If this story was about Google's ultimatum to the AdBlock Plus developers rather than to Microsoft, would we be seeing the same sentiments expressed by the same people here? I doubt it.
I'm seeing a range of different views expressed, and a significant number are pro-Microsoft.
I'm not going to come down heavily on one side or another, beyond making the observation that a company like Microsoft that depends on people working in good faith with their licensed content probably should not be working in bad faith with the content of third parties, especially when those third parties are massive publishers who can just as easily help Microsoft's "villains". It's a stupid strategy and one that's likely to bite them in the rear.
Remember that Google already supports Windows Phone. Don't believe me? Get a Lumia, and visit http://m.youtube.com./
FWIW there's an option in settings to make the official Android YouTube app download and cache everything in your "Watch later" playlist while you're on Wifi.
Google hasn't sued anyone yet, they've set a deadline but it's not clear what action Google can take. There are several, including:
* Find ways to block the app
* Embed ads in the raw video
* Complete on-going switch to codecs Microsoft doesn't want to support
* Place a "Windows serial number generator" on the front page of Google.com
Is Microsoft doing right by users? That depends on whether their actions completely undermine YouTube or not. I'd like to think that the ability to download movies wouldn't damage the service, but one can reasonably suggest that without revenue from ads, YouTube isn't going to continue to be viable, and that users would be harmed more by the disappearance of YouTube.
Still, it's Windows Phone, so I doubt that all eight Lumia owners are going to bankrupt Google by depriving them of advertizing revenue...
Whether it is or it isn't, it sure feels like it. It feels, from the description, like stuff we've been doing for decades, except now it has a fancy name and people are doing more of it.
I'm genuinely interested to know whether my impression of SDN is totally off base and whether it is radically new and different.
I don't believe the ads are there by default if you're making an actual app as opposed to a wrapper around a website. An app is going work by determining the URL of the core video file, downloading and playing the video. Unless Google starts embedding ads in the raw video stream (it doesn't today) there's no way ads would even be considered.
That said, I'm not entirely sure I side with either party here. I am surprised, however, that a company as dependent upon honest compliance with licensed usage of its copyrighted materials would be stupid enough to piss off the largest search engine on the planet by providing unlicensed, non-compliant with the official licenses, access to its resources.
My guess is that Microsoft would be better off producing a wrapper around Google's HTML5 site.
It's an epic fail because it contradicts the notion that Fox News is wrong about global warming, which as we all know is wrong because it's been scientifically proven that Fox News is fair and balanced.
The alternative, that Fox News is wrong, would suppose that these so-called "Scientists" are actually doing research, publishing their results and methodology, and are being proven right time and time again. Which is ridiculous because Scientists are funded by Not Big Oil, and therefore have a vested interest in spreading Not Big Oil's agenda.
As a real small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, I have to admit I get a big kick out of the fact that you puny Earthlings still think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Well, because this is the United States, where the state and local governments have, since the 1950s, refused to allow any development outside of existing high density cities that didn't require residents to drive in order to perform day to day acts. Most Americans are forced to live in these areas through simply economic expediency.
Banning someone from driving in such conditions is, as a result, basically taking away their ability to fend for themselves. They become dependent on someone else to provide everything from access to food to access to employment. And by "someone else" I don't mean an efficient business capable of providing transportation to many people at once, I mean friends and family.
Want to be able to ban people from driving? Make it optional.
Want to force people to drive because you like driving and think it would somehow make it impossible for you to drive everywhere if just the option of not driving was available? Learn to deal with drunks behind the wheel.
Wonder if the right response is "Dear Sir, I can confirm it was nobody in my household who downloaded the content in question. Feel free to investigate my neighbors. Be careful how you word your accusations when making your investigation as we will sue for libel if, as a result of your investigation, any of our neighbors are under the impression we were responsible for the download."
Nobody's proposing that the restrictions on property ownership be stupid, just that there be some restrictions to prevent the loss of major archeological treasures.
By definition money is store of value, means of exchange and unit of account.
