debt, but rather loans to us) or Medicare (which is far better at paying for our healthcare than the profiteer insurers), we should drop this F-22 ripoff. Like right now. Social Security and Medicare actually protect the lives of many millions of Americans, a far better investment of defense money.
Well, I'm not at all sure we need rocky planets, since we'd be arriving from space and so likely technologically capable of using off-planet rocks for necessary materials, as I said. Also as I said, Earth gravity on a planet with no heavy elements would be proportionally larger in radius and area, though not as big as Jupiter. Since Uranus and Neptune have no cores, they're probably more diffuse and heavier than any planet with Earth gravity and a crust, so the upper bound is somewhere less than them.
A hollow planet could have Earth's surface gravity with nearly any radius. There's probably a vast amount of planets out there, and odds say we might be able to pick even a highly idiosyncratic configuration and find it somewhere.
I'm hoping Kepler discovers some Jupiter sized planets, in radius and area, that are really low density, so their gravity is like Earth's - along with the atmosphere. They'd probably lack metals or any heavier elements, though they'd probably better have silicon if their crust is going to look like Earth's surface. If the planet has a moon or an asteroid belt nearby full of those missing elements, space mining might make for a really huge place for humans to spread out on in a familiar style.
In late October 2011, Congressman Markey sent a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) requesting copies of all documents (including voting records, reports, emails, correspondence, memoranda, phone or meeting minutes or other materials) related to the events of Fukushima or the NRC’s response thereto prepared or obtained by any Commissioner or member of any Commissioner’s staff. While most Commissioners marked every single document – ncluding articles that appeared in the public media – to be not for public release – this narrative is an effort to provide a summary of the thousands of pages of materials that were responsive to that request. The review of these materials indicates that:
1. Four NRC Commissioners attempted to delay and otherwise impede the creation of the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima. 2. Four NRC Commissioners conspired, with each other and with senior NRC staff, to delay the release of and alter the NRC Near-Term Task Force report on Fukushima. 3. The other NRC Commissioners attempted to slow down or otherwise impede the adoption of the safety recommendations made by the NRC Near-Term Task Force on Fukushima. 4. NRC Chairman Greg Jaczko kept the other four NRC Commissioners fully informed regarding the Japanese emergency, despite claims to the contrary made by these Commissioners. 5. A review of emails and other documents indicates high levels of suspicion and hostility directed at the Chairman. 6. The consideration of the Fukushima safety upgrades is not the only safety-related issue that the other NRC Commissioners have opposed.
Is Sprint also putting a CarrierIQ stripper app into the Android Market so I can strip it myself from my own phone? Why do I have to rely on the OEM, and probably never get it - unless with a new phone, which will have something even sneakier? I don't want to rely on even CarrierIQ detectors from a 3rd party - who knows what it will do when I install it with its permissions.
Apps should have a "line item veto" where I tell my Android OS to refuse specific permissions and accept others if I want. If a feature actually requires a permission, it should ask again. Or just stop asking for these unnecessary permissions, which cause me (but not most people) to refuse to install the app, even if I want it for features I'd permit where actually necessary. Android is really a soup of "intent" messages being sent among the apps. At least make the app modular enough to let me grant permissions on a per-intent basis within an app.
Then they might have to wait the 20 seconds max it takes for a 1000' radius jammer to completely pass them at 60MPH.
But so what? I said
Note that I'm not (necessarily) advocating mobile jammers. Someone in a nearby car might not need to be on the phone, but they might just want to be, and are not driving. It's their privilege to be on the phone, that is not overwhelmed by someone else's interest in jamming everyone.
How many people have heart attacks while passengers in cars? How many need the driver to call ahead instead of just rushing to a hospital?
Name one. One.
Then tell me how their survival chances are reduced because the driver is talking on a cellphone instead of concentrating on driving as fast as safely possible to the hospital.
Then I'll tell you how many people are sent to the hospital by other drivers talking on their phones: many. Every year.
Then they can pull over. There's rarely a case where the person in the car has to be moving while talking. That's what we have emergency responders for - who can be called into action.
Note that I'm not (necessarily) advocating mobile jammers. Someone in a nearby car might not need to be on the phone, but they might just want to be, and are not driving. It's their privilege to be on the phone, that is not overwhelmed by someone else's interest in jamming everyone.
I'm just pointing out that these "need to talk and drive" excuses are BS.
Yes, those examples cite bad driving while on a cellphone, not just driving while on a cellphone, as the cause of the collisions. But driving while talking on a cellphone doesn't reduce the rate at which people do the bad driving. In fact it seems obvious that distraction by the phone makes it more likely to do more bad driving.
Just talking on the phone isn't colliding with someone. But talking on the phone doesn't make anyone a better driver. It's obvious to everyone on the road how very often it makes many people worse drivers.
