Windows is a product which ships with interface implementations in the form of Win32api / MAPI / COM / etc.. IE is a product which uses uses Win32api / etc... and implements the mshtml API Windows Update is a product that ships with Windows which depends on the mshtml API
The dependency chain is cyclic which means that one cannot ship Windows without IE, but it doesn't make IE derivative of windows. It makes IE dependent on well known though non-copyrightable interfaces. This is why you -can- install IE on Wine. It may not work well, but that's a matter of implementation instead of legality. Also, Microsoft could have built an alternative mshtml interface that would work with the native platform that wasn't IE if they really chose to (or forced to) but their job isn't to detach lock-in from their own products.
About the GPL in general: Do I need to perform due diligence the licensing terms of the software I use? Yes
2. Outside of negotiated fares, private fares are quite often negotiated outside of published fare world, and the majority of them have commission rates tacked on through partnerships and agency agreements. Some airlines utilize them more than others but there it is.
Maybe the starved US airlines that are already flying on fumes can't afford the overhead of agency commission, but there are a vast number that are.
I think everyone assumes that Google or any other business that doesn't bribe heavily to follow the laws of the land they operate in. The controversy surrounding Google and China has typically resolved around ethics instead of laws.
Google's corporate mantra is to 'do no evil', and in their general opinion government censorship is a bad thing with the exception or child porn I imagine. Up to a few months ago, Google actively supported the China's censorship program by restricting the results returned in their search results pages. At some point around then, the company had some spat with the Chinese gov and decided that they could no longer filter results. Because its against the law to host these uncensored results in mainland China, Google simply redirected search box searches to servers in Hong Kong (Part of China, though heavily relaxed liberties due to British possession 1999). Hong Kong doesn't require censorship like mainland China does, so Google can host their searches there without the guilt of being a part of the censorship. The government had an issue with this as well, because google.cn was still 'actively' generating results even though all real work was done from Hong Kong servers. The latest 'fix' by Google was to replace the text input box with a button that was a direct link to Google's uncensored Hong Kong search engine. This all said, the Chinese government still has the Great Firewall, so that any content linked out from Google's search results can still be blocked for mainland citizens, but at least Google can claim that they can't control what the government does with its pipes.
Trust me, basically all travel agents make a profit. If the sites aren't moronic, they will have themselves as agents of the airline for the commission (usually a % of the ticket's fare value). Its pretty standard practice.
"... because it is likely to exacerbate the trend toward personalized and less transparent pricing of airline tickets"
Its already way too late for that my friend. There are millions and millions of public fares ('tenders for offers') on the market at any one time. Many are never even available, any many are locked down to only specific groups. The systems are so crazy that companies spend millions of dollars on systems just to figure out their -own- fares. That's just to see if I can make an offer for a fare. When we worry about booking a fare, we have the wide variety of travel agencies that each have their finger in the commission pot, so who knows how much savings are being passed on to the actual consumer and how much the agent is swallowing. Don't forget the 'tax' (aka surcharges, not a real tax) that more and more airlines are tacking onto their flights. This is usually highlighted in a less visible font $500...... (+ 300 tax ).. ouch
Here is what usually happens when buying a ticket online:
Consumer - Types in their From/To & dates
Internet Booking Engine - Searches through the GDS' for the most appropriate itineraries for the dates / passengers / etc.. (This is the expedia / travelocity / etc..)
GDS - Ties in with fare management systems (reading published fare data for compatible fares & surcharges), scheduling firms (when / where flights are coming and going), reservation systems, and few other smaller sources to find an itinerary that matches whatever criteria you specified in your journey
Airline's Reservation System - Confirms availability and makes the booking and reserves a placement on the plane (usually a single airline company per system, though there are shared hosting systems for small guys)
My best assumption is that the want ITA to better refine the Google experience of the "Internet Booking Engine". To be fair, every time you see the annoying spinning "seaching for cheap fares" messages from sites are usually the result of querying GDS systems for appropriate matching fares/itineraries. I suppose some smart caching can speed that up, but can lead to false positives for bookings.