No. Means of exchange and unit of account, yes. Store of value? No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding which leads people to run around pretending that low rates of inflation are a conspiracy and that the world will end if we don't switch to the gold standard.
It's a medium of exchange and unit of account only. We print up sheets of paper (and mint coins) solely to make the transactions easier, but to a certain extent you and I can create and destroy money - actual dollars - in the time it takes for me to say "I'll sell you this TV for $100" and you to respond, "Sure, I'll owe you, is this IOU OK?" The Fed (and the banks it regulates) doesn't even have a monopoly on money creation.
You get scared because it seems to you obvious - despite being wrong - that if something can be used to transfer wealth it would follow that holding on to it would mean you keep that wealth. But money isn't wealth, it isn't value. And you holding on to it doesn't benefit anyone, it just means you make it more difficult for others to engage in transactions (because you're holding onto the unit of exchange) until someone else creates more money - which, ironically, you then crap your pants about.
I meant what I said, and gave an example of how the market can react. This is not a required product. You are not going to be denied a job, prevented from socializing, or lack important information needed to live your daily life if you eschew cable TV. The market is perfectly capable of handling "abuses" because people can, and do, walk away from the stall if the price is too high or the product is not what they want.
Cable TV is:
1. Not a monopoly, not that it matters.
2. Not required.
3. Not important.
4. Dependent upon delivering value to paying customers to be successful
Quite honestly though, even if it were a monopoly, with Dish Network and DirecTV going bust tomorrow, cable TV is still not required, is still not important, and is still dependent upon delivering value to paying customers to be successful. Beyond basic protections against fraud, what the hell regulation does it need?
It doesn't.
I meant what I said, and gave an example of how the market can react. This is not a required product. You are not going to be denied a job, prevented from socializing, or lack important information needed to live your daily life if you eschew Cable TV. The market is perfectly capable of handling "abuses" because people can, and do, walk away from the stall if the price is too high or the product is not what they want.
The market can take care of this one.
The greater good would, though, require the government actually focus on important stuff, which quite honestly the payment rules for TV channels and the provision of access to sporting content isn't.
Would it be nice if I could just buy the channels I want? I think so, sorta. Probably. I don't know. I have a feeling Dish wants me to pay what I'm paying regardless. I suspect I'll gain one or two channels I currently don't have in my package because they belong to another tier, but I'll unexpectedly miss out on content I thought I never watch but actually do.
Moreover though, it's not the kind of thing I want the government doing, because the government has an irritating habit of screwing things up when it decides how people should pay for something. One of the (many) reasons for the failure of, for example, passenger rail in this country was the decision of state and Federal governments to micromanage ticket pricing. Indeed, much of the freight rail industry collapsed for the same reason in the 1970s, it took deregulation to prevent it all from collapsing and a massive government bailout to keep the system in the North East up and running until it could be made profitable agaain.
And it did that despite the fact the industry involved, that it was destroying, was actually important. Cable TV isn't.
I don't see value in the government micromanaging this. Access to the Internet? Perhaps. But even there it needs to be aware of its limitations. These proposals seem, to me, to be an excessively large amount of action for a trivial problem.
Me neither. I'm hardly a libertarian, except in the sense that everyone is*, but this seems to me to be government overreach.
Cable TV is not a vital public service, in any shape or form. It's not important infrastructure you must have access to or else be significantly disadvantaged. Nobody is any the worse for not having it. In fact, it's actually just awful.
Given that, let the market take care of it. If Disney gets greedy and insists no bundling ABC without 50 other unrelated channels that cause a cable provider's costs to go up by $50 per subscriber, then let it fail because nobody can afford it any more. Governments shouldn't be micromanaging issues like this.
* I'm in favor only of those laws I support, and against laws I disagree with. As such I'm in favor of small government, obviously, because small government people believe that there should only be laws they deem necessary which by definition means the ones they agree with and not the ones they disagree with.
Solution to what? Microsoft is being careful here to (1) license, at reasonable rates, its IP, and (2) concentrate only on phone manufacturers (meaning they're at least ahering to the spirit of the original Appeals Court ruling legalizing some software patents, which said that it's OK to patent software as long as it's a part of physical device. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr I believe, though I may have the wrong case, I'm going by memory.)
