Yes, we should also get rid of labeling laws and virtually everything to do with health and safety. If someone eats a hamburger with asbestos sprinkled on it for flavor, then that's their fault, they should have scanned all their foodstuffs with asbestos detectors.
I'm not seeing much similarity TBH, the only way Google would be confused with DDG would be if they're running a Google Doodle with some similar shapes and color schemes. I'm not sure that's ever happened.
No, my complaint is that people keep using what happened to Microsoft to justify Google sanctions, along the lines of "Well, what Google did must be bad because Microsoft did the exact same thing and we all know they were punished for it."
That doesn't follow. Microsoft didn't do the exact same thing, they do, and continue to do, things that are in an entirely different ballpark, and nobody has a problem with it.
Google are not doing anything wrong here. They spent the first years of Android being crucified for not clamping down on "fragmentation", and now they're doing that, requiring that anyone who licenses Google Play produces phones with a standardized environment, they're getting shat on both by the EU and, bizarrely, the same community that was whining about fragmentation in the first place.
Not to mention that most of the complaints are bass ackward. "They're requiring phone makers include a front end to their monopoly search engine." OK. And why is this a problem? "Well, it, uh, means they'll get a monopoly in search!" "But you just said it was a monopoly search engine, don't they have that already?" "Yeah, but, uh, it'll support that monopoly. What if a rival wants their search engine on a phone?" "What do rivals have to do with anything? If Google search is the monopoly then surely end users are going to want the latter on their phones?" "*head explodes*"
It's a stupid decision by the EU, much of it was technically illiterate, and what's left is a back to front interpretation of competition law and monopolies. Google's options are limited, but in their shoes I'd probably just give them the finger.
There's a sweet spot for funding from "risk happy US capitalists" that seems to be in the $1M-50M range. Anything below is considered peanuts, anything above would interfere with the average VC's ability to be funding eleventeen projects at once.
The Hyperloop is a dumb, idiotic, bad faith, project that'll set back environmental progress by decades. Nonetheless, that's not what's stopping risk happy capitalists from investing in it. What's stopping them is that this is a project that'll require tens of billions of dollars to be thrown at it. They can invest in a hundred Juicero start ups for that kind of cash.
No, but you just proved his point. Oil pipelines are routinely shot at and are in constant need of repair. And oil pipelines don't need to maintain near vacuums and if one leaks it's a minor environmental issue, not a slaughter.
Yeah, let's compare this to Microsoft. Since the anti-trust efforts of both the EU and US, Microsoft now practices the following:
1. If you want a Microsoft operating system you have to bundle Microsoft's app store. Google provides AOSP without restrictions. You do not have to bundle Google's app store with AOSP.
2. In addition you are required to bundle a range of applications with your Microsoft operating system. Google only requires you bundle a handful of apps, noteably search and Chrome, with the Play Store, and again, you do not need to license the Play Store.
3. In addition, the Microsoft operating system requires you use Edge with many of the bundled applications. If you try to open a link from Windows 10 Mail, for example, it will (since the latest version of Windows 10) force you to open it in Edge. If you install Firefox (or another browser) on Android with the Play Store and try to access a URL from within a Google app like Mail, Android will prompt you to ask you what browser you want to use.
4. Edge and IE cannot be uninstalled from Windows 10. While Chrome is part of the operating system image for phones with the Play Store, it can be disabled so it's effectively not installed except for the storage space it uses.
5. The defaults in Windows 10 require use of Bing to search for things. The defaults in versions of Android with the Play Store require use of Google's search engine. Both can be changed. Microsoft even has an app called Bing that, when installed on Android, replaces the Google search infrastructure completely.
In all these cases, Microsoft, which has a defacto monopoly on the desktop, is being allowed to leverage its monopoly to promote use of its unrelated search engine and browser. But Google, who has a defacto monopoly on search, but not on the desktop or even on mobile devices (you see, there's this company called Apple, that...) is leveraging its monopoly... *reads notes*... on Android App Stores to make it easier to access the same website all useful mobile phones would default to anyway because they already have a monopoly there.