PS: Dirty little secret for those not in the know: Reservation Systems book seats with the assumption that people won't show up to flights, so they quite often oversell if they get the chance. If you've ever been bumped to a different class or off the plane, this is most likely why
Not to bash the guy, but wasn't most of his work done in aggregating the content discovered by others in a useful and accessible way? How much of Art did he personally 'discover'? I can't really answer that, but I have no doubt he didn't 'invent' most of the ideas found in his books. Its kind of like Constantine. He didn't invent Christianity, but he brought Christianity to Europe in a way few others could.
"The article says that they can also install apps, in addition to OTA OS upgrades"
This was demonstrated by Google to the world at a Google I/O keynote. Go watch it now. The feature is that from a web page, you can click on an app and say 'install now' or whatever and the app installation gets pushed to the phone just as if you hit the 'install' button through the app store. This is not smoke and mirrors behind the scenes. Its an advertised feature.
Last time I checked, Android pulls data from the web all the time when it syncs profiles, does push downloads, etc.. All these things are being done without your control. Google controls your phone! Do you want to sever all functions of a 'connected' application from your phone as well? I don't like the fact that Google 'can' delete apps from my phone, but I've yet to see Google delete anything that falls into 'profit' or 'control' categories.
Things that I think Google should remove apps for:
- Cause privacy violations (back doors, data harvesting, etc..)
- Compromise the security of the phone
- Cause physical damage to the phone
- Causes substantial damage to mobile / wifi network operators through an unprotected exploit, etc..
- Hampers or removes the ability to remove the application itself
- Apps that violate Copyright -- In order to maintain safe harbor, they would probably be required to take down from wherever they have control to take the app down which would include your phone
- Apps who's purpose is to serve kiddie porn (though this could be ambiguously stretched badly to many internet / browser apps)
In regards to remakes, there are times when a remake brings something interesting into the current landscape. A remake done well will adapt the story to the important issues of the day. As an example, Logan's Run could be adapted to the overpopulation and lack of natural resources that plagues mankind. This is a re-occurring theme that has re-emerged from the 70's yet again. Tie it with climate concerns and peak oil and you'll have a real horror show.
Another note on remakes is that no matter how much of a masterpiece it was, some people will never watch 'old' movies regardless of how good it was. I don't even remember Logan's Run being that good of a film, but the last time I saw it was maybe 15 years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy.
Oh god, you're not alone. This movie was one of the few movies I saw in theaters and I must say it was a let down. On the bright side, I really really liked 28 days later which I thought was great. Too bad the poster didn't seem to watch or care about that film...
This may be a redundant data on tech savy Slashdotters, and I must say that the pre-installation notification on security is pretty good in android, it does make the less technical people reading CNET think twice about installing a 'trojan' app for example (hypothetical) 'cute girls in bikini's 15' which has access to location, phone state, wifi, phone calls, etc..
Teens found a way of dieing by driving accidents way before video games ever came along. If there's a way to identify higher risk youths then that's all and good I suppose. This just brings me back to my teenage years where there were a few people in my schools who ended up dieing in accidents (usually associated with drinking and driving, but that's another discussion).
PS: If, I had an ISP contract that said I was responsible for the content that was being downloaded, couldn't 'suing party' just sue the name associated with the ISP account? I imagine most if not all common carrier ISP's have such a clause either through service agreement the someone signed, or through law. I'd be shocked if this black hole of 'responsibility of infringement' has been sealed up somewhere. Now if you don't have your name on such an agreement then I guess you're free and clear without direct evidence.
Snippet from Comcast's TOS for example:
What obligations do I have under this Policy?
In addition to being responsible for your own compliance with this Policy, you are also responsible for any use or misuse of the Service that violates this Policy, even if it was committed by a friend, family member, or guest with access to your Service account. Therefore, you must take steps to ensure that others do not use your account to gain unauthorized access to the Service by, for example, strictly maintaining the confidentiality of your Service login and password. In all cases, you are solely responsible for the security of any device you choose to connect to the Service, including any data stored or shared on that device....