While we can have a debate about the fairness of forcing hardware makers to license patents on a FRAND basis, it'll never be the same issue that it is for software. Hardware makers expect to have per-object costs, they're never going to have any kind of business model that does not expect a certain about of revenue per thing produced.
I don't see any evidence that HTC, Samsung, et al are fuming about having to pay money to Microsoft. They are upset about Apple's armtwisting, but that's largely because Apple's hostility to Android to begin with, with patents being used and abused to attempt to close the competing platform down rather than make money from it, and Apple's reluctance to license FRAND patents on the technologies it uses to build iPhones at the going rate.
Microsoft isn't really being much of a problem here.
I don't necessary agree with the GP, but I think his entire point was that the machine in question was implementing a game. As such I'm finding it hard to see the relevance of a snack machine having an exploitable fault.
Wait, so an American bank is using commonsense and not running to get people prosecuted over what, in the great scheme of things, is a minor abuse of a minor screw up, while a British bank is doing the opposite?
I was unaware that the Boston bombers put their plans to music.
Oh, you're saying they didn't? Oh, but you do have a long, long, list of terrorists who released rap videos boasting about what they were about to do before they did them, right?
No? Uh, you can't think of a single example?
Well, OK... perhaps then you're arguing that while it's never happened in the history of terrorism that if someone was to boast they were about to perform violent acts in a rap song it would be a massive departure from rap music, because references to violence of a fictional nature is non-existent in modern rap music?
No? Actually it's pretty common? In fact it's completely mainstream?
Here's an idea. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of you wussy anti-civil rights idiots pissing your pants every time someone anywhere does something vaguely violent anywhere. The fact you are terrified because of a violence category that still kills considerably less people than the common motor car every single day shouldn't mean we have to redesign America, Britain, and all the other countries who have suffered criminal political violence over the last few decades, around you.
See a psychologist or a counselor. See if you can deal with your problems in a rational way. And stop being terrified. That makes you a victim. That makes you what the late Osama Bin Laden wanted you to be. You need to knock that shit off now.
Why do I get the impression that none of the people posting that "driving is fun" actually have to drive? It's a week day, if they have to drive it's a fair bet that the last time they drove was this morning, to work. If they had fun doing that, well...
I enjoy driving, on a Sunday afternoon, driving down deserted country roads with no need to be at any particular place at any particular time.
I pretty much hate it otherwise. Now here's the deal, there are some very strange desires people have. Some want to be beaten. Others want to be tied up. And others want to be tied up and beaten. And still others want some combination, or neither, of these two activities combined with having jello pudding thrown at them.
So, given that, I'm going to rule it as not entirely impossible that you're about to tell me that you think commuting to work by car is awesome, and the bit you love the most is when you're about 10 minutes from work and suddenly see red lights in front of you and realize that the next mile of traffic consists of cars travelling at about 5-15mph, stop, start, stop, start.
I think a more serious issue is that most women are not able to work immediately after a pregnancy. It's a pretty physically traumatic experience for mother and baby.
Yes, us Dads have a hell of a lot of emotional trauma to deal with afterwards, but we're able to function. Indeed, the major argument for dads staying home with the family immediately after birth is as the necessary support, not because of some biological need to do so.
Welcome to economics, where people exchange things on the basis that the value to them of the goods received are more than the value to them of the goods being given, and both sides of that exchange are able to make that valuation.
I give you a chair, you give me a TV. My chair was surplus to requirements, but I don't have a TV. You don't have a chair, but have a pile of TVs. So to me the TV was worth more than the chair, to you the chair more than the TV.
CPU cycles? Yes, someone who knows what they're doing can convert their CPU cycles into Bitcoins directly. Or... or maybe they can't. Maybe their CPU isn't that great, because they're using the CPU built into a phone. And so perhaps, just perhaps, they see the value of the software you're giving them as worth more than the 0.1% chance they might mint a Bitcoin if only they devoted the same CPU power to running Bitcoin mining software.