Handsfree phones should be required; anything else should be prohibited. And any collision or moving violation should cause subpoena of the phone records (phone#s redacted) to see whether the driver was on the phone at the time. If so, they should be found guilty of distracted driving (and perhaps negligent homicide, if they killed someone). And their insurance policy shouldn't cover the event.
We started building the ISS from existing orbiting stations in 1988. Of course parts started needing replacement immediately, since the base components were already in use for quite some time in one of the most extreme environments for machines (including launch). But of course after nearly a quarter century more replacement parts are needed.
These are all some of humanity's greatest successes. Even when there are failures, as is inevitable in any human work, fixing them under such difficult conditions is a great success.
Inside-out. In orbit there's only microgravity, and whatever you simulate by centrifuge. A 3D printer on the ISS would probably work most naturally by adding sequential shells to a starting kernel.
Seems like the people who make space capsules are experienced in making sealed subcompartments in which a gassy process can operate before yielding its products to the human occupied spaces.
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I don't see why Android patches that aren't more or less universal in installation target should be in the mainline kernel. Isn't that exactly what source tree branches are for? Regardless of their quality (which should only determine whether they're committed, not where they're committed) if their features are out of scope of the mainstream, why would they be committed to the mainstream branch?
Android's source is (currently) open, and its Dalvik JVM is Apache licensed. But what about the Java class libraries to which apps link in order to run? Is their source open? Because Android's development model makes those libraries as much a part of the OS as is any of the rest of the SW Google added to the Linux kernel (ie. substituting for the GNU SW that's in most popular "Linux" distros).
You are correct. That's why the FTC does an investigation. Otherwise, any first mover in a market could be slammed by the Feds called in by a lazy first competitor.
There is over a century of antitrust investigation and enforcement, and many examples of trusts that escaped the system to cause damage. Monopolism is the ultimate evil of capitalism, so an aggressive FTC acting according to the lessons learned about its targets is essential business for our government.
That's one measure of effectiveness.
Running the Terminal Emulator shell app gives "permission denied" to any invocation of any executable or attempt to read any dir or file. Maybe rooting the phone before installing it would help, but that's my point about how the OS is not open.
So Motorola/HTC/etc are the ones who closed the Android instance on the phone. That doesn't argue that it's open, it explains how it is closed, which therefore agrees that it's closed.
I'm not talking about who's to blame, I'm talking about the condition of the OS instance on the phone, the inarguable reality for most people.
If you were the owner of the Ubuntu machine, and no other person had the root password, it would not be open. That is the situation with Android.
A machine that I own and use that doesn't allow me root access is not open. If I have to reinstall or otherwise hack the OS to be granted root access, then the OS is not open - I had to open it, despite the OS.
Google isn't free. Google is an advertising agency that is paid by all its advertisers, for whom others compete.
Those prices could be manipulated by Google to protect its ability to manipulate those prices, by its power of market dominance and other advantages that aren't simply competing. Likewise Google could be using other such advantages that aren't simply competing, to interfere with advertising competition.
And besides, the free searching and other features all support that advertising, which in turn supports the free searching. If other search companies cannot compete because of Google's dominance of either or both ads and searching, that is also anti-competitive.
Monopolies are complex, not just dangerous. That's why an FTC antitrust investigation is more complex than just "what's its market share?" Gaming a market is often a sophisticated racket. Which is bad for consumers, bad for competitors, and bad for the entire market. With Google at the center of so many essential markets, which are the center of so many essential economies, industries and daily lives, we need the FTC ensuring that it's competition, and not some other synthetic advantage, that determines who wins in Google's businesses.
Any company that gets as big as Google should be investigated for being a monopoly, trust or anchor of a cartel. By "big" I mean both market share and sheer size in either revenue, profit, market cap or assets. Because when a corporation is that big, it probably is distorting the market substantially in those ways. All the other businesses, and of course the people, are paying taxes and expecting as citizens their government protect them from such abuses.
There's plenty of research the FTC could do automatically on any company that gets that big without causing any costs beyond routine compliance processing all its competitors also do. They should, and any substantial evidence of something more serious should automatically trigger a fuller investigation. The government should not have people whose discretion protects favored corporations from these compulsory reviews, who are obviously going to be corrupted by companies too big to stop. They should not get too big to stop before the government starts stopping them.
FWIW every president should have an impeachment committee fired up and researching impeachable offenses starting the day they're elected. These various executives have far too much power to corrupt, delay and stop investigations that are the people's only defense from their crimes.
Until my phone's Android lets me run the Android Perl shell app on it without rooting, it's not "open", no matter what Google says. The source code might be open, at least "open readonly", and the binary might be "open execute" by hackers onto unauthorized hardware. But the OS instance is not open if it's not open to me as a user to invoke its API with an app that can do the job.
