The...name car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum ("wheeled vehicle"), or the Middle English word carre ("cart") (from Old North French), or karros (a Gallic wagon).
The internet was designed to be segregated into different categories. Com = commercial, org = non-proft, gov = government, edu = educational. The problem is that the TLDs controlled by the US exercised no control over assignments to those domains,.com became a buzzword, and everyone grabbed for a.com, even if their content was better suited to another TLD.
In Australia, you have to have an ABN (Australian Business Number) to register a.com.au (it's not hard to get one, takes one phone call). You need to be a registered non-profit to get a.org.au. For personal use, you can get an.id.au.
I have no problem in an.xxx domain. If you're worried about being filtered (and I am - I'm in Australia after all), then you need to fight that battle where it counts - against filtering. As is stands, the non-country TLDs are largely pointless. The only reason to having more than one is to increase the namespace. Otherwise.com,.org and.net are functionally identical.
Multiplayer still is free. The only sort that isn't is persistent world multiplayer, where your activity is taking place on a third party server, which has to be paid for and maintained.
I started playing back in the early 90's on various MUDs which were a) free and b) a lot more creative with their game mechanics.
Which were basically an early form of MMO (large number of players, persistent world, etc). So it's not that you hate the concept of MMOs, you just don't like any of the current, popular MMOs.
Stop re-phrasing my statements inaccurately. I'm not making general statements, stop generalising them. If you are a monopoly, and you are competing in a market distinct from your monopoly, and you leverage the special properties of your monopoly to inhibit the competition in the second market, then you should be stopped.
What if Ford (assuming Ford were a monopoly) required stupidly expensive tires? Then, unless government intervened, all other tire manufacturers would go out of business (if Ford is the only car, and their tires "won't work" with Ford for whatever reason, then their product is useless) and Ford would have a monopoly on the tire business (or their supplier would).
Eventually somebody else will come along and make another one, and if its a superior product, people will switch to it.
No, somebody will make another one, Ford will cut prices so that the other product is priced out of the market and shuts down, then Ford will jack the prices back up again to recoup the losses they sustained while undercutting the newcomer. A newcomer to the market won't have the capitalization to run in the red for as long as an incumbent monopoly.
But along your logic, if they are forced to offer a tire/sun-visor choice, then why would anybody bother creating and selling another car?
Because there's more to a car than a sun visor and tires? Because they think they can make a more efficient/prettier/faster car than Ford? Because they think they can make cars cheaper than Ford can? Hell, because they think they can make cars exactly the same as Ford, and think the market will reward them for offering variety. They'll make cars for the same reason anyone's ever gone into business - because they think they can make money.
Owning a computer is not a constitutionally derived right
You know what else isn't a constitutionally derived right? Having a corporate charter. By that logic, we should just pull Microsoft's corporate charter - after all, if it's not in the constitution it's up for grabs, right?
Its the FREE MARKET
Not free for the consumer, who now has no choice. Not free for the competitor, who cannot compete, not due to the quality of their own product, but due to another company's control of the market.
the moment you intervene is the moment things slide down the slippery slope and destroy competition incentive.
There's no competition incentive anyway with an monopoly in your market. How can you kill that which is already dead?
To the average consumer, brakes are as important to the car as the browser is as important to the OS. How else would they access Facebook?
That might be the case now, fifteen years after they were first added, but at the time, no, they weren't. There was a nascent browser market, and MS attempted to kill it in it's infancy, and roll it into their OS monopoly.
And to your Holden argument, well, you are suggesting that because a manufacturer is the 'only' one in the playing field, they have to accommodate other companies in on their revenue stream because its 'unfair' to default to their built-in features.
In essence, yes. Monopolies are abberations in a free market. They sometimes exist, due to natural laws, or simply the extreme competency of a company, but they are problematic. The laws of a free market do not apply to monopolies - therefore they need external regulations to keep them under control. This is understood and accepted by pretty much every free market theorist from Adam Smith onwards. If this were not the case, monopolies could spread from industry to adjacent industry via lock-in until the free market is totally strangled.
The more market intervention by governments, the less incentive there is for folks to create and sell (or even distribute) better operating systems.