While you? Well, you have the power to harness 100,000 such CPUs, each with a 0.1% chance of minting a Bitcoin, giving you a likely yield of 100 Bitcoins. And you already have the app (you wrote it) and can make copies for free, so it's not like hoarding it is valuable to you.
To you the CPU cycles are valuable. To the app buyer, not so much. To you an additional copy of the game is worthless. To the app buyer, yes, it's something they'll have fun with.
My Galaxy Nexus has a 10-12 hour battery life under ordinary conditions with the standard battery - needless to say I ended up buying a long life equivalent. Reportedly the Nexus 4 is even worse than the Galaxy Nexus in practice (and the battery can't be replaced!), while my HTC myTouch 3G Slide had a battery life of about 30-40 hours.
Complaints of crappy battery lives are getting louder, I doubt that'd be the case if my experience were atypical and your's was more representative. When I've raised the issue before, I've been told I'm out of line because I'd "expect" battery life to be poorer given the newer phone is more "powerful".
Funnily enough, the newer phone is never that much more functional.
For what little it's worth (warning, anecdotal evidence follows):
I met Hodge's daughter at University, she was involved in the local student union and was one of the worst scheming, back-stabbing, everything-is-office-politics people there. It was one of those eye-opening experiences where you learn the disconnect between the self-described view of politicians being people trying to get into governing positions in order to ensure what they think is right is what is done, and the reality, where it's just a bunch of nasty sociopaths trying to get power over one another, with no aim in mind beyond the pursuit of power for its own sake.
It seems unlikely that Hodge's daughter was anything other than a product of her parents, I suspect she's exactly like her mother, especially based upon what I've seen of Hodge's political style.
Google, well, I'm kinda biased towards them, they give me lots of great free stuff (nothing specific to me, just, you know, email, a mobile OS, that kind of thing. Pity they keep foisting their crappy search engine on me though), so I know I'd be inclined to take Google's side anyway, but it certainly does help convince me there's something there that Hodge is the one leading the witchhunt.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm seeing a range of different views expressed, and a significant number are pro-Microsoft.
I'm not going to come down heavily on one side or another, beyond making the observation that a company like Microsoft that depends on people working in good faith with their licensed content probably should not be working in bad faith with the content of third parties, especially when those third parties are massive publishers who can just as easily help Microsoft's "villains". It's a stupid strategy and one that's likely to bite them in the rear.
Remember that Google already supports Windows Phone. Don't believe me? Get a Lumia, and visit http://m.youtube.com./
FWIW there's an option in settings to make the official Android YouTube app download and cache everything in your "Watch later" playlist while you're on Wifi.
Google hasn't sued anyone yet, they've set a deadline but it's not clear what action Google can take. There are several, including:
* Find ways to block the app
* Embed ads in the raw video
* Complete on-going switch to codecs Microsoft doesn't want to support
* Place a "Windows serial number generator" on the front page of Google.com
Is Microsoft doing right by users? That depends on whether their actions completely undermine YouTube or not. I'd like to think that the ability to download movies wouldn't damage the service, but one can reasonably suggest that without revenue from ads, YouTube isn't going to continue to be viable, and that users would be harmed more by the disappearance of YouTube.
Still, it's Windows Phone, so I doubt that all eight Lumia owners are going to bankrupt Google by depriving them of advertizing revenue...
Whether it is or it isn't, it sure feels like it. It feels, from the description, like stuff we've been doing for decades, except now it has a fancy name and people are doing more of it.
I'm genuinely interested to know whether my impression of SDN is totally off base and whether it is radically new and different.
I don't believe the ads are there by default if you're making an actual app as opposed to a wrapper around a website. An app is going work by determining the URL of the core video file, downloading and playing the video. Unless Google starts embedding ads in the raw video stream (it doesn't today) there's no way ads would even be considered.
That said, I'm not entirely sure I side with either party here. I am surprised, however, that a company as dependent upon honest compliance with licensed usage of its copyrighted materials would be stupid enough to piss off the largest search engine on the planet by providing unlicensed, non-compliant with the official licenses, access to its resources.