"less privacy", This only really applies when you're using free online services, but even Google isn't brazen enough to look into your personal data specifically. They'll run it through a content munching machine to give you ads that it thinks you'll be most coerced by.
"less control" Less administration
"less reliability" You'll need to throw a lot of money into a system that would beat the uptime you get out of most cloud providers
"requires constant net access" Yup
"shifting terms of service and the like" Once again, this mostly applies for free software, but besides Facebook which isn't a cloud offering, I don't know of any cloud services that have been specifically bad about their TOS
1. Cloud services are really cheap versus a company hosting all their IT infrastructure internally. Why pay big bucks for exchange when you can use GMail for instance 2. You often don't need a real administrator to manage the services, since the hosting company makes it easy for their services. The mileage may vary on this point depending on how much control the individual has over the service 3. Looking over your message, you're more thinking about cloud services as an individual. Cloud computing is vastly growing in Enterprise more so than anything in the consumer space now. 4. The shift to internet based computing ( vs. local apps to do everything for you ) meant that we lost a piece of control. I don't have my local Slashdot app installed because I use a web page. I can't know that slashdot won't change my TOS, I can't know that slashdot won't... The cloud concept is one of the evolution of the web really. It allows for application categories that fall somewhere in between local app and web site. You will definitely be seeing more 'cloud' based technology when HTML5 really starts to flex its muscles. As it becomes more and more like a first class OS application, they'll look a lot like the cloud augmented apps that you use today.
Sorry, but please take some responsibility for yourself. If in fact there is something so important that you don't want anyone to know, then don't do it online, PERIOD. This is nothing new and there are very few if any technological measures that can ever be deployed that will guarantee that your privacy / security will ever be secure. The level of hassle involved with making really improbable-to-break security is really hard and requires diligence on the part of the individual. If Vista taught us anything, it is that users do NOT want real security. They want to do what they want and not worry about how the system does it. Well guess what? The system isn't perfect and neither is the security. We live with the imperfection for the sake of simplicity.
"Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions" This was a defect in their IM system. This could happen in EVERY SINGLE store and forward based messaging system (AKA basically all of them). If you expect each facebook user to generate their own Public/Private key then you're diluted (plus it breaks the online chat thing unless you're sharing your private key with facebook which would defeat the purpose). If you expect software to be perfect then you're an idiot.
"and other data to third parties" You agree to this when you clicked through their EULA (which is your fault).
"MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots..." Data was wide open (which is your fault) and the company erroneously captured it.
Fighting may be a part of school life, but so are teen suicides which I'd say are more likely a result of bullying over any other reasons (I knew kids driven to suicide, so please don't tell me its BS).
A natural part of growing up is working on your parents farm helping them grow crops. It isn't packing hundreds of kids into a building that just increases the already large emotional stress that teenagers face during puberty. Humans have changed over the past thousands of years, but you can't call anything about schools 'natural' in the sense that it is the human norm, so please omit the word from the discussion as it has nothing to do with modern sociological discussions on school violence.
Its too bad that the bully and the retaliating party of the fight may be treated equally, but that's just the nature of the beast. Lets say you had a round 2 a week later and wailed on the kid sending him to the doctor with a concussion. Now the school and you are actionable in court. When asked what the school did to deter your now aggressive demeanor, they can at least say that they punished you for fighting. If you had a walk after the first occurrence, the school would be very actionable regardless of who the original aggressor was. Plus this ignores the fact that there are many fights that aren't 1 sided. If you have two people wanting to fight (school gangs / ethnic groups for instance), the school should definitely punish both parties regardless of who 'started it' because in reality they both did.
You can install all programs directly from the market, but there's no reason why they can't 'link' to other published features of other other applications. For example maps is used by a ton of other apps. If maps released a new version that broke compatibility( or wasn't installed) then the root app would break or perform at reduced capacity.
Also, I'm running into problems writing an API implementation that other apps use. I'm either stuck with having each Android app deploy the exact same API jar packaging when installed (larger apps / more phone storage taken up), or put the API implementation into a single 'app' and have them access the app through the remoting API and having a light-weight shim on the client's code (more complicated / error prone).
