Not sure, but I think people were predicting many decades ago that statistics would be abused to show an absense of something that actually exists, simply by being selective with your samples. For example, you might choose to pick a 15 year time span of a pattern subject to noise when you know full well that a five, ten, twenty, twenty five, and fifty year time span doesn't show the same thing, and that the only reason that fifteen years shows what you want is because of the noise.
Great comparison. Nazis were charged under one set of laws in a totally different country that we'd been at war against, therefore, ergo, an entirely unrelated extradition treaty that didn't even exist in the 1940s should apply to a different dictator.
Sorry, that's not how the law works. It's never worked like that. You don't get to say "Well, of course this law applies, this man is evil, that's all you need to know to apply it!" The law is a strict set of rules, and they either apply to a specific instance or they don't. Saying "They don't" doesn't mean you're supporting the viewpoints and prior actions of the person immediately benefiting from your decision.
You'd be better of venting your anger at parliament for not having the laws you want, and/or the DPP for not using them.
Well our elected parliament has decide they shouldn't.
Seems to me that elected representatives should make the law not judges.
He asked why, not who should make the decision. And the law is made by elected representatives, so your argument here is bogus. If the UK government doesn't want it, they should change the law in a legal way, rather than demand the benefits of, say, European integration without wanting the bits they disagree with.
Prisoners voting in the UK also poses specific problems as we vote in relatively small constituencies and some of our prisons are very large. You might end up giving prisoners a disproportionate amount of influence if they were in a swing seat.
Or you might give them no influence because they're stuck in a seat where the outcome is preordained because of the degree of support the winning candidate has. In any case, is that a reason to ban voting, or simply a reason to ensure the criteria by which a choice of voting venue is made is reformed to match the circumstances?
I'm thoroughly against the notion that prisoners should have no say in the law of the land. It's been widely misused, especially in the US and in particular the Deep South, as an easy way to disenfranchise political opponents, by creating laws focused on acts likely to be committed by members of a particular lifestyle or social group, eliminating them from the voting populace before they know what's hit them. Some examples, however, such the war on drugs, exist on both sides of the Atlantic, and exist almost entirely to marginalize those likely to be caught by them. Bans on voting prop up such injustices, magnify them, and make them impossible to overturn.
The decision may not have been the one we want, but it seems legally sound to me (yes, I'd expect such a treaty to only apply to offenses committed after such a treaty is signed), not "despicable". I don't want the law to be a popularity contest, however much I may want to see an evil person see justice.
The fact that you can use some of the same terms to describe entirely different things doesn't mean that someone is applying a double standard if they agree with one thing and not another.
The message you're responding to actually makes it clear that this is not an example of "the bad thing". It was a correction to drivel people are posting because, well, they hear "Valve is digging through your cache" and think that Valve is indiscriminately looking at your cache, and sending private information it has no right to know.
People are suggesting that Valve is sending your entire DNS cache to Valve so it can look for cheating. This is wrong. It's not true. That is what I was correcting. Valve is not receiving anything from your computer beyond a yes/no flag as to whether a particular DNS lookup was made recently, where that DNS lookup would not be a user initiated event.
When people are upset about "digging through your machine", they're worried not about an anti-cheat algorithm sending a yes/no answer to the question "Is Frobnicator cheating", they're worried about a long answer to "What has Frobnicator been doing recently?"
Your comment ignores nuance, ignores differences, pretends that disimilar things are similar, and equates flawed anti-terror policies that invade privacy and harm innocent people with locally stored logic that confirms if you've been cheating on a game, and then only if there's reason to believe that. Your attempt to promote an aura of aloof objectivity falls flat, it's absurd, and you should know better.
You can. It's called the Firehose. Obviously, once an editor has actually posted the article it's too late and voting effectively (that is, meaningfully, the submission can still be voted on but it makes no difference) stops.
You want to visit a bunch of servers that run nothing but web services, if they run a web server at all?
Because that's the type of server we're talking about here. Something cheat.dll uses to phone home, connecting to port 1234 on drm-server-73.cheatcorp.com. Not www.cheapcheats.com where you bought the cheat from.