My guess is that Microsoft would be better off producing a wrapper around Google's HTML5 site.
It's an epic fail because it contradicts the notion that Fox News is wrong about global warming, which as we all know is wrong because it's been scientifically proven that Fox News is fair and balanced.
The alternative, that Fox News is wrong, would suppose that these so-called "Scientists" are actually doing research, publishing their results and methodology, and are being proven right time and time again. Which is ridiculous because Scientists are funded by Not Big Oil, and therefore have a vested interest in spreading Not Big Oil's agenda.
As a real small furry creature from Alpha Centauri, I have to admit I get a big kick out of the fact that you puny Earthlings still think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
Well, because this is the United States, where the state and local governments have, since the 1950s, refused to allow any development outside of existing high density cities that didn't require residents to drive in order to perform day to day acts. Most Americans are forced to live in these areas through simply economic expediency.
Banning someone from driving in such conditions is, as a result, basically taking away their ability to fend for themselves. They become dependent on someone else to provide everything from access to food to access to employment. And by "someone else" I don't mean an efficient business capable of providing transportation to many people at once, I mean friends and family.
Want to be able to ban people from driving? Make it optional.
Want to force people to drive because you like driving and think it would somehow make it impossible for you to drive everywhere if just the option of not driving was available? Learn to deal with drunks behind the wheel.
Yes, I'm serious.
Wonder if the right response is "Dear Sir, I can confirm it was nobody in my household who downloaded the content in question. Feel free to investigate my neighbors. Be careful how you word your accusations when making your investigation as we will sue for libel if, as a result of your investigation, any of our neighbors are under the impression we were responsible for the download."
Nobody's proposing that the restrictions on property ownership be stupid, just that there be some restrictions to prevent the loss of major archeological treasures.
No. Means of exchange and unit of account, yes. Store of value? No. That's a fundamental misunderstanding which leads people to run around pretending that low rates of inflation are a conspiracy and that the world will end if we don't switch to the gold standard.
It's a medium of exchange and unit of account only. We print up sheets of paper (and mint coins) solely to make the transactions easier, but to a certain extent you and I can create and destroy money - actual dollars - in the time it takes for me to say "I'll sell you this TV for $100" and you to respond, "Sure, I'll owe you, is this IOU OK?" The Fed (and the banks it regulates) doesn't even have a monopoly on money creation.
You get scared because it seems to you obvious - despite being wrong - that if something can be used to transfer wealth it would follow that holding on to it would mean you keep that wealth. But money isn't wealth, it isn't value. And you holding on to it doesn't benefit anyone, it just means you make it more difficult for others to engage in transactions (because you're holding onto the unit of exchange) until someone else creates more money - which, ironically, you then crap your pants about.
Wait, how old are you?!
I meant what I said, and gave an example of how the market can react. This is not a required product. You are not going to be denied a job, prevented from socializing, or lack important information needed to live your daily life if you eschew cable TV. The market is perfectly capable of handling "abuses" because people can, and do, walk away from the stall if the price is too high or the product is not what they want.
Cable TV is:
1. Not a monopoly, not that it matters.
2. Not required.
3. Not important.
4. Dependent upon delivering value to paying customers to be successful
Quite honestly though, even if it were a monopoly, with Dish Network and DirecTV going bust tomorrow, cable TV is still not required, is still not important, and is still dependent upon delivering value to paying customers to be successful. Beyond basic protections against fraud, what the hell regulation does it need?
It doesn't.
I meant what I said, and gave an example of how the market can react. This is not a required product. You are not going to be denied a job, prevented from socializing, or lack important information needed to live your daily life if you eschew Cable TV. The market is perfectly capable of handling "abuses" because people can, and do, walk away from the stall if the price is too high or the product is not what they want. The market can take care of this one.
The greater good would, though, require the government actually focus on important stuff, which quite honestly the payment rules for TV channels and the provision of access to sporting content isn't.