OSX beat desktop linux out of the gate. This is not new. The fact is that Desktop Linux has never been consumer appealing, not that Apple's business model for limited hardware support (their own) is the best way to go.
I'm still waiting for my OTA Nexus One upgrade to 2.2 which really looks compelling.
I can't see how hobbyists would care for 100% coverage across all devices. Additionally, the UI toolkit for android is basically the same for all versions of the phone. Plus, you can write as many resolution implementations as you like more or less simply by the editor. Hell, why bother spewing useless anecdotes. Just go and get the SDK. It is FREE. Give it a try for 5 days and determine for yourself if its worth beans for YOU.
I gave it a try and it doesn't break anything, It just doesn't install. There are files missing in the restore that are important. Once it 'fails' you have the option of rebooting, and no harm done. There was a 3rd party one released (linked through engadget) which may work for you if you've rooted your phone previously.
There was a discussion about this (I forget where) that said Hulu would block the android flash player due to licensing reasons. I don't really know why but it seems that Hulu won't be on the road-map this year unless something changes from them.
You have to capture frames in order to identify the SSID's of the AP's (the whole point of the exercise), so most likely there's a sniffer that just sit there running forever in the vans grabbing all captured frames, or at least the first of every unique AP found. When the van gets to Google central the logs were probably downloaded to a bulk data loader for eventual geo-location coding. It would seem that instead of wiping out the captured raw logs, they were retained as either 'malicious and nefarious use' or an oversight.
Cable co's have specific licensing with their upsteam content providers. Although what you propose is possible, it also means re-negotiating the contract's, etc.. Red tape is annoying and ultimately this has to come down to the bottom line: Does adding this service (minus the rollout costs) make me more money?
Slashdot Mirror
Windows is a product which ships with interface implementations in the form of Win32api / MAPI / COM / etc..
IE is a product which uses uses Win32api / etc... and implements the mshtml API
Windows Update is a product that ships with Windows which depends on the mshtml API
The dependency chain is cyclic which means that one cannot ship Windows without IE, but it doesn't make IE derivative of windows. It makes IE dependent on well known though non-copyrightable interfaces. This is why you -can- install IE on Wine. It may not work well, but that's a matter of implementation instead of legality. Also, Microsoft could have built an alternative mshtml interface that would work with the native platform that wasn't IE if they really chose to (or forced to) but their job isn't to detach lock-in from their own products.
About the GPL in general: Do I need to perform due diligence the licensing terms of the software I use?
Yes
1. The US is not the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travel_agency#Commissions
http://www.atpco.net/atpco/products/negfares_dc.shtml
http://www.pacificepoch.com/newsstories?id=1625547_0_5_0_M ...
2. Outside of negotiated fares, private fares are quite often negotiated outside of published fare world, and the majority of them have commission rates tacked on through partnerships and agency agreements. Some airlines utilize them more than others but there it is.
Maybe the starved US airlines that are already flying on fumes can't afford the overhead of agency commission, but there are a vast number that are.
Quoted from the source, though NSFW language:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL7yD-0pqZg
I think everyone assumes that Google or any other business that doesn't bribe heavily to follow the laws of the land they operate in. The controversy surrounding Google and China has typically resolved around ethics instead of laws.
Google's corporate mantra is to 'do no evil', and in their general opinion government censorship is a bad thing with the exception or child porn I imagine. Up to a few months ago, Google actively supported the China's censorship program by restricting the results returned in their search results pages. At some point around then, the company had some spat with the Chinese gov and decided that they could no longer filter results. Because its against the law to host these uncensored results in mainland China, Google simply redirected search box searches to servers in Hong Kong (Part of China, though heavily relaxed liberties due to British possession 1999). Hong Kong doesn't require censorship like mainland China does, so Google can host their searches there without the guilt of being a part of the censorship. The government had an issue with this as well, because google.cn was still 'actively' generating results even though all real work was done from Hong Kong servers. The latest 'fix' by Google was to replace the text input box with a button that was a direct link to Google's uncensored Hong Kong search engine. This all said, the Chinese government still has the Great Firewall, so that any content linked out from Google's search results can still be blocked for mainland citizens, but at least Google can claim that they can't control what the government does with its pipes.