Nothing. Unless you're actually doing things on an online game that would make the admins think you were cheating, you won't be victimized simply because you follow a link.
And bear in mind that they're not looking for public website domain names unless by sheer coincidence (or cheaping out on the part of the cheats vendor - yes, that's what we're talking about) the same server AND domain name is being used for both the vendor's website and for the DRM checking code in their cheat patch.
I don't think it'd make any sense for Valve to get upset about people visiting websites discussing cheats. Too many innocent hits, and besides, many websites with information like "Install this DLL for infinite lives" are also going to come up with stuff like "You get past the Hamster of Doom by picking up the Golden Sunflower Seed under the third rock, throw the seed at the hamster, and then jump, dart left, dart right, and hop over the Hamster as he swipes at you."
Everyone reading the story seems to think they're blocking the latter. They're not. They're looking for people using commercial cheats, and looking for evidence (in this case, in the DNS cache) that the commercial cheat is installed by looking at DNS lookups that would be performed by the commercial cheat itself.
Try responding to the entire comment, which talks about Google facing liability in the lawsuit that it doesn't if it removes the file. That is true.
since copyright holders have already sued and won against service providers and file sharing sites that MET the DMCA's safe harbor requirements.
Yes and no. File sharing sites set up specifically facilitate copyright theft have found that a dubious "DMCA compliance" system that's easily bypassed by, for example, allowing every file to have an infinite number of URL aliases (oron.com/file/123. oron.com/file/123/hotlusybabes.flv, oron.com/file/123/hotlustybabes.flv?welcome=1, server-1.oron.com/file/123/) removing only those mentioned by the copyright holder, have found judges are not stupid. Illegal sites are illegal, even if they pretend to be compliant with some laws.
Youtube.com is a fairly neutral hoster of videos that both makes a good faith attempt to comply with the DMCA, has legitimate uses, includes features designed to make it less useful for piracy (such as the 10 minute video limit), and is used mostly legitimately (like BitTorrent, not like Napster) with people using it to share self-produced content more than any other type of content. As long as it complies with the DMCA judges will side with it.
You're looking at it at too low a level. The cheapest route to communicate between two parties is free webmail. Guess which country hosts the largest number of free webmail systems?
Google (or any hosting provider) is obliged, under the DMCA, to pull his video unless he submits that counter-claim, or else face liability should the copyright holder want to sue. While you and I can pontificate as much as we want as to whether it's fair use (and we're probably right), most hosting providers, as a matter of policy, would rather not be dragged into court and risk losing in the first place.
Issuing the counter claim would protect his hosting provider (in this case, Google.) It bothers me that he's not doing this, yet the tone of the article is that Google is at fault for pulling it.
Once again: Democrats don't claim that merely disagreeing with Obama makes you racist. What we've observed is that much of the opposition to Obama is due to naked racism.
The fact you're not racist (assuming you're not) doesn't mean others aren't.
The Boston Bomber was charged with a law that was on the books prior to 9/11 that used the term. It's kinda awkward, but it certainly wasn't prosecutors trying to abuse the term for PR reasons.
Not really, the comments here are largely people rushing to Canonical's defense. Trademarks exist for good reasons, and they're an excellent defense against fraud and a way to promote a predictable product. Most, including the Slashdot mob, recognize that.
Google's actions with Android are disappointing, but they still ship a fully fledged feature complete 100% open source mobile operating system. They just would like developers to use their non-free middleware, as it gives them some control over how the platform develops. I don't blame them, although I also would like to live in a world where they don't feel the need to do that. Unfortunately, I suspect that world is inhabited by sparkling unicorns who fart rainbows.
make it so that they can compete and they can try any program they want
I don't want them to compete, I want them to be regulated. One carrier per region makes more sense.
I know this will have the usual free market advocates clutching their pearls and fainting, but here's the problem. It costs $X kagillion to cover a region with cable, and $Y kabillion per month to maintain it. Those figures do not change by any significant amount depending on market share. If Comcast is paying $1B to cover a region, and another $100M a year to maintain it, it'll pay that regardless of whether it keeps or loses 50% of its customers. And likewise a competitor will pay exactly the same.
