Bitcoin advocates are, in my experience, quite happy to say that the economic crisis (at least, in the form they've imagined it to be) is a fiat money issue. And I have difficulty believing that if the current economic crisis were localized such that it only happened in the US, and that there actually was some link between the theory of the dollar and the problem, they'd be more specific.
In this case, there's a link between the theory of Bitcoin and the consequences of MtGox. We could, at best, say "It's not a Bitcoin issue, it applies to all non-state backed crypto-currencies", but you certainly can't minimize it and pretend it applies to "less than Bitcoin". MtGox is a clear consequence of what happens when you're desperate to build a currency that cannot be regulated. It's a Bitcoin problem, because that's what Bitcoins are. Its a Bitcoin problem because Bitcoin's advocates and users want Bitcoins to be like that. And it's a Bitcoin problem because Bitcoin's advocates are too fixated on the notion that somehow a crash or two will filter out the bad actors to realize that's not a viable strategy, that bad actors will always come in, that they've built no way to distinguish them from honest players, and that there's no insurance against being a victim of them.
If this were a normal bank, exchanging dollars for dollars, it would face regulation and insurance requirements that would make failure much more difficult. Attempts by hackers to redirect large sums of money, even electronically, would face much higher hurdles with legally mandated stronger security controls, and a much stronger paper trail. If the actual underlying cause is fraud within Mt Gox, again, the fraudsters would face higher hurdles, having to deal with external auditors at every move.
And if all of those controls failed (and they do occasionally), the controllers of the currency, the government, would be in a position to rescue the victims of the collapse. And we've seen them do this too.
Bitcoin doesn't have these protections because its entire reason for its existence is to avoid government. It treats government control as a bug, not a feature. It treats regulation as a terrible thing. Bitcoin exchanges cannot reliably be audited, because any Bitcoin exchange can claim anything about itself with impunity. Bitcoin exchanges cannot be regulated in real time. Insofar as fraudsters face consequences, it happens well after the fact, with investigations for fraud and breach of contract, and requires more efforts to prove.
It's interesting that every Bitcoin advocate is now claiming they saw Mt Gox's troubles coming and anyone who lost money was stupid. In fact, part of the problem here is up until six months ago, Mt Gox was widely praised, recommended, and considered part of the backbone of the Bitcoin system. By the time Bitcoin's "I told you so" crowd started to notice a problem, it was essentially too late. Anyone can notice that an exchange suddenly is having problems paying out deposits. What would have been more impressive is if Bitcoins fans had predicted problems in advance. What would have been even more impressive would have been if Bitcoin's fans predicted the possibility of such problems happening and had implemented an infrastructure where the effects of such problems were mitigated.
The reality is very few Bitcoin advocates saw this coming. If they had, you wouldn't have waited until after Mt Gox started to collapse to claim it was a bad investment. If they had, real efforts would have been made to protect the currency.
Bitcoin is not just some mathematics. It's a function of who uses it. You guys failed. Miserably. And Bitcoin is damaged as a result. Not that I'm upset or anything, it's a currency designed by people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It's a currency, essentially, designed by people who don't understand money. It needs to go. So it's a good thing the gaping holes are being revealed.
But if you disagree with me on whether Bitcoins are a good thing, and want it to be a success, do not, do not for a single second, sit there while the most famous and, until the start of the collapse six months ago, most respected exchange collapses, and act like nothing's wrong.
You failed to read the post you're responding to. The author said the law was stupid. vux984 was, however, saying that if the law is consistent it applies just as much to a company-owned Facebook page as their non-social media Internet advertising.
In fairness, DNS is so broken that it's a miracle any changes ever get past the "wishful thinking" stage. I still remember the original news reports that new TLDs were being added to the DNS system... in the late nineties. It took over a decade for anything to actually happen after that original announcement, and they're still trying to make it work.
What's the difference been that and, say, the fact CNAME is virtually useless and nobody uses _SRV? Answer: Money.