Trust me, basically all travel agents make a profit. If the sites aren't moronic, they will have themselves as agents of the airline for the commission (usually a % of the ticket's fare value). Its pretty standard practice.
" ... because it is likely to exacerbate the trend toward personalized and less transparent pricing of airline tickets"
Its already way too late for that my friend. There are millions and millions of public fares ('tenders for offers') on the market at any one time. Many are never even available, any many are locked down to only specific groups. The systems are so crazy that companies spend millions of dollars on systems just to figure out their -own- fares. That's just to see if I can make an offer for a fare. When we worry about booking a fare, we have the wide variety of travel agencies that each have their finger in the commission pot, so who knows how much savings are being passed on to the actual consumer and how much the agent is swallowing. Don't forget the 'tax' (aka surcharges, not a real tax) that more and more airlines are tacking onto their flights. This is usually highlighted in a less visible font $500 .. .... (+ 300 tax ) .. ouch
Here is what usually happens when buying a ticket online:
Consumer - Types in their From/To & dates
Internet Booking Engine - Searches through the GDS' for the most appropriate itineraries for the dates / passengers / etc.. (This is the expedia / travelocity / etc..)
GDS - Ties in with fare management systems (reading published fare data for compatible fares & surcharges), scheduling firms (when / where flights are coming and going), reservation systems, and few other smaller sources to find an itinerary that matches whatever criteria you specified in your journey
Airline's Reservation System - Confirms availability and makes the booking and reserves a placement on the plane (usually a single airline company per system, though there are shared hosting systems for small guys)
My best assumption is that the want ITA to better refine the Google experience of the "Internet Booking Engine". To be fair, every time you see the annoying spinning "seaching for cheap fares" messages from sites are usually the result of querying GDS systems for appropriate matching fares/itineraries. I suppose some smart caching can speed that up, but can lead to false positives for bookings.
PS: Dirty little secret for those not in the know: Reservation Systems book seats with the assumption that people won't show up to flights, so they quite often oversell if they get the chance. If you've ever been bumped to a different class or off the plane, this is most likely why
Not to bash the guy, but wasn't most of his work done in aggregating the content discovered by others in a useful and accessible way? How much of Art did he personally 'discover'? I can't really answer that, but I have no doubt he didn't 'invent' most of the ideas found in his books. Its kind of like Constantine. He didn't invent Christianity, but he brought Christianity to Europe in a way few others could.
"The article says that they can also install apps, in addition to OTA OS upgrades"
This was demonstrated by Google to the world at a Google I/O keynote. Go watch it now. The feature is that from a web page, you can click on an app and say 'install now' or whatever and the app installation gets pushed to the phone just as if you hit the 'install' button through the app store. This is not smoke and mirrors behind the scenes. Its an advertised feature.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY3U2GXhz44&feature=channel
View from minutes: 31:00 onward
Last time I checked, Android pulls data from the web all the time when it syncs profiles, does push downloads, etc.. All these things are being done without your control. Google controls your phone! Do you want to sever all functions of a 'connected' application from your phone as well? I don't like the fact that Google 'can' delete apps from my phone, but I've yet to see Google delete anything that falls into 'profit' or 'control' categories.
Things that I think Google should remove apps for:
- Cause privacy violations (back doors, data harvesting, etc..)
- Compromise the security of the phone
- Cause physical damage to the phone
- Causes substantial damage to mobile / wifi network operators through an unprotected exploit, etc..
- Hampers or removes the ability to remove the application itself
- Apps that violate Copyright -- In order to maintain safe harbor, they would probably be required to take down from wherever they have control to take the app down which would include your phone
- Apps who's purpose is to serve kiddie porn (though this could be ambiguously stretched badly to many internet / browser apps)
In regards to remakes, there are times when a remake brings something interesting into the current landscape. A remake done well will adapt the story to the important issues of the day. As an example, Logan's Run could be adapted to the overpopulation and lack of natural resources that plagues mankind. This is a re-occurring theme that has re-emerged from the 70's yet again. Tie it with climate concerns and peak oil and you'll have a real horror show.