The story with browsers is an interesting one, because Microsoft's attempt at bundling was essentially defeated by Netscape committing seppuku. They released their browser for free. IE is not free, it's simply baked into the cost of Windows. Netscape couldn't do that because their browser was their only product. When Netscape died, their browser lived on to compete with IE, preventing the monopoly MS was trying to achieve. This is obviously not the usual outcome, as most industries have a greater than zero production cost per widget.
If this had not occurred, and MS had achieved its monopoly, what do you think would happen? Microsoft would have probably continued to drive web technology. As it refused to accept standards, ActiveX and other properietary MS technologies would have gained dominance. Via tighter integration with the browser, and proprietary protocols, MS would have been able to displace Apache with IIS. This would have allowed MS to lock-in serverside development. Java would have been shut out in favour of.NET, ASP would become the only options, rather than ASP/Perl/PHP/Rails like we have now. Every website would have to run on windows, in order to use ASP/.NET. How well do you think Google would have done, competing against MS while relying on their technology, and being required to have tens of thousands of Windows licenses for their massive clusters? How much traction do you think linux would have gained if it hadn't had a solid base of server-installs to grow from?
MS would have spread from having an OS monopoly to monopolies in browsers, http servers, development languages and server OSes. This is what anti-trust laws are designed to prevent - monopolies taking over the free market. In this particular case, thanks first to Netscape and later to open source software, this didn't happen. But in industries where your widgets cost money to produce individualls, instead of being able to be electronically replicated at negligible cost, this is not possible. Restraining monopolies protects free markets, it doesn't hinder them. Ideally, free markets shouldn't need protection, as in an ideal world, there would be no monopolies. We don't live in an ideal world, there are monopolies, and they need restraining.
Well, it'd have to be local apps that can interoperate with others of the same class (so all parties don't need to purchase the same software) and a free service that runs a synchronisation server (otherwise you've got the extra overhead of running and maintaining that yourself).
As to the security "hole", it's not really. It's a possible security problem, as you need to trust your provider, but it's not a "hole" in the way that security vulnerabilities are a hole. Having local apps synchronize to a server has the same hole - whether the app is browser-based or not doesn't really matter.
There isn't a problem with being a monopoly. There is a problem with abusing a monopoly. Monopolies are dangerous things in a market economy. Ideally, they shouldn't exist. If you are have a monopoly, there are some legal restrictions on things you can do with it. One of the things which is illegal is using your monopoly presence to squeeze competitors out of adjacent markets. Microsoft did this with Netscape. They used their desktop OS monopoly to squeeze Netscape out of the browser monopoly. This was illegal; they are now being punished.
Your car analogy is even worse than such things usually are. This isn't about "market leaders". This is about "monopolies". Windows is a monopoly. Mac OSX isn't a competitor - a Mac is a piece of hardware. If you want an OS for your commodity x86 hardware, you can't go buy OSX. Brakes are also not a good example, as they are an integral part of a car, and always have been. Back when the browser bundling occurred, browsers were "aftermarket" components of operating systems.
A more apt analogy would be if Holden was the only manufacturer of cars. There exists a market for car MP3 players. Holden starts manufacturing their own MP3 players, installs them in all their cars, and bakes the cost of them into the price of the car. All the third party MP3 players then go out of business, because the only cars people can buy all come with MP3 players. Holden now has an additional monopoly in car MP3 players, not because they have a best-of-breed product, but because they leveraged their existing monopoly. It would be entirely appropriate to force Holden to make MP3 players optional extras, and restore the market.
Note this doesn't apply if Holden is "the largest car manufacturer"; it applies if they are "the only car manufacturer".
I'm from Australia, and our ISPs love bittorrent, for the reason you describe - it drives people towards their higher data, more expensive, plans. In the US, however, their ISPs generally only sell unlimited plans. They are therefore financially motivated to try and stop people from actually using their services. They get the most money from people who subscribe, but don't use much bandwidth. People who use a lot of bandwidth actually cost them money.
Their behaviour is a result of their business plan. It seems most of them realize this, but having pimped the "unlimited" data plans for so long, they encounter consumer backlash when they try and change to metered useage.
I have a love/hate relationship with WebApps. Their UIs are generally slower and clunkier than that of a local program. They generally don't have as many features, and lots of operations are more difficult to do remotely.
However, for collaboration and remote access, they're simply awesome. I'd never use Google Docs to write a report or an essay. But Google Docs was awesome for setting up a wedding spreadsheet that both my fiancee and I can access and update when we book things, or get RSVPs.