So adding competition simply increases the amount each company will have to claw back from its customers. If there are three competitors where there's currently one operator, all it means is that the cost of Internet access will tripple. At best you might end up with better customer service. But I'm not sure that paying $210/month for internet access instead of $70 is going to feel better because on the odd occasion I have to call Comt&t the person's friendly and I don't have to wait 45 minutes being told that my call is important to them.
Fuck that. Regulate them. Regulate the shit out of them. We regulate (and tax, and so on) the wrong things in the US, and then declare regulation (and taxes, and so on) wrong and competition the solution to everything.
Competition isn't going to help here. At least, not in the way you're advocating. If you want competition, introduce it at layers unrelated to infrastructure redundancy.
FWIW, no, it'll make no difference. The NSA and GCHQ has a fairly substantial data sharing thing going on (and probably does with other European agencies, it's just with The Guardian being based in the UK it focusses on the UK-NSA links.) Merkel's proposal probably has more to do with appearances than actual substance.
I don't know what Slashdot you're reading but the one I'm reading is packed with supportive comments about the decision. I think there's just relief that Shuttleworth hasn't decided to NIH something for once.
(Not that I'm particularly upset that they tried to do something different with Unity. GNOME 3 needed a good alternative, the problem was that Unity seems to be just as flawed, not with the principle of doing something. It'd be nice to see them stick with X.org rather than go Wayland, but they've also decided to do the "wrong alternative to wrong" again in Mir...)
Funnily enough that's a recent thing. Shakespeare used "Their"/"They" to mean "His/her" without any problems. Even used it when the gender was known, and a specific person was refered to. See here for a discussion.
Given the lack of situations where it's likely to be misleading to use "The{y/ir}" instead of "His/her", and given it's not making it more difficult to express a concept (unlike, say, recent redefinitions of "literally" or "decimate"), and especially given this was the original definition of the word before some proto-grammar-nazi redefined it, I have no objection to they/their becoming valid for both single and plural references.
Tax funded higher education, including a "maintenance grant" that covered (or intended to cover) living costs, was the norm in Britain when I went to University (I'm not sure what the current situation is, this was at the end of the Thatcher administration), and I can assure you your depiction of free education bears no relation to reality.
Indeed, I'm actually a little horrified by the notion that anyone would consider access to higher education should be dependent upon their access to wealth, because somehow a child with much inherited (or soon to be) wealth would work harder than a child of a family with little or no money. It's absurd, it's insulting, and it's ultimately damaging.
Oh, ease up on the hyperbole. There is no comparison between Darwin (the OSS part of Mac OS X) which is a bare bones GUI-less Unix-type OS, and AOSP (the OSS part of Android) which is a fully fledged entirely usable mobile operating system. You would not buy a computer intending to use it as your main desktop knowing it can only run Darwin. You might well buy a phone or tablet running AOSP however intending it to be your main phone or tablet. And people do.
What Google Play Services provides is:
- An app store.
- An additional set of APIs which exists primarily as a compatibility layer between different versions of Android
- Access to the Google App Suite, which require that framework and need to be downloaded via the Play Store.
Additionally Google has their own forks of several of AOSP's built-in apps, and no longer develops the AOSP versions - though they're still present. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whether you really want, for example, your photo gallery integrated with Google+ (hell no), or your media player to automatically download songs from Google's Play Store (actually, that sounds useful. Shame the Google version of the music player sucks though...)
The Ars Technica article is somewhat hysterical and I was disappointed to read it. It hugely overstates the situation, portraying it as a conspiracy to take control over an OS that Google's been the lead developer on since the beginning. It ignores the success companies like Amazon are having with GMS-less Android.
This has nothing to do with the Big 3. I've been involved with the Big 3 and I can tell you they'd get rid of the dealership system in a heartbeat if there was a way to do so. Moreover the Big 3 doesn't give a rats ass about a high end niche car maker.