I loved _Ringworld_, too :).
I wonder what the actually largest (radius) planet would be with Earth gravity but low density (nothing heavier than silicon, and no helium or neon).
This neverending boondoggle is fit to destroy only budgets. Long before the bank-puppets in Washington threaten to cut Social Security (which doesn't create debt, but rather loans to us) or Medicare (which is far better at paying for our healthcare than the profiteer insurers), we should drop this F-22 ripoff. Like right now. Social Security and Medicare actually protect the lives of many millions of Americans, a far better investment of defense money.
Well, I'm not at all sure we need rocky planets, since we'd be arriving from space and so likely technologically capable of using off-planet rocks for necessary materials, as I said. Also as I said, Earth gravity on a planet with no heavy elements would be proportionally larger in radius and area, though not as big as Jupiter. Since Uranus and Neptune have no cores, they're probably more diffuse and heavier than any planet with Earth gravity and a crust, so the upper bound is somewhere less than them.
A hollow planet could have Earth's surface gravity with nearly any radius. There's probably a vast amount of planets out there, and odds say we might be able to pick even a highly idiosyncratic configuration and find it somewhere.
I'm hoping Kepler discovers some Jupiter sized planets, in radius and area, that are really low density, so their gravity is like Earth's - along with the atmosphere. They'd probably lack metals or any heavier elements, though they'd probably better have silicon if their crust is going to look like Earth's surface. If the planet has a moon or an asteroid belt nearby full of those missing elements, space mining might make for a really huge place for humans to spread out on in a familiar style.
Is Sprint also putting a CarrierIQ stripper app into the Android Market so I can strip it myself from my own phone? Why do I have to rely on the OEM, and probably never get it - unless with a new phone, which will have something even sneakier? I don't want to rely on even CarrierIQ detectors from a 3rd party - who knows what it will do when I install it with its permissions.
Apps should have a "line item veto" where I tell my Android OS to refuse specific permissions and accept others if I want. If a feature actually requires a permission, it should ask again. Or just stop asking for these unnecessary permissions, which cause me (but not most people) to refuse to install the app, even if I want it for features I'd permit where actually necessary. Android is really a soup of "intent" messages being sent among the apps. At least make the app modular enough to let me grant permissions on a per-intent basis within an app.
Then they might have to wait the 20 seconds max it takes for a 1000' radius jammer to completely pass them at 60MPH.
But so what? I said
How many people have heart attacks while passengers in cars? How many need the driver to call ahead instead of just rushing to a hospital?
Name one. One.
Then tell me how their survival chances are reduced because the driver is talking on a cellphone instead of concentrating on driving as fast as safely possible to the hospital.
Then I'll tell you how many people are sent to the hospital by other drivers talking on their phones: many. Every year.
Thanks for feeding the troll some sense, though naturally the troll thrives on any reply. At least the rest of the readers see the sense.
Then they can pull over. There's rarely a case where the person in the car has to be moving while talking. That's what we have emergency responders for - who can be called into action.
Note that I'm not (necessarily) advocating mobile jammers. Someone in a nearby car might not need to be on the phone, but they might just want to be, and are not driving. It's their privilege to be on the phone, that is not overwhelmed by someone else's interest in jamming everyone.
I'm just pointing out that these "need to talk and drive" excuses are BS.
Yes, those examples cite bad driving while on a cellphone, not just driving while on a cellphone, as the cause of the collisions. But driving while talking on a cellphone doesn't reduce the rate at which people do the bad driving. In fact it seems obvious that distraction by the phone makes it more likely to do more bad driving.
Just talking on the phone isn't colliding with someone. But talking on the phone doesn't make anyone a better driver. It's obvious to everyone on the road how very often it makes many people worse drivers.
Handsfree phones should be required; anything else should be prohibited. And any collision or moving violation should cause subpoena of the phone records (phone#s redacted) to see whether the driver was on the phone at the time. If so, they should be found guilty of distracted driving (and perhaps negligent homicide, if they killed someone). And their insurance policy shouldn't cover the event.
We started building the ISS from existing orbiting stations in 1988. Of course parts started needing replacement immediately, since the base components were already in use for quite some time in one of the most extreme environments for machines (including launch). But of course after nearly a quarter century more replacement parts are needed.
These are all some of humanity's greatest successes. Even when there are failures, as is inevitable in any human work, fixing them under such difficult conditions is a great success.
Inside-out. In orbit there's only microgravity, and whatever you simulate by centrifuge. A 3D printer on the ISS would probably work most naturally by adding sequential shells to a starting kernel.
Seems like the people who make space capsules are experienced in making sealed subcompartments in which a gassy process can operate before yielding its products to the human occupied spaces.