In the end, it's horses for courses. I'll use both local apps and remote ones for different tasks. I'll probably never use either one exclusively.
What incentive does a distribution channel have for producing/marketing/shipping/promoting/selling an author's work? Either the author needs to be independantly wealthy enough to finance the whole operation (ok, they can hire it, they don't need to outright purchase the machinery as I posted above), or they need to convince someone to invest in/speculate on their work. Whoever does the speculation is going to require some stake in the work being produced. This stake is generally the exclusive right to distribute the work. If you don't let authors transfer this right, you take away anything they have to offer investors, and essentially require any prospective authors to have the funds to do it all themselves.
Even so, I'm not sure what parent poster is complaining about. Having the ability to sell distribution rights doesn't mean the original author no longer has any incentive to create sequels. They still own the copyright. They still own the rights to all their characters. And they want to create another work so they can sell the rights again, and buy another few meals.
The moral right to be identified as the author of a work is non-transferrable. But if you're going to have distribution rights at all, then you need to make them transferrable. Otherwise any author that wishes to distribute would somehow have to finance the purchase of printing machinery and international distribution channels themselves. Given that that's not feasible, they instead sell their rights to those that do have that capacity.
Consequences of using DRM: Development costs, bad publicity, it gets cracked first day, pirates pirate it.
Consequences of not using DRM: Pirates pirate it.
For every person who pirates a game, bugger all happens to the number of games that are released. That number's been rising for years, and shows no sign of stopping now.
Because nobody tells you that you have that power. In fact, they can explicitly tell you that you don't, or that you aren't allowed to use it. It requires someone confident and knowledgeable to stand up to that - and they try and stack the deck that way too by paying such a pittance for jurors that any competent person will try and get out of jury duty.
The problem with your story isn't the notions of juries - the problem is the environment that has fostered the idea that "juries are filled with 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty".
The government compels people to fill juries, but provides inadequate compensation for their time, and allows numerous loopholes. It's obvious to anyone with sense what the ultimate situation will be. It's also true that the judicial system has deliberately erroded the powers of juries, and withheld from them information about those powers they do hold. It's become such that people view the jury as an impotent relic from judicial history, rather than the last bulwark against injustice that it should be.
I took something else away from it too: the jury has the ultimate control over deciding whether a crime was committed. It can be illegal for you to chew gum, but it'll take a full jury to be willing to convict you. For example, in Michigan, it's a felony to commit adultery (750.30). I suppose adultery is about as common here as anywhere else, but guess how many people are tried for it... Juries are the reason draconian laws aren't enforced.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. US judges now instruct juries that nullification is illegal (i.e. that they can only judge the facts, not the law), and remove jurists who indicate that they are aware of their rights to nullify, or intend to exercise them.
The last barrier to abusive government is being dismantled. Which is why we now have an explosion in laws that many (most?) consider to be unjust - marijuana possession, non-commercial copyright infringement, etc.
Judges already have similar powers - they can throw cases if they believe the prosecution doesn't have a reasonably strong argument.
AFAIK, juries are there to decide innocence or guilt - a relatively simple boolean value. Judges are there to (among other things) decide amounts, which are based on more complex legal problems. It's appropriate for them to adjust damages. In any case, I have no problems with judges reducing penalties, or even declaring innocence after a jury has returned guilty, as long as it's not the other way around (increasing penalties, or declaring guilt).
Apples to oranges. You're comparing developing for a single device with developing for a whole bunch of them. If you supported only one Android model, the way you only support (essentially) one iPhone model, it'd be a fair comparison.
It sounds like the problem is your support contract. If you guarantee support for all models on a given date, then your costs are going to increase as more diversity enters the phone market. If your contract doesn't allow for you to increase your charges as the number of supported devices increase, then it's going to be a weight around your necks.
Which I believe to be a situation which needs to be reversed, rather than accepted as the status quo. I consider the increasing movement away from jury nullification to be indicative of the movement towards autocracy. If a government is truly by and for the people, it doesn't need to fear its laws being trumped by jury nullification.
Unfortunately, remove juries and you remove jury nullification. The purpose of a jury (ostensibly) is to ensure that punishments are not imposed arbitrarily by the state; they always have authority of the the peers of the one being judged.
"I consider...[trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
- Thomas Jefferson
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile#Etymology
The...name car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum ("wheeled