Base level phones these days generally come with 2G of RAM, and usually more. That's more than enough for the most memory intensive mobile apps. But even if it wasn't, the usual response of Android is to kill idle apps, not "page" them, largely because there are major technical problems with that. This isn't hypothetical, it's been true on every device I have. If I load a large number of apps, eventually trying to go to an app loaded much earlier in the day results in the app being loaded from scratch, revealing that it was terminated.
But on top that, the entire concept of paging is complex given how Android works.
In a normal operating system, paging is done in two ways: read only data from executables (including stored libraries) is paged in directly from the file system, and the application's working storage may be paged to and from a swapfile. Both are, for practical purposes, not relevant in Android. Android's "executables" are APK files, zip'd files of non-native bytecode. And swapfiles (or swap disks) would be a disaster in a flash storage environment because they're constantly being written to.
So, in practice, what you're left with is time taken to load an app. And quite honestly, I'm not seeing any practical difference between apps loaded from SD card, and from internal storage. I don't doubt it's technically slower, but it's not slow enough to be an issue.
And it certainly isn't slow enough for Samsung to be justified in disabling the feature.
The problem here is Samsung, not Google. Android has had the ability to use the SD card as extended storage, rather than a separate drive, since version 7 (maybe 6, can't remember the exact version); Samsung purposely disabled the feature claiming (wrongly, I use it) that it leads to performance issues.
Google implemented exactly what you want. They just didn't force Samsung to not disable the feature.
I don't think it's film resolution that's the problem here, but set resolution. That is, sets that looked OK for 480i NTSC are going to look worse when you can see the glint on every bit of scotch tape used to hold them together.
The GP is saying that AOSP is free. It is. It's completely free. Do whatever you want with it. There are no strings attached. None. Period.
The GP is saying there is exists in the universe a separate set of packages that are not part of AOSP, what he (poorly, given Google Apps is the name of something else) calls Google Apps, but is actually the Play Store and some frameworks. These are not free. THESE come with restrictions.
AOSP is a complete operating system. You can use it as is. Amazon has produced a line of tablets that uses AOSP. It does not require the Play Store. AOSP does not require the Play Store.
But... most users want the Play Store. Because it's where most developers distribute their software.
It's this, not Android, that's the bone of contention here. Apparently the EU believes that if Google is distributing the Play Store it has no right to say "You must also include these packages." It has no right to say that phones shipped with the Play Store must use a specific version of AOSP. It has no right to say phones shipped with the Play Store must include another Google app that provides search features. It has no right to say that phones shipped with the Google search app should only include the Google search app. It has no right to say phones shipped with the Play Store must include Chrome.
Some of these demands by the EU kinda make sense, at least from a promoting competition point of view, some appear to reflect technical illiteracy.
But regardless, no AOSP is not free with restrictions. The Play Store is gratis with restrictions. AOSP is free without restrictions, gratis and libre. Period.
Blu-ray's storage and data rates were determined at a time when it was expected to store MPEG-2 streams. Early BD discs actually were MPEG-2. It was HD DVD's adoption and proving of H.264 that pushed BD to adopt and encourage the H.264 format.
So yeah, H.265 might not be 4x an improvement over H.264, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to be a 4x improvement over MPEG-2, which it is.
With Android you need to agree to make Google the default and only search engine on the phone if you want the Play Store.
...which is somewhat undermined by the fact you can download any search engine you want... from the Play Store.
For a while I actually had the Bing search thing on my phone (and yeah, searches in that big search box on the home screen went via Bing) because various flaws in Google had made me temporarily want to try alternatives. It worked, and unlike, say, Microsoft's "It's done when Lotus won't run" philosophy, it was fully integrated and there were no obvious downsides of running a non-Google system beyond, well, the fact Bing sucks.
There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from downloading and using a rival search service on an Android phone that has the Play Store.
Also worth noting is that this applies only to search. Google has a range of other products, and has never placed any restrictions on rival products being bundled on phones. Google is even happy for rivals to the Play Store to be pre-installed - look at Amazon's Prime Exclusive phones for example.