Nor is this aimed at Tesla or Tesla specific. It's aimed at a particular way of selling cars that it happens Tesla wants to do. While it sucks, there's no reason why, for example, Bentley would be a beneficiary of this system while Tesla would be a victim.
This is car dealers protecting their turfs, nothing more, nothing less. They want all automakers to provide them with franchises. Manufacturers, to varying degrees, do not want that. The dealers are attempting an end-run around the manufacturers by getting the law involved.
Claiming otherwise would be like, if in 2000, Tiger Direct and Circuit City lobbied their state government to ban computer manufacturers from having their own stores (like Apple was about to do), that Microsoft was behind it.
I'm guessing they're not going to waste enormous effort on this to produce a me-too Android phone that they have to discontinue. The relationship between Nokia and Microsoft being what it is, I suspect this is a face-saving way Microsoft has of adopting Android in some shape or form.
Something the summary didn't highlight: this isn't GMS/Android (GMS - Google Mobile Services, the apps and infrastructure that make up Google Play and that are bundled with most modern Android devices), Nokia are building this from AOSP in much the same way as Amazon have with the Kindle Fire version of Android. It will have no Google Play Store nor any of the underlying Google non-AOSP infrastructure, and apps written for GMS (an increasing body of work that grows by the day) will need a fair amount of work to make them available in the Nokia app store.
Windows Phone hasn't exactly been a roaring success. Maybe it should have been, perhaps Windows 8's failure to take off has hurt it, but it hasn't been, and at some point Microsoft is going to look for options. I think it's a pretty major change of direction to jump on a third party product and tweak it for their own needs, but it's not impossible or unheard of - Microsoft tried to do that with Java. Hey, they even had Xenix once. With the exceptions of Linux and Busybox, AOSP has the kind of FOSS licensing Microsoft isn't scared of.
And Amazon's made a success of the strategy. There are only two popular alternatives to iOS, one is Google's Android, the other is Amazon's.
If nothing else, allowing Nokia to use a version of Android that's under Nokia/Microsoft's control lets Microsoft buy time.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure, but I think people were predicting many decades ago that statistics would be abused to show an absense of something that actually exists, simply by being selective with your samples. For example, you might choose to pick a 15 year time span of a pattern subject to noise when you know full well that a five, ten, twenty, twenty five, and fifty year time span doesn't show the same thing, and that the only reason that fifteen years shows what you want is because of the noise.
Great comparison. Nazis were charged under one set of laws in a totally different country that we'd been at war against, therefore, ergo, an entirely unrelated extradition treaty that didn't even exist in the 1940s should apply to a different dictator.
Sorry, that's not how the law works. It's never worked like that. You don't get to say "Well, of course this law applies, this man is evil, that's all you need to know to apply it!" The law is a strict set of rules, and they either apply to a specific instance or they don't. Saying "They don't" doesn't mean you're supporting the viewpoints and prior actions of the person immediately benefiting from your decision.
You'd be better of venting your anger at parliament for not having the laws you want, and/or the DPP for not using them.
His actual name is John Laws. It happens sometimes that people are born with rather appropriate names for their future careers.
He asked why, not who should make the decision. And the law is made by elected representatives, so your argument here is bogus. If the UK government doesn't want it, they should change the law in a legal way, rather than demand the benefits of, say, European integration without wanting the bits they disagree with.
Or you might give them no influence because they're stuck in a seat where the outcome is preordained because of the degree of support the winning candidate has. In any case, is that a reason to ban voting, or simply a reason to ensure the criteria by which a choice of voting venue is made is reformed to match the circumstances?
I'm thoroughly against the notion that prisoners should have no say in the law of the land. It's been widely misused, especially in the US and in particular the Deep South, as an easy way to disenfranchise political opponents, by creating laws focused on acts likely to be committed by members of a particular lifestyle or social group, eliminating them from the voting populace before they know what's hit them. Some examples, however, such the war on drugs, exist on both sides of the Atlantic, and exist almost entirely to marginalize those likely to be caught by them. Bans on voting prop up such injustices, magnify them, and make them impossible to overturn.