Would it be nice if I could just buy the channels I want? I think so, sorta. Probably. I don't know. I have a feeling Dish wants me to pay what I'm paying regardless. I suspect I'll gain one or two channels I currently don't have in my package because they belong to another tier, but I'll unexpectedly miss out on content I thought I never watch but actually do.
Moreover though, it's not the kind of thing I want the government doing, because the government has an irritating habit of screwing things up when it decides how people should pay for something. One of the (many) reasons for the failure of, for example, passenger rail in this country was the decision of state and Federal governments to micromanage ticket pricing. Indeed, much of the freight rail industry collapsed for the same reason in the 1970s, it took deregulation to prevent it all from collapsing and a massive government bailout to keep the system in the North East up and running until it could be made profitable agaain.
And it did that despite the fact the industry involved, that it was destroying, was actually important. Cable TV isn't.
I don't see value in the government micromanaging this. Access to the Internet? Perhaps. But even there it needs to be aware of its limitations. These proposals seem, to me, to be an excessively large amount of action for a trivial problem.
Me neither. I'm hardly a libertarian, except in the sense that everyone is*, but this seems to me to be government overreach.
Cable TV is not a vital public service, in any shape or form. It's not important infrastructure you must have access to or else be significantly disadvantaged. Nobody is any the worse for not having it. In fact, it's actually just awful.
Given that, let the market take care of it. If Disney gets greedy and insists no bundling ABC without 50 other unrelated channels that cause a cable provider's costs to go up by $50 per subscriber, then let it fail because nobody can afford it any more. Governments shouldn't be micromanaging issues like this.
* I'm in favor only of those laws I support, and against laws I disagree with. As such I'm in favor of small government, obviously, because small government people believe that there should only be laws they deem necessary which by definition means the ones they agree with and not the ones they disagree with.
Solution to what? Microsoft is being careful here to (1) license, at reasonable rates, its IP, and (2) concentrate only on phone manufacturers (meaning they're at least ahering to the spirit of the original Appeals Court ruling legalizing some software patents, which said that it's OK to patent software as long as it's a part of physical device. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_v._Diehr I believe, though I may have the wrong case, I'm going by memory.)
While we can have a debate about the fairness of forcing hardware makers to license patents on a FRAND basis, it'll never be the same issue that it is for software. Hardware makers expect to have per-object costs, they're never going to have any kind of business model that does not expect a certain about of revenue per thing produced.
I don't see any evidence that HTC, Samsung, et al are fuming about having to pay money to Microsoft. They are upset about Apple's armtwisting, but that's largely because Apple's hostility to Android to begin with, with patents being used and abused to attempt to close the competing platform down rather than make money from it, and Apple's reluctance to license FRAND patents on the technologies it uses to build iPhones at the going rate.
Microsoft isn't really being much of a problem here.
I don't necessary agree with the GP, but I think his entire point was that the machine in question was implementing a game. As such I'm finding it hard to see the relevance of a snack machine having an exploitable fault.
Wait, so an American bank is using commonsense and not running to get people prosecuted over what, in the great scheme of things, is a minor abuse of a minor screw up, while a British bank is doing the opposite?
Well, there has to be one case...
I was unaware that the Boston bombers put their plans to music.
Oh, you're saying they didn't? Oh, but you do have a long, long, list of terrorists who released rap videos boasting about what they were about to do before they did them, right?
No? Uh, you can't think of a single example?
Well, OK... perhaps then you're arguing that while it's never happened in the history of terrorism that if someone was to boast they were about to perform violent acts in a rap song it would be a massive departure from rap music, because references to violence of a fictional nature is non-existent in modern rap music?
No? Actually it's pretty common? In fact it's completely mainstream?
Here's an idea. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I'm tired of this. I'm tired of you wussy anti-civil rights idiots pissing your pants every time someone anywhere does something vaguely violent anywhere. The fact you are terrified because of a violence category that still kills considerably less people than the common motor car every single day shouldn't mean we have to redesign America, Britain, and all the other countries who have suffered criminal political violence over the last few decades, around you.
See a psychologist or a counselor. See if you can deal with your problems in a rational way. And stop being terrified. That makes you a victim. That makes you what the late Osama Bin Laden wanted you to be. You need to knock that shit off now.