Another note on remakes is that no matter how much of a masterpiece it was, some people will never watch 'old' movies regardless of how good it was. I don't even remember Logan's Run being that good of a film, but the last time I saw it was maybe 15 years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy.
Oh god, you're not alone. This movie was one of the few movies I saw in theaters and I must say it was a let down. On the bright side, I really really liked 28 days later which I thought was great. Too bad the poster didn't seem to watch or care about that film...
This may be a redundant data on tech savy Slashdotters, and I must say that the pre-installation notification on security is pretty good in android, it does make the less technical people reading CNET think twice about installing a 'trojan' app for example (hypothetical) 'cute girls in bikini's 15' which has access to location, phone state, wifi, phone calls, etc..
Teens found a way of dieing by driving accidents way before video games ever came along. If there's a way to identify higher risk youths then that's all and good I suppose. This just brings me back to my teenage years where there were a few people in my schools who ended up dieing in accidents (usually associated with drinking and driving, but that's another discussion).
"I HATE fucking lawyers."
Sounds like it =>
PS: If, I had an ISP contract that said I was responsible for the content that was being downloaded, couldn't 'suing party' just sue the name associated with the ISP account? I imagine most if not all common carrier ISP's have such a clause either through service agreement the someone signed, or through law. I'd be shocked if this black hole of 'responsibility of infringement' has been sealed up somewhere. Now if you don't have your name on such an agreement then I guess you're free and clear without direct evidence.
Snippet from Comcast's TOS for example:
What obligations do I have under this Policy?
In addition to being responsible for your own compliance with this Policy, you are also responsible for any use or misuse of the Service that violates this Policy, even if it was committed by a friend, family member, or guest with access to your Service account. Therefore, you must take steps to ensure that others do not use your account to gain unauthorized access to the Service by, for example, strictly maintaining the confidentiality of your Service login and password. In all cases, you are solely responsible for the security of any device you choose to connect to the Service, including any data stored or shared on that device....
"less privacy",
This only really applies when you're using free online services, but even Google isn't brazen enough to look into your personal data specifically. They'll run it through a content munching machine to give you ads that it thinks you'll be most coerced by.
"less control"
Less administration
"less reliability"
You'll need to throw a lot of money into a system that would beat the uptime you get out of most cloud providers
"requires constant net access"
Yup
"shifting terms of service and the like"
Once again, this mostly applies for free software, but besides Facebook which isn't a cloud offering, I don't know of any cloud services that have been specifically bad about their TOS
1. Cloud services are really cheap versus a company hosting all their IT infrastructure internally. Why pay big bucks for exchange when you can use GMail for instance ... The cloud concept is one of the evolution of the web really. It allows for application categories that fall somewhere in between local app and web site. You will definitely be seeing more 'cloud' based technology when HTML5 really starts to flex its muscles. As it becomes more and more like a first class OS application, they'll look a lot like the cloud augmented apps that you use today.
2. You often don't need a real administrator to manage the services, since the hosting company makes it easy for their services. The mileage may vary on this point depending on how much control the individual has over the service
3. Looking over your message, you're more thinking about cloud services as an individual. Cloud computing is vastly growing in Enterprise more so than anything in the consumer space now.
4. The shift to internet based computing ( vs. local apps to do everything for you ) meant that we lost a piece of control. I don't have my local Slashdot app installed because I use a web page. I can't know that slashdot won't change my TOS, I can't know that slashdot won't
Sorry, but please take some responsibility for yourself. If in fact there is something so important that you don't want anyone to know, then don't do it online, PERIOD. This is nothing new and there are very few if any technological measures that can ever be deployed that will guarantee that your privacy / security will ever be secure. The level of hassle involved with making really improbable-to-break security is really hard and requires diligence on the part of the individual. If Vista taught us anything, it is that users do NOT want real security. They want to do what they want and not worry about how the system does it. Well guess what? The system isn't perfect and neither is the security. We live with the imperfection for the sake of simplicity.