The decision may not have been the one we want, but it seems legally sound to me (yes, I'd expect such a treaty to only apply to offenses committed after such a treaty is signed), not "despicable". I don't want the law to be a popularity contest, however much I may want to see an evil person see justice.
The fact that you can use some of the same terms to describe entirely different things doesn't mean that someone is applying a double standard if they agree with one thing and not another.
The message you're responding to actually makes it clear that this is not an example of "the bad thing". It was a correction to drivel people are posting because, well, they hear "Valve is digging through your cache" and think that Valve is indiscriminately looking at your cache, and sending private information it has no right to know.
People are suggesting that Valve is sending your entire DNS cache to Valve so it can look for cheating. This is wrong. It's not true. That is what I was correcting. Valve is not receiving anything from your computer beyond a yes/no flag as to whether a particular DNS lookup was made recently, where that DNS lookup would not be a user initiated event.
When people are upset about "digging through your machine", they're worried not about an anti-cheat algorithm sending a yes/no answer to the question "Is Frobnicator cheating", they're worried about a long answer to "What has Frobnicator been doing recently?"
Your comment ignores nuance, ignores differences, pretends that disimilar things are similar, and equates flawed anti-terror policies that invade privacy and harm innocent people with locally stored logic that confirms if you've been cheating on a game, and then only if there's reason to believe that. Your attempt to promote an aura of aloof objectivity falls flat, it's absurd, and you should know better.
You can. It's called the Firehose. Obviously, once an editor has actually posted the article it's too late and voting effectively (that is, meaningfully, the submission can still be voted on but it makes no difference) stops.
You want to visit a bunch of servers that run nothing but web services, if they run a web server at all?
Because that's the type of server we're talking about here. Something cheat.dll uses to phone home, connecting to port 1234 on drm-server-73.cheatcorp.com. Not www.cheapcheats.com where you bought the cheat from.
Nothing. Unless you're actually doing things on an online game that would make the admins think you were cheating, you won't be victimized simply because you follow a link.
And bear in mind that they're not looking for public website domain names unless by sheer coincidence (or cheaping out on the part of the cheats vendor - yes, that's what we're talking about) the same server AND domain name is being used for both the vendor's website and for the DRM checking code in their cheat patch.
I don't think it'd make any sense for Valve to get upset about people visiting websites discussing cheats. Too many innocent hits, and besides, many websites with information like "Install this DLL for infinite lives" are also going to come up with stuff like "You get past the Hamster of Doom by picking up the Golden Sunflower Seed under the third rock, throw the seed at the hamster, and then jump, dart left, dart right, and hop over the Hamster as he swipes at you."
Everyone reading the story seems to think they're blocking the latter. They're not. They're looking for people using commercial cheats, and looking for evidence (in this case, in the DNS cache) that the commercial cheat is installed by looking at DNS lookups that would be performed by the commercial cheat itself.
Try responding to the entire comment, which talks about Google facing liability in the lawsuit that it doesn't if it removes the file. That is true.
Yes and no. File sharing sites set up specifically facilitate copyright theft have found that a dubious "DMCA compliance" system that's easily bypassed by, for example, allowing every file to have an infinite number of URL aliases (oron.com/file/123. oron.com/file/123/hotlusybabes.flv, oron.com/file/123/hotlustybabes.flv?welcome=1, server-1.oron.com/file/123/) removing only those mentioned by the copyright holder, have found judges are not stupid. Illegal sites are illegal, even if they pretend to be compliant with some laws.
Youtube.com is a fairly neutral hoster of videos that both makes a good faith attempt to comply with the DMCA, has legitimate uses, includes features designed to make it less useful for piracy (such as the 10 minute video limit), and is used mostly legitimately (like BitTorrent, not like Napster) with people using it to share self-produced content more than any other type of content. As long as it complies with the DMCA judges will side with it.
You're looking at it at too low a level. The cheapest route to communicate between two parties is free webmail. Guess which country hosts the largest number of free webmail systems?