Everything seem to be more than a little overblown by the EU here.
Google are doing the same thing. If you want to ship phones with Android and Google Play (which is increasingly necessary for many apps to just work), then *all* your phones must ship with this, and none with a competitive operating system or environment.
Do you have a citation for this? The coverage of the EU's decision hasn't mentioned such conditions, merely that manufacturers can't bundle the Play Store with a phone without also bundling Chrome and some other apps with those same phones.
If what they're doing is as you claim, then yeah, I agree with the EU on this one. If it isn't, the EU's decision seems to be unreasonable. As an example of why it's unreasonable, the last few phones I've bought were Amazon Prime phones - phones Amazon sells at a discount in return for having the Amazon suite installed. They also included the Google suite. So Google were quite happy to license their software for phones that had a rival app store, rival music store and system, rival video store and system, etc, pre-installed.
Nothing Google is doing is precluding competition. Indeed, competition is able to ride Google's coattails, and I have phones from BLU, Motorola, and Alcatel that prove it.
They can still fuck it up. We don't have a proper passenger rail system in the US in large part because of government regulation, micromanaging, and price fixing.
That said, I'd take Britain's NHS over the insane system we have right now. I know, as an ex-Brit, it isn't perfect, but it provides 99% of the US system's necessary services to 100% of the population, without forcing anyone to pick between severe financial consequences or calling an ambulance, as opposed to the US system that provides great care but at the cost of severe hardship to the majority of people who use it, and that's cut off from a significant portion of the population as too expensive even with insurance.
That's a fair criticism of Obamacare (though the entire point of the mandate/tax on uninsured people is to address that problem), but it doesn't really factor into this. The issue here is that virtually nobody goes to an insurance company and tries to make a deal with them for their own personal insurance. You either get it from your employer, or you get it from an Obamacare exchange where you choose from a list of plans with prices after entering your age, sex, and zip code (I believe, I can't remember and open enrollment is currently over. But the bottom line is you're not entering your name and social security number when you're offered the plans.)
No, he specifically mentioned Obamacare. I mean, it's literally the second word of the part of his reply you quoted.
Who do you think was most impacted by Obamacare? The people who were already getting insurance via their employers? Or, you know, the self employed, and others who previously had to buy insurance individually but now had the option of using the Obamacare exchanges.
Most people in the US get their health insurance either from their employer, or from the Obamacare exchanges. In both cases they're not treated as individuals (from a buying point of view) by the health insurance industry, instead they're treated as part of a group (on the exchanges this is called "community rating")
So where is this information actually being used? How often, post-AHCA, do people buy insurance directly from the insurer in such a form that the insurer can actually benefit from having this level of information about their potential customer?
No, you're thinking of MegaUpload. Mega is the company Kim Dotcom founded after MegaUpload was shut down. Kim Dotcom and Mega have since parted ways (I think he even wrote some less than complementary comments about the service recently but I'd have to look it up), so it's independent and unlikely to be shut down as a result of Dotcom's involvement.
Minor correction: LTE is the third generation of GSM. It's the 4G version of GSM (that is: the third generation of GSM implements a fourth generation mobile phone system.)
Interestingly the version numbers in the standards documenting first generation of GSM start at 2, for UMTS 3, and I assume for LTE they're 4, though I've never actually read the latter.
And such an incident in Thailand has nothing to do with the Tesla 3 production costs. So I've modded both posts as off topic.
So you neither understood either the article (which is about someone reviewing the Tesla 3's engineering and changing their mind after previously rating such engineering negatively, not about "production costs") or the joke (which is about why this person changed their mind)? But you feel you're qualified to moderate posts?
One side makes a throwaway rude comment about the desirability of a certain "solution", the other makes a serious accusation against the first of one of the worst crimes in existence. Both sides!
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we should also get rid of labeling laws and virtually everything to do with health and safety. If someone eats a hamburger with asbestos sprinkled on it for flavor, then that's their fault, they should have scanned all their foodstuffs with asbestos detectors.