I look forward to many more years of manufacturers giving me what I actually "want", rather than what I think I want, even though for some reason I still think I want what I originally said I wanted. But I'm probably dippy like that! I could swear what I want is a decent battery life, largish screen, fast CPU and memory, removable storage, and a keyboard, and I'm not sure why I wouldn't want that, but as I understand it I'm wrong, and what I actually "want" is a phone that's super-thin, has inadequate storage, and has a battery life of a few hours.
Bitcoin is made of bits, ownership of a bitcoin is really based on a distributed network of people agreeing that the bitcoin belongs to you. As you should well know there is a fundamental difference between "bits" and "cars".
FWIW, there is plenty of history in terms of law enforcement entities enforcing breaches of law in the electronic realm, both using traditional pre-digital laws such as fraud and wire fraud, copyright infringement, obscenity, etc, and post-digital digital-specific laws such as those against "computer misuse".
In MtGox's case:
- There is objective evidence (that is, this is what MtGox is claiming themselves) that post digital crimes such as those aimed at hackers are relevent.
- There is at least some evidence that fraud is involved, both in terms of what Mt Gox is saying, and the possibility that Mt Gox are lying.
In addition to the above, it's also quite possible that individual users can make civil cases against Mt Gox on the basis of breach of contract, and Mt Gox, in turn, can possibly have civil cases against the users they claim defrauded them on the same basis.
These do open the gates for a full-on government law enforcement investigation. I'm guessing the Japanese authorities have jurisdiction.
Largely because I'm tired of hearing about it, moreover tired of hearing justifications for it based upon people who have no understanding of money outside of what some Austrian-economics kook told them.
This isn't the problem. As I understand it (and I've read the article multiple times and it's early in the morning so I may be getting it wrong), the problem is this:
1. ICANN is introducing new.TLDs (eg additions to.com,.net,.org) etc (we've known about this for a while, this isn't news.)
2. Common practice on private networks is to create and use an unused.TLD for the private network, for example ".internal", ".corp", etc. For example, your employer might, right now, be calling your workstation "pc117.nyoffice.intranet"
3. After analyzing global DNS hits, ICANN's researchers found that many/most of the new proposed.TLDs are already, apparently, in use by private entities for their private networks. You might ask how they know? Well, think in terms of a roaming laptop that upon connecting to a Wifi at Starbucks immediately, before the VPN is set up, tries to access "exchange-server.nyoffice.intranet". It makes the DNS lookup, and because the VPN isn't up yet, the DNS lookup goes to the global DNS servers, causing a bell to ring in ICANN's HQ (or something.)
4. ICANN needs to "do something" to alert people with private networks to change their TLDs, or else those people will, unintentionally, find themselves locked out of sites with the new TLD. (Cynical PoV: and this will decrease the value of the.TLDs themselves. Kerching!)
Now ICANN appears to believe that the best solution is to have the.TLDs return this odd 127.0.53.53 IP address instead of "domain not found" for all unknown domains, so that if a technie working for a company affected is roaming with their laptop, and they try to access "exchange-server.nyoffice.intranet" forgetting to put up the VPN, and ".intranet" is a new TLD, and they can't connect because the VPN isn't up, and they decide to check their Windows Event Logs to figure out why, then instead of "domain not found" which would immediately make them think "Oh wait, of course it can't be resolved, it's not a real domain and I'm not on the VPN", they'd see a weird IP address, and think "That's odd, let me Google that, there's obviously a problem with DNS."
(I think they'd have more luck if they made it a pair of real IP addresses, one A, one AAAA, pointing at a website that tells the roaming user the answer that they can report to a sysadmin, rather than forcing a sysadmin to Google something they may never become aware of because they may not roam in the first place, but to be honest, even that sounds like a bad idea, I'd rather IP addresses not be returned for invalid domains to begin with.)
While this may indeed be the case, this has nothing to do with copyright law.
Unless the actress has a copyright interest in the finished work, which apparently she does. It's right there in the summary. You did read the summary, right?
Seriously people, why are you fuckers commenting if you're not even willing to read the summary? And why are you jumping to the conclusion that a Judge just pulled this judgement completely out of his ass rather than at least starting with the assumption there's at least some basis for the decision?