Google (or any hosting provider) is obliged, under the DMCA, to pull his video unless he submits that counter-claim, or else face liability should the copyright holder want to sue. While you and I can pontificate as much as we want as to whether it's fair use (and we're probably right), most hosting providers, as a matter of policy, would rather not be dragged into court and risk losing in the first place.
Issuing the counter claim would protect his hosting provider (in this case, Google.) It bothers me that he's not doing this, yet the tone of the article is that Google is at fault for pulling it.
Once again: Democrats don't claim that merely disagreeing with Obama makes you racist. What we've observed is that much of the opposition to Obama is due to naked racism.
The fact you're not racist (assuming you're not) doesn't mean others aren't.
The Boston Bomber was charged with a law that was on the books prior to 9/11 that used the term. It's kinda awkward, but it certainly wasn't prosecutors trying to abuse the term for PR reasons.
Not really, the comments here are largely people rushing to Canonical's defense. Trademarks exist for good reasons, and they're an excellent defense against fraud and a way to promote a predictable product. Most, including the Slashdot mob, recognize that.
Google's actions with Android are disappointing, but they still ship a fully fledged feature complete 100% open source mobile operating system. They just would like developers to use their non-free middleware, as it gives them some control over how the platform develops. I don't blame them, although I also would like to live in a world where they don't feel the need to do that. Unfortunately, I suspect that world is inhabited by sparkling unicorns who fart rainbows.
I don't want them to compete, I want them to be regulated. One carrier per region makes more sense.
I know this will have the usual free market advocates clutching their pearls and fainting, but here's the problem. It costs $X kagillion to cover a region with cable, and $Y kabillion per month to maintain it. Those figures do not change by any significant amount depending on market share. If Comcast is paying $1B to cover a region, and another $100M a year to maintain it, it'll pay that regardless of whether it keeps or loses 50% of its customers. And likewise a competitor will pay exactly the same.
So adding competition simply increases the amount each company will have to claw back from its customers. If there are three competitors where there's currently one operator, all it means is that the cost of Internet access will tripple. At best you might end up with better customer service. But I'm not sure that paying $210/month for internet access instead of $70 is going to feel better because on the odd occasion I have to call Comt&t the person's friendly and I don't have to wait 45 minutes being told that my call is important to them.
Fuck that. Regulate them. Regulate the shit out of them. We regulate (and tax, and so on) the wrong things in the US, and then declare regulation (and taxes, and so on) wrong and competition the solution to everything.
Competition isn't going to help here. At least, not in the way you're advocating. If you want competition, introduce it at layers unrelated to infrastructure redundancy.
FWIW, no, it'll make no difference. The NSA and GCHQ has a fairly substantial data sharing thing going on (and probably does with other European agencies, it's just with The Guardian being based in the UK it focusses on the UK-NSA links.) Merkel's proposal probably has more to do with appearances than actual substance.
I don't know what Slashdot you're reading but the one I'm reading is packed with supportive comments about the decision. I think there's just relief that Shuttleworth hasn't decided to NIH something for once.
(Not that I'm particularly upset that they tried to do something different with Unity. GNOME 3 needed a good alternative, the problem was that Unity seems to be just as flawed, not with the principle of doing something. It'd be nice to see them stick with X.org rather than go Wayland, but they've also decided to do the "wrong alternative to wrong" again in Mir...)
I have nothing.
Funnily enough that's a recent thing. Shakespeare used "Their"/"They" to mean "His/her" without any problems. Even used it when the gender was known, and a specific person was refered to. See here for a discussion.
Given the lack of situations where it's likely to be misleading to use "The{y/ir}" instead of "His/her", and given it's not making it more difficult to express a concept (unlike, say, recent redefinitions of "literally" or "decimate"), and especially given this was the original definition of the word before some proto-grammar-nazi redefined it, I have no objection to they/their becoming valid for both single and plural references.
Tax funded higher education, including a "maintenance grant" that covered (or intended to cover) living costs, was the norm in Britain when I went to University (I'm not sure what the current situation is, this was at the end of the Thatcher administration), and I can assure you your depiction of free education bears no relation to reality.