Agreed.
Why do I get the impression that none of the people posting that "driving is fun" actually have to drive? It's a week day, if they have to drive it's a fair bet that the last time they drove was this morning, to work. If they had fun doing that, well...
I enjoy driving, on a Sunday afternoon, driving down deserted country roads with no need to be at any particular place at any particular time.
I pretty much hate it otherwise. Now here's the deal, there are some very strange desires people have. Some want to be beaten. Others want to be tied up. And others want to be tied up and beaten. And still others want some combination, or neither, of these two activities combined with having jello pudding thrown at them.
So, given that, I'm going to rule it as not entirely impossible that you're about to tell me that you think commuting to work by car is awesome, and the bit you love the most is when you're about 10 minutes from work and suddenly see red lights in front of you and realize that the next mile of traffic consists of cars travelling at about 5-15mph, stop, start, stop, start.
But I really, really, doubt it.
I think a more serious issue is that most women are not able to work immediately after a pregnancy. It's a pretty physically traumatic experience for mother and baby.
Yes, us Dads have a hell of a lot of emotional trauma to deal with afterwards, but we're able to function. Indeed, the major argument for dads staying home with the family immediately after birth is as the necessary support, not because of some biological need to do so.
Welcome to economics, where people exchange things on the basis that the value to them of the goods received are more than the value to them of the goods being given, and both sides of that exchange are able to make that valuation.
I give you a chair, you give me a TV. My chair was surplus to requirements, but I don't have a TV. You don't have a chair, but have a pile of TVs. So to me the TV was worth more than the chair, to you the chair more than the TV.
CPU cycles? Yes, someone who knows what they're doing can convert their CPU cycles into Bitcoins directly. Or... or maybe they can't. Maybe their CPU isn't that great, because they're using the CPU built into a phone. And so perhaps, just perhaps, they see the value of the software you're giving them as worth more than the 0.1% chance they might mint a Bitcoin if only they devoted the same CPU power to running Bitcoin mining software.
While you? Well, you have the power to harness 100,000 such CPUs, each with a 0.1% chance of minting a Bitcoin, giving you a likely yield of 100 Bitcoins. And you already have the app (you wrote it) and can make copies for free, so it's not like hoarding it is valuable to you.
To you the CPU cycles are valuable. To the app buyer, not so much. To you an additional copy of the game is worthless. To the app buyer, yes, it's something they'll have fun with.
My Galaxy Nexus has a 10-12 hour battery life under ordinary conditions with the standard battery - needless to say I ended up buying a long life equivalent. Reportedly the Nexus 4 is even worse than the Galaxy Nexus in practice (and the battery can't be replaced!), while my HTC myTouch 3G Slide had a battery life of about 30-40 hours.
Complaints of crappy battery lives are getting louder, I doubt that'd be the case if my experience were atypical and your's was more representative. When I've raised the issue before, I've been told I'm out of line because I'd "expect" battery life to be poorer given the newer phone is more "powerful".
Funnily enough, the newer phone is never that much more functional.
For what little it's worth (warning, anecdotal evidence follows):
I met Hodge's daughter at University, she was involved in the local student union and was one of the worst scheming, back-stabbing, everything-is-office-politics people there. It was one of those eye-opening experiences where you learn the disconnect between the self-described view of politicians being people trying to get into governing positions in order to ensure what they think is right is what is done, and the reality, where it's just a bunch of nasty sociopaths trying to get power over one another, with no aim in mind beyond the pursuit of power for its own sake.
It seems unlikely that Hodge's daughter was anything other than a product of her parents, I suspect she's exactly like her mother, especially based upon what I've seen of Hodge's political style.
Google, well, I'm kinda biased towards them, they give me lots of great free stuff (nothing specific to me, just, you know, email, a mobile OS, that kind of thing. Pity they keep foisting their crappy search engine on me though), so I know I'd be inclined to take Google's side anyway, but it certainly does help convince me there's something there that Hodge is the one leading the witchhunt.