Oh, and you idiots who keep screaming "Freedom of speech" - here's the problem. The movie in question isn't being censored because of content, but because one of the makers (the actress in question) of the film has no desire to see it published. That is, actually, her right. The producers of the film can get around this by making the exact same film, only without the actress's involvement this time.
People withdrawing their works is a time honored tradition. And in this case, unlike, say, Kubrick removing Clockwork Orange from UK theaters, the person demanding the work be withdrawn has actually been hurt, and is hurt by the movie continuing to circulate.
That third dimension adds extra layers of safety. In 2D, you have to veer left or right to dodge an obstacle. In 3D, you also have up and down, or any combination thereof, and you can start off flying at a level where there are very few obstacles to begin with.
Autonomous is about the only sensible way we can implement "flying cars". And it's probably, realistically, the case that the only way we can implement autonomous cars is if they're flying (short of us building out a national grade separated tracked road network that joins every building in the country)
As someone who hates driving, and hates being forced to drive, and knows damned well the chances of us getting a decent zoning system in most of the US so people can actually live in places well served with transit are minimal, I see flying autonomous cars as the next best thing.
Of course, it's almost equally unlikely to happen.
Or maybe, for maximum bad taste comedic effect, "We have been ordered by a German court to say that "videos are not available due to a lack of a licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA", and as a mark of our respect to the German legal system, we are only following orders when we show this message to you."
Not just clickbait, but an actual hatchet-job which will be defended by Wikileaks opponents as "We know he's imperfect and you shouldn't be worshipping him" (which we weren't anyway.)
Clearest clue this entire article is written in bad faith: this poor attempt to imply hypocrisy:
But Assange, who was quite happy to reveal the secrets of governments around the world proved far more reluctant when it came to talking about his own past and private life.
No idea if Assange is an unfaithful harasser of women or not, but this isn't an article I'd trust on the subject. And no, I'm a fan of the message, the messenger isn't important.
Those of us who need more information on the technical side of the version of Android shipped with this phone can look here for more information. They include an APK checker (no, not Mr Hosts...) that looks for common problems (presumably anything that calls GMS)
Same here, but people are telling me that while it's unpopular in the US there are many countries where it's extremely popular. I guess it's the Sony MiniDisc of IM, a runaway success, but considered a failure by citizens of the most powerful country on Earth because it just didn't take off there.
A kid born today has a considerably lower chance of leading a life of (crippling) debt, unemployment (for the most part, 1950-1970s excepting perhaps), poverty, starvation, or war than in the past, at least, if they're lucky enough to be born in the West, which I assume they would be if you were the parents.
I used to use the same justifications to myself, FWIW. The reality is that I was finding justiifcations for not having children, which was the real issue. I didn't want them. I didn't want the loss of freedom and imposition of responsibilities a child would entail. But such an argument feels selfish (it isn't, but it feels selfish) and so I pretended I didn't want children for the good of the world, and for their own good.
If you're like 99% of the population, you'll change your mind. Biological programming will overwhelm you when the time is right. You'll view having a child as one of the most wonderful things you could possibly do. You'll recognize that you can actually build a stable environment for your child to come into the world, to learn what they need to do, and to ensure they're equipped with the tools needed to make it in this world.
One of those tools being, of course, their mere existance.
Well, early Unixes and Unix clones were available for computers whose addressing model was 16 bit (or worse). Indeed, this survived well into the 1980s, with early versions of Coherent available for the 8088 (yes, I know some will say that has a 20 bit address space, but it's sorta paged such that each process can only see 64k (actually three banks of 64k) at once. And Coherent user space programs generally only saw 64k of memory, period.)
If the 8088, then why not the Z80/8080? Well, mostly because almost all Z80 computers had less than 64k of RAM, and those that had more used banking techniques that weren't terribly terribly efficient. But in theory, at least, a computer maker can add a decent MMU to a Z80, and make it perfectly capable of running (smaller) Unix systems. Unix was ideally suited to the environment in some ways, it was originally built on the principle that that a collection of small, efficient, tools was better than a smaller number of larger tools.
So it doesn't really surprise me, and it's not ridiculously ambitious assuming you're not demanding a modern operating system capable of running gcc and EMACS, or other similarly large tools.