"Facebook is exposing users' live chat sessions"
This was a defect in their IM system. This could happen in EVERY SINGLE store and forward based messaging system (AKA basically all of them).
If you expect each facebook user to generate their own Public/Private key then you're diluted (plus it breaks the online chat thing unless you're sharing your private key with facebook which would defeat the purpose).
If you expect software to be perfect then you're an idiot.
"and other data to third parties"
You agree to this when you clicked through their EULA (which is your fault).
"MAC address and SSID information from public Wi-Fi hotspots ..."
Data was wide open (which is your fault) and the company erroneously captured it.
Fighting may be a part of school life, but so are teen suicides which I'd say are more likely a result of bullying over any other reasons (I knew kids driven to suicide, so please don't tell me its BS).
A natural part of growing up is working on your parents farm helping them grow crops. It isn't packing hundreds of kids into a building that just increases the already large emotional stress that teenagers face during puberty. Humans have changed over the past thousands of years, but you can't call anything about schools 'natural' in the sense that it is the human norm, so please omit the word from the discussion as it has nothing to do with modern sociological discussions on school violence.
Its too bad that the bully and the retaliating party of the fight may be treated equally, but that's just the nature of the beast. Lets say you had a round 2 a week later and wailed on the kid sending him to the doctor with a concussion. Now the school and you are actionable in court. When asked what the school did to deter your now aggressive demeanor, they can at least say that they punished you for fighting. If you had a walk after the first occurrence, the school would be very actionable regardless of who the original aggressor was. Plus this ignores the fact that there are many fights that aren't 1 sided. If you have two people wanting to fight (school gangs / ethnic groups for instance), the school should definitely punish both parties regardless of who 'started it' because in reality they both did.
You can install all programs directly from the market, but there's no reason why they can't 'link' to other published features of other other applications. For example maps is used by a ton of other apps. If maps released a new version that broke compatibility( or wasn't installed) then the root app would break or perform at reduced capacity.
Also, I'm running into problems writing an API implementation that other apps use. I'm either stuck with having each Android app deploy the exact same API jar packaging when installed (larger apps / more phone storage taken up), or put the API implementation into a single 'app' and have them access the app through the remoting API and having a light-weight shim on the client's code (more complicated / error prone).
OSX beat desktop linux out of the gate. This is not new. The fact is that Desktop Linux has never been consumer appealing, not that Apple's business model for limited hardware support (their own) is the best way to go.
I'm still waiting for my OTA Nexus One upgrade to 2.2 which really looks compelling.
I can't see how hobbyists would care for 100% coverage across all devices. Additionally, the UI toolkit for android is basically the same for all versions of the phone. Plus, you can write as many resolution implementations as you like more or less simply by the editor. Hell, why bother spewing useless anecdotes. Just go and get the SDK. It is FREE. Give it a try for 5 days and determine for yourself if its worth beans for YOU.
Eclipse IDE:
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
Android SDK:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html
Android / Eclipse Integration:
http://developer.android.com/sdk/eclipse-adt.html
I gave it a try and it doesn't break anything, It just doesn't install. There are files missing in the restore that are important. Once it 'fails' you have the option of rebooting, and no harm done. There was a 3rd party one released (linked through engadget) which may work for you if you've rooted your phone previously.
There was a discussion about this (I forget where) that said Hulu would block the android flash player due to licensing reasons. I don't really know why but it seems that Hulu won't be on the road-map this year unless something changes from them.
You have to capture frames in order to identify the SSID's of the AP's (the whole point of the exercise), so most likely there's a sniffer that just sit there running forever in the vans grabbing all captured frames, or at least the first of every unique AP found. When the van gets to Google central the logs were probably downloaded to a bulk data loader for eventual geo-location coding. It would seem that instead of wiping out the captured raw logs, they were retained as either 'malicious and nefarious use' or an oversight.
Cable co's have specific licensing with their upsteam content providers. Although what you propose is possible, it also means re-negotiating the contract's, etc.. Red tape is annoying and ultimately this has to come down to the bottom line: Does adding this service (minus the rollout costs) make me more money?