I'm not seeing much similarity TBH, the only way Google would be confused with DDG would be if they're running a Google Doodle with some similar shapes and color schemes. I'm not sure that's ever happened.
Nobody ever said it was a hate symbol because the Trump campaign was using it. To the best of my knowledge, the Trump campaign never did.
They said it was being used by hate groups and neo-Nazis, which it absolutely was. In fact, the Frog's creator recently won a legal action against the Daily Stormer to get them to stop using it.
No, my complaint is that people keep using what happened to Microsoft to justify Google sanctions, along the lines of "Well, what Google did must be bad because Microsoft did the exact same thing and we all know they were punished for it."
That doesn't follow. Microsoft didn't do the exact same thing, they do, and continue to do, things that are in an entirely different ballpark, and nobody has a problem with it.
Google are not doing anything wrong here. They spent the first years of Android being crucified for not clamping down on "fragmentation", and now they're doing that, requiring that anyone who licenses Google Play produces phones with a standardized environment, they're getting shat on both by the EU and, bizarrely, the same community that was whining about fragmentation in the first place.
Not to mention that most of the complaints are bass ackward. "They're requiring phone makers include a front end to their monopoly search engine." OK. And why is this a problem? "Well, it, uh, means they'll get a monopoly in search!" "But you just said it was a monopoly search engine, don't they have that already?" "Yeah, but, uh, it'll support that monopoly. What if a rival wants their search engine on a phone?" "What do rivals have to do with anything? If Google search is the monopoly then surely end users are going to want the latter on their phones?" "*head explodes*"
It's a stupid decision by the EU, much of it was technically illiterate, and what's left is a back to front interpretation of competition law and monopolies. Google's options are limited, but in their shoes I'd probably just give them the finger.
There's a sweet spot for funding from "risk happy US capitalists" that seems to be in the $1M-50M range. Anything below is considered peanuts, anything above would interfere with the average VC's ability to be funding eleventeen projects at once.
The Hyperloop is a dumb, idiotic, bad faith, project that'll set back environmental progress by decades. Nonetheless, that's not what's stopping risk happy capitalists from investing in it. What's stopping them is that this is a project that'll require tens of billions of dollars to be thrown at it. They can invest in a hundred Juicero start ups for that kind of cash.
No, but you just proved his point. Oil pipelines are routinely shot at and are in constant need of repair. And oil pipelines don't need to maintain near vacuums and if one leaks it's a minor environmental issue, not a slaughter.
Yeah, let's compare this to Microsoft. Since the anti-trust efforts of both the EU and US, Microsoft now practices the following:
1. If you want a Microsoft operating system you have to bundle Microsoft's app store. Google provides AOSP without restrictions. You do not have to bundle Google's app store with AOSP.
2. In addition you are required to bundle a range of applications with your Microsoft operating system. Google only requires you bundle a handful of apps, noteably search and Chrome, with the Play Store, and again, you do not need to license the Play Store.
3. In addition, the Microsoft operating system requires you use Edge with many of the bundled applications. If you try to open a link from Windows 10 Mail, for example, it will (since the latest version of Windows 10) force you to open it in Edge. If you install Firefox (or another browser) on Android with the Play Store and try to access a URL from within a Google app like Mail, Android will prompt you to ask you what browser you want to use.
4. Edge and IE cannot be uninstalled from Windows 10. While Chrome is part of the operating system image for phones with the Play Store, it can be disabled so it's effectively not installed except for the storage space it uses. 5. The defaults in Windows 10 require use of Bing to search for things. The defaults in versions of Android with the Play Store require use of Google's search engine. Both can be changed. Microsoft even has an app called Bing that, when installed on Android, replaces the Google search infrastructure completely.
In all these cases, Microsoft, which has a defacto monopoly on the desktop, is being allowed to leverage its monopoly to promote use of its unrelated search engine and browser. But Google, who has a defacto monopoly on search, but not on the desktop or even on mobile devices (you see, there's this company called Apple, that...) is leveraging its monopoly... *reads notes*... on Android App Stores to make it easier to access the same website all useful mobile phones would default to anyway because they already have a monopoly there.