Indeed, I'm actually a little horrified by the notion that anyone would consider access to higher education should be dependent upon their access to wealth, because somehow a child with much inherited (or soon to be) wealth would work harder than a child of a family with little or no money. It's absurd, it's insulting, and it's ultimately damaging.
Oh, ease up on the hyperbole. There is no comparison between Darwin (the OSS part of Mac OS X) which is a bare bones GUI-less Unix-type OS, and AOSP (the OSS part of Android) which is a fully fledged entirely usable mobile operating system. You would not buy a computer intending to use it as your main desktop knowing it can only run Darwin. You might well buy a phone or tablet running AOSP however intending it to be your main phone or tablet. And people do.
What Google Play Services provides is:
- An app store.
- An additional set of APIs which exists primarily as a compatibility layer between different versions of Android
- Access to the Google App Suite, which require that framework and need to be downloaded via the Play Store.
Additionally Google has their own forks of several of AOSP's built-in apps, and no longer develops the AOSP versions - though they're still present. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on whether you really want, for example, your photo gallery integrated with Google+ (hell no), or your media player to automatically download songs from Google's Play Store (actually, that sounds useful. Shame the Google version of the music player sucks though...)
The Ars Technica article is somewhat hysterical and I was disappointed to read it. It hugely overstates the situation, portraying it as a conspiracy to take control over an OS that Google's been the lead developer on since the beginning. It ignores the success companies like Amazon are having with GMS-less Android.
This has nothing to do with the Big 3. I've been involved with the Big 3 and I can tell you they'd get rid of the dealership system in a heartbeat if there was a way to do so. Moreover the Big 3 doesn't give a rats ass about a high end niche car maker.
Nor is this aimed at Tesla or Tesla specific. It's aimed at a particular way of selling cars that it happens Tesla wants to do. While it sucks, there's no reason why, for example, Bentley would be a beneficiary of this system while Tesla would be a victim.
This is car dealers protecting their turfs, nothing more, nothing less. They want all automakers to provide them with franchises. Manufacturers, to varying degrees, do not want that. The dealers are attempting an end-run around the manufacturers by getting the law involved.
Claiming otherwise would be like, if in 2000, Tiger Direct and Circuit City lobbied their state government to ban computer manufacturers from having their own stores (like Apple was about to do), that Microsoft was behind it.
I'm guessing they're not going to waste enormous effort on this to produce a me-too Android phone that they have to discontinue. The relationship between Nokia and Microsoft being what it is, I suspect this is a face-saving way Microsoft has of adopting Android in some shape or form.
Something the summary didn't highlight: this isn't GMS/Android (GMS - Google Mobile Services, the apps and infrastructure that make up Google Play and that are bundled with most modern Android devices), Nokia are building this from AOSP in much the same way as Amazon have with the Kindle Fire version of Android. It will have no Google Play Store nor any of the underlying Google non-AOSP infrastructure, and apps written for GMS (an increasing body of work that grows by the day) will need a fair amount of work to make them available in the Nokia app store.
Windows Phone hasn't exactly been a roaring success. Maybe it should have been, perhaps Windows 8's failure to take off has hurt it, but it hasn't been, and at some point Microsoft is going to look for options. I think it's a pretty major change of direction to jump on a third party product and tweak it for their own needs, but it's not impossible or unheard of - Microsoft tried to do that with Java. Hey, they even had Xenix once. With the exceptions of Linux and Busybox, AOSP has the kind of FOSS licensing Microsoft isn't scared of.
And Amazon's made a success of the strategy. There are only two popular alternatives to iOS, one is Google's Android, the other is Amazon's.
If nothing else, allowing Nokia to use a version of Android that's under Nokia/Microsoft's control lets Microsoft buy time.
There's always a knee-jerk reaction to anything related to advertising simply because as a medium it's been abused so much throughout its history.
Try as I might, I can't really fault Mozilla for the way they're handling this, and yeah, I would like to see them get another source of revenue.