Also: it's a myth that text messaging is "free". Text messages use the control channel (the same channel that's used to set up/tear down calls), which has a limited amount of capacity. Flood a tower with SMS messages and you'll actually make it impossible for others to make calls at the same time.
From a cost perspective, they "cost" more than regular data, and a phone call that encompasses the same content as a string of text messages is much more efficient than the same number of text messages.
The Play Store is leverage over the carriers to make sure that Android stays more or less standardized. Without it, the FOSS nature of the OS means it would be easier to create forks of Android that, over time, become less compatible with the version Google maintains.
I'd also add that one of the entire reasons Android exists is that Apple locked up the iPhone, and Google was quite legitimately frightened of being locked out of the touchphone world completely. Even the "Google" apps that came with the iPhone weren't Google's. Regardless of what direction the touchphone world goes, Google wants to guarantee it's not locked out.
And if Bing has shown us anything, Microsoft's attempt at beating Google at their own game is laughably pitiful.
Uh, have you used Google lately? Yeah, Bing today isn't as good as Google search was five years ago, but it's more or less an equal to what Google search is right now. Perhaps even slightly better.
And before anyone (for this is Slashdot) says "squiggleslash? Never heard of you and you said something that sounded like praise for Microsoft therefore SHILL", believe me "Being slightly better than Google search is right now" is damning with faint praise. They're both shit.
I read that article a while back and found it flawed for a number of reasons. It overstates the difficulty of reproducing the Google APIs, overstates the degree to which apps are dependent upon them (that is, the number may be growing but the nature of most of the APIs means that there's nothing stopping most developers from producing a "Microsoft" version that simply disables Google features), and hand-waves over the fact that the most successful tablet range in the world right now is a non-Google Android device, the Kindle Fire.
If Amazon were truly having difficulty getting developers to develop for the Fire, then however tortured the logic, the Ars article may have some basis in reality, but as it is it feels like reading one of those "The process that causes vaccines to cause autism" pamphlets: a long scientific argument that's obviously wrong because the very thing it's trying to explain doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin advocates are, in my experience, quite happy to say that the economic crisis (at least, in the form they've imagined it to be) is a fiat money issue. And I have difficulty believing that if the current economic crisis were localized such that it only happened in the US, and that there actually was some link between the theory of the dollar and the problem, they'd be more specific.
In this case, there's a link between the theory of Bitcoin and the consequences of MtGox. We could, at best, say "It's not a Bitcoin issue, it applies to all non-state backed crypto-currencies", but you certainly can't minimize it and pretend it applies to "less than Bitcoin". MtGox is a clear consequence of what happens when you're desperate to build a currency that cannot be regulated. It's a Bitcoin problem, because that's what Bitcoins are. Its a Bitcoin problem because Bitcoin's advocates and users want Bitcoins to be like that. And it's a Bitcoin problem because Bitcoin's advocates are too fixated on the notion that somehow a crash or two will filter out the bad actors to realize that's not a viable strategy, that bad actors will always come in, that they've built no way to distinguish them from honest players, and that there's no insurance against being a victim of them.
It is a Bitcoin issue.
If this were a normal bank, exchanging dollars for dollars, it would face regulation and insurance requirements that would make failure much more difficult. Attempts by hackers to redirect large sums of money, even electronically, would face much higher hurdles with legally mandated stronger security controls, and a much stronger paper trail. If the actual underlying cause is fraud within Mt Gox, again, the fraudsters would face higher hurdles, having to deal with external auditors at every move.
And if all of those controls failed (and they do occasionally), the controllers of the currency, the government, would be in a position to rescue the victims of the collapse. And we've seen them do this too.
Bitcoin doesn't have these protections because its entire reason for its existence is to avoid government. It treats government control as a bug, not a feature. It treats regulation as a terrible thing. Bitcoin exchanges cannot reliably be audited, because any Bitcoin exchange can claim anything about itself with impunity. Bitcoin exchanges cannot be regulated in real time. Insofar as fraudsters face consequences, it happens well after the fact, with investigations for fraud and breach of contract, and requires more efforts to prove.
It's interesting that every Bitcoin advocate is now claiming they saw Mt Gox's troubles coming and anyone who lost money was stupid. In fact, part of the problem here is up until six months ago, Mt Gox was widely praised, recommended, and considered part of the backbone of the Bitcoin system. By the time Bitcoin's "I told you so" crowd started to notice a problem, it was essentially too late. Anyone can notice that an exchange suddenly is having problems paying out deposits. What would have been more impressive is if Bitcoins fans had predicted problems in advance. What would have been even more impressive would have been if Bitcoin's fans predicted the possibility of such problems happening and had implemented an infrastructure where the effects of such problems were mitigated.
The reality is very few Bitcoin advocates saw this coming. If they had, you wouldn't have waited until after Mt Gox started to collapse to claim it was a bad investment. If they had, real efforts would have been made to protect the currency.
Bitcoin is not just some mathematics. It's a function of who uses it. You guys failed. Miserably. And Bitcoin is damaged as a result. Not that I'm upset or anything, it's a currency designed by people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It's a currency, essentially, designed by people who don't understand money. It needs to go. So it's a good thing the gaping holes are being revealed.
But if you disagree with me on whether Bitcoins are a good thing, and want it to be a success, do not, do not for a single second, sit there while the most famous and, until the start of the collapse six months ago, most respected exchange collapses, and act like nothing's wrong.
You failed to read the post you're responding to. The author said the law was stupid. vux984 was, however, saying that if the law is consistent it applies just as much to a company-owned Facebook page as their non-social media Internet advertising.
In fairness, DNS is so broken that it's a miracle any changes ever get past the "wishful thinking" stage. I still remember the original news reports that new TLDs were being added to the DNS system... in the late nineties. It took over a decade for anything to actually happen after that original announcement, and they're still trying to make it work.
What's the difference been that and, say, the fact CNAME is virtually useless and nobody uses _SRV? Answer: Money.
Thanks for telling me what I don't want.
I look forward to many more years of manufacturers giving me what I actually "want", rather than what I think I want, even though for some reason I still think I want what I originally said I wanted. But I'm probably dippy like that! I could swear what I want is a decent battery life, largish screen, fast CPU and memory, removable storage, and a keyboard, and I'm not sure why I wouldn't want that, but as I understand it I'm wrong, and what I actually "want" is a phone that's super-thin, has inadequate storage, and has a battery life of a few hours.
FWIW, there is plenty of history in terms of law enforcement entities enforcing breaches of law in the electronic realm, both using traditional pre-digital laws such as fraud and wire fraud, copyright infringement, obscenity, etc, and post-digital digital-specific laws such as those against "computer misuse".
In MtGox's case:
- There is objective evidence (that is, this is what MtGox is claiming themselves) that post digital crimes such as those aimed at hackers are relevent.
- There is at least some evidence that fraud is involved, both in terms of what Mt Gox is saying, and the possibility that Mt Gox are lying.
In addition to the above, it's also quite possible that individual users can make civil cases against Mt Gox on the basis of breach of contract, and Mt Gox, in turn, can possibly have civil cases against the users they claim defrauded them on the same basis.
These do open the gates for a full-on government law enforcement investigation. I'm guessing the Japanese authorities have jurisdiction.
Looks like the NHS link was missing a dash: http://www.nhs.uk/news/2014/02...
Largely because I'm tired of hearing about it, moreover tired of hearing justifications for it based upon people who have no understanding of money outside of what some Austrian-economics kook told them.
This isn't the problem. As I understand it (and I've read the article multiple times and it's early in the morning so I may be getting it wrong), the problem is this:
1. ICANN is introducing new .TLDs (eg additions to .com, .net, .org) etc (we've known about this for a while, this isn't news.) .TLD for the private network, for example ".internal", ".corp", etc. For example, your employer might, right now, be calling your workstation "pc117.nyoffice.intranet" .TLDs are already, apparently, in use by private entities for their private networks. You might ask how they know? Well, think in terms of a roaming laptop that upon connecting to a Wifi at Starbucks immediately, before the VPN is set up, tries to access "exchange-server.nyoffice.intranet". It makes the DNS lookup, and because the VPN isn't up yet, the DNS lookup goes to the global DNS servers, causing a bell to ring in ICANN's HQ (or something.) .TLDs themselves. Kerching!)
2. Common practice on private networks is to create and use an unused
3. After analyzing global DNS hits, ICANN's researchers found that many/most of the new proposed
4. ICANN needs to "do something" to alert people with private networks to change their TLDs, or else those people will, unintentionally, find themselves locked out of sites with the new TLD. (Cynical PoV: and this will decrease the value of the
Now ICANN appears to believe that the best solution is to have the .TLDs return this odd 127.0.53.53 IP address instead of "domain not found" for all unknown domains, so that if a technie working for a company affected is roaming with their laptop, and they try to access "exchange-server.nyoffice.intranet" forgetting to put up the VPN, and ".intranet" is a new TLD, and they can't connect because the VPN isn't up, and they decide to check their Windows Event Logs to figure out why, then instead of "domain not found" which would immediately make them think "Oh wait, of course it can't be resolved, it's not a real domain and I'm not on the VPN", they'd see a weird IP address, and think "That's odd, let me Google that, there's obviously a problem with DNS."
(I think they'd have more luck if they made it a pair of real IP addresses, one A, one AAAA, pointing at a website that tells the roaming user the answer that they can report to a sysadmin, rather than forcing a sysadmin to Google something they may never become aware of because they may not roam in the first place, but to be honest, even that sounds like a bad idea, I'd rather IP addresses not be returned for invalid domains to begin with.)
Unless the actress has a copyright interest in the finished work, which apparently she does. It's right there in the summary. You did read the summary, right?
Seriously people, why are you fuckers commenting if you're not even willing to read the summary? And why are you jumping to the conclusion that a Judge just pulled this judgement completely out of his ass rather than at least starting with the assumption there's at least some basis for the decision?
Oh, and you idiots who keep screaming "Freedom of speech" - here's the problem. The movie in question isn't being censored because of content, but because one of the makers (the actress in question) of the film has no desire to see it published. That is, actually, her right. The producers of the film can get around this by making the exact same film, only without the actress's involvement this time.
People withdrawing their works is a time honored tradition. And in this case, unlike, say, Kubrick removing Clockwork Orange from UK theaters, the person demanding the work be withdrawn has actually been hurt, and is hurt by the movie continuing to circulate.
That third dimension adds extra layers of safety. In 2D, you have to veer left or right to dodge an obstacle. In 3D, you also have up and down, or any combination thereof, and you can start off flying at a level where there are very few obstacles to begin with.
How about F YES?
Autonomous is about the only sensible way we can implement "flying cars". And it's probably, realistically, the case that the only way we can implement autonomous cars is if they're flying (short of us building out a national grade separated tracked road network that joins every building in the country)
As someone who hates driving, and hates being forced to drive, and knows damned well the chances of us getting a decent zoning system in most of the US so people can actually live in places well served with transit are minimal, I see flying autonomous cars as the next best thing.
Of course, it's almost equally unlikely to happen.
In fairness, that's proven very difficult to prosecute anyway...
Or maybe, for maximum bad taste comedic effect, "We have been ordered by a German court to say that "videos are not available due to a lack of a licensing agreement between YouTube and GEMA", and as a mark of our respect to the German legal system, we are only following orders when we show this message to you."
Not when the insurance company has an army.
Real banks have insurance. So no, Mt Gox failing is not like a "large bank fail".
Not just clickbait, but an actual hatchet-job which will be defended by Wikileaks opponents as "We know he's imperfect and you shouldn't be worshipping him" (which we weren't anyway.)
Clearest clue this entire article is written in bad faith: this poor attempt to imply hypocrisy:
No idea if Assange is an unfaithful harasser of women or not, but this isn't an article I'd trust on the subject. And no, I'm a fan of the message, the messenger isn't important.
Those of us who need more information on the technical side of the version of Android shipped with this phone can look here for more information. They include an APK checker (no, not Mr Hosts...) that looks for common problems (presumably anything that calls GMS)
Same here, but people are telling me that while it's unpopular in the US there are many countries where it's extremely popular. I guess it's the Sony MiniDisc of IM, a runaway success, but considered a failure by citizens of the most powerful country on Earth because it just didn't take off there.
A kid born today has a considerably lower chance of leading a life of (crippling) debt, unemployment (for the most part, 1950-1970s excepting perhaps), poverty, starvation, or war than in the past, at least, if they're lucky enough to be born in the West, which I assume they would be if you were the parents.
I used to use the same justifications to myself, FWIW. The reality is that I was finding justiifcations for not having children, which was the real issue. I didn't want them. I didn't want the loss of freedom and imposition of responsibilities a child would entail. But such an argument feels selfish (it isn't, but it feels selfish) and so I pretended I didn't want children for the good of the world, and for their own good.
If you're like 99% of the population, you'll change your mind. Biological programming will overwhelm you when the time is right. You'll view having a child as one of the most wonderful things you could possibly do. You'll recognize that you can actually build a stable environment for your child to come into the world, to learn what they need to do, and to ensure they're equipped with the tools needed to make it in this world.
One of those tools being, of course, their mere existance.
Well, early Unixes and Unix clones were available for computers whose addressing model was 16 bit (or worse). Indeed, this survived well into the 1980s, with early versions of Coherent available for the 8088 (yes, I know some will say that has a 20 bit address space, but it's sorta paged such that each process can only see 64k (actually three banks of 64k) at once. And Coherent user space programs generally only saw 64k of memory, period.)
If the 8088, then why not the Z80/8080? Well, mostly because almost all Z80 computers had less than 64k of RAM, and those that had more used banking techniques that weren't terribly terribly efficient. But in theory, at least, a computer maker can add a decent MMU to a Z80, and make it perfectly capable of running (smaller) Unix systems. Unix was ideally suited to the environment in some ways, it was originally built on the principle that that a collection of small, efficient, tools was better than a smaller number of larger tools.
So it doesn't really surprise me, and it's not ridiculously ambitious assuming you're not demanding a modern operating system capable of running gcc and EMACS, or other similarly large tools.
Also: it's a myth that text messaging is "free". Text messages use the control channel (the same channel that's used to set up/tear down calls), which has a limited amount of capacity. Flood a tower with SMS messages and you'll actually make it impossible for others to make calls at the same time.
From a cost perspective, they "cost" more than regular data, and a phone call that encompasses the same content as a string of text messages is much more efficient than the same number of text messages.
The Play Store is leverage over the carriers to make sure that Android stays more or less standardized. Without it, the FOSS nature of the OS means it would be easier to create forks of Android that, over time, become less compatible with the version Google maintains.
I'd also add that one of the entire reasons Android exists is that Apple locked up the iPhone, and Google was quite legitimately frightened of being locked out of the touchphone world completely. Even the "Google" apps that came with the iPhone weren't Google's. Regardless of what direction the touchphone world goes, Google wants to guarantee it's not locked out.
Uh, have you used Google lately? Yeah, Bing today isn't as good as Google search was five years ago, but it's more or less an equal to what Google search is right now. Perhaps even slightly better.
And before anyone (for this is Slashdot) says "squiggleslash? Never heard of you and you said something that sounded like praise for Microsoft therefore SHILL", believe me "Being slightly better than Google search is right now" is damning with faint praise. They're both shit.
I read that article a while back and found it flawed for a number of reasons. It overstates the difficulty of reproducing the Google APIs, overstates the degree to which apps are dependent upon them (that is, the number may be growing but the nature of most of the APIs means that there's nothing stopping most developers from producing a "Microsoft" version that simply disables Google features), and hand-waves over the fact that the most successful tablet range in the world right now is a non-Google Android device, the Kindle Fire.
If Amazon were truly having difficulty getting developers to develop for the Fire, then however tortured the logic, the Ars article may have some basis in reality, but as it is it feels like reading one of those "The process that causes vaccines to cause autism" pamphlets: a long scientific argument that's obviously wrong because the very thing it's trying to explain doesn't exist.