Yes, let's rage about that.
Not if you were to make all the gold in Fort Knox radioactive.
I don't think you're right.
Base level phones these days generally come with 2G of RAM, and usually more. That's more than enough for the most memory intensive mobile apps. But even if it wasn't, the usual response of Android is to kill idle apps, not "page" them, largely because there are major technical problems with that. This isn't hypothetical, it's been true on every device I have. If I load a large number of apps, eventually trying to go to an app loaded much earlier in the day results in the app being loaded from scratch, revealing that it was terminated.
But on top that, the entire concept of paging is complex given how Android works.
In a normal operating system, paging is done in two ways: read only data from executables (including stored libraries) is paged in directly from the file system, and the application's working storage may be paged to and from a swapfile. Both are, for practical purposes, not relevant in Android. Android's "executables" are APK files, zip'd files of non-native bytecode. And swapfiles (or swap disks) would be a disaster in a flash storage environment because they're constantly being written to.
So, in practice, what you're left with is time taken to load an app. And quite honestly, I'm not seeing any practical difference between apps loaded from SD card, and from internal storage. I don't doubt it's technically slower, but it's not slow enough to be an issue.
And it certainly isn't slow enough for Samsung to be justified in disabling the feature.
The problem here is Samsung, not Google. Android has had the ability to use the SD card as extended storage, rather than a separate drive, since version 7 (maybe 6, can't remember the exact version); Samsung purposely disabled the feature claiming (wrongly, I use it) that it leads to performance issues.
Google implemented exactly what you want. They just didn't force Samsung to not disable the feature.
I don't think it's film resolution that's the problem here, but set resolution. That is, sets that looked OK for 480i NTSC are going to look worse when you can see the glint on every bit of scotch tape used to hold them together.
You're seriously misunderstanding the GP.
The GP is saying that AOSP is free. It is. It's completely free. Do whatever you want with it. There are no strings attached. None. Period.
The GP is saying there is exists in the universe a separate set of packages that are not part of AOSP, what he (poorly, given Google Apps is the name of something else) calls Google Apps, but is actually the Play Store and some frameworks. These are not free. THESE come with restrictions.
AOSP is a complete operating system. You can use it as is. Amazon has produced a line of tablets that uses AOSP. It does not require the Play Store. AOSP does not require the Play Store.
But... most users want the Play Store. Because it's where most developers distribute their software.
It's this, not Android, that's the bone of contention here. Apparently the EU believes that if Google is distributing the Play Store it has no right to say "You must also include these packages." It has no right to say that phones shipped with the Play Store must use a specific version of AOSP. It has no right to say phones shipped with the Play Store must include another Google app that provides search features. It has no right to say that phones shipped with the Google search app should only include the Google search app. It has no right to say phones shipped with the Play Store must include Chrome.
Some of these demands by the EU kinda make sense, at least from a promoting competition point of view, some appear to reflect technical illiteracy.
But regardless, no AOSP is not free with restrictions. The Play Store is gratis with restrictions. AOSP is free without restrictions, gratis and libre. Period.
Make sense?
Blu-ray's storage and data rates were determined at a time when it was expected to store MPEG-2 streams. Early BD discs actually were MPEG-2. It was HD DVD's adoption and proving of H.264 that pushed BD to adopt and encourage the H.264 format.
So yeah, H.265 might not be 4x an improvement over H.264, but it doesn't have to be - it just has to be a 4x improvement over MPEG-2, which it is.
For a while I actually had the Bing search thing on my phone (and yeah, searches in that big search box on the home screen went via Bing) because various flaws in Google had made me temporarily want to try alternatives. It worked, and unlike, say, Microsoft's "It's done when Lotus won't run" philosophy, it was fully integrated and there were no obvious downsides of running a non-Google system beyond, well, the fact Bing sucks.
There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from downloading and using a rival search service on an Android phone that has the Play Store.
Also worth noting is that this applies only to search. Google has a range of other products, and has never placed any restrictions on rival products being bundled on phones. Google is even happy for rivals to the Play Store to be pre-installed - look at Amazon's Prime Exclusive phones for example.
Everything seem to be more than a little overblown by the EU here.
Do you have a citation for this? The coverage of the EU's decision hasn't mentioned such conditions, merely that manufacturers can't bundle the Play Store with a phone without also bundling Chrome and some other apps with those same phones.
If what they're doing is as you claim, then yeah, I agree with the EU on this one. If it isn't, the EU's decision seems to be unreasonable. As an example of why it's unreasonable, the last few phones I've bought were Amazon Prime phones - phones Amazon sells at a discount in return for having the Amazon suite installed. They also included the Google suite. So Google were quite happy to license their software for phones that had a rival app store, rival music store and system, rival video store and system, etc, pre-installed.
Nothing Google is doing is precluding competition. Indeed, competition is able to ride Google's coattails, and I have phones from BLU, Motorola, and Alcatel that prove it.
They can still fuck it up. We don't have a proper passenger rail system in the US in large part because of government regulation, micromanaging, and price fixing.
That said, I'd take Britain's NHS over the insane system we have right now. I know, as an ex-Brit, it isn't perfect, but it provides 99% of the US system's necessary services to 100% of the population, without forcing anyone to pick between severe financial consequences or calling an ambulance, as opposed to the US system that provides great care but at the cost of severe hardship to the majority of people who use it, and that's cut off from a significant portion of the population as too expensive even with insurance.
That's a fair criticism of Obamacare (though the entire point of the mandate/tax on uninsured people is to address that problem), but it doesn't really factor into this. The issue here is that virtually nobody goes to an insurance company and tries to make a deal with them for their own personal insurance. You either get it from your employer, or you get it from an Obamacare exchange where you choose from a list of plans with prices after entering your age, sex, and zip code (I believe, I can't remember and open enrollment is currently over. But the bottom line is you're not entering your name and social security number when you're offered the plans.)
No, he specifically mentioned Obamacare. I mean, it's literally the second word of the part of his reply you quoted.
Who do you think was most impacted by Obamacare? The people who were already getting insurance via their employers? Or, you know, the self employed, and others who previously had to buy insurance individually but now had the option of using the Obamacare exchanges.
*sigh* Please read the comment you're responding to before responding to it.
Most people in the US get their health insurance either from their employer, or from the Obamacare exchanges. In both cases they're not treated as individuals (from a buying point of view) by the health insurance industry, instead they're treated as part of a group (on the exchanges this is called "community rating")
So where is this information actually being used? How often, post-AHCA, do people buy insurance directly from the insurer in such a form that the insurer can actually benefit from having this level of information about their potential customer?
No, you're thinking of MegaUpload. Mega is the company Kim Dotcom founded after MegaUpload was shut down. Kim Dotcom and Mega have since parted ways (I think he even wrote some less than complementary comments about the service recently but I'd have to look it up), so it's independent and unlikely to be shut down as a result of Dotcom's involvement.
Minor correction: LTE is the third generation of GSM. It's the 4G version of GSM (that is: the third generation of GSM implements a fourth generation mobile phone system.)
Interestingly the version numbers in the standards documenting first generation of GSM start at 2, for UMTS 3, and I assume for LTE they're 4, though I've never actually read the latter.
So you neither understood either the article (which is about someone reviewing the Tesla 3's engineering and changing their mind after previously rating such engineering negatively, not about "production costs") or the joke (which is about why this person changed their mind)? But you feel you're qualified to moderate posts?
One side makes a throwaway rude comment about the desirability of a certain "solution", the other makes a serious accusation against the first of one of the worst crimes in existence. Both sides!
Are there five investigations into Tesla too?
How many investigations are ongoing into Lyft?
The entrenched business entities argument works when it comes to changing laws, but it doesn't really explain what you're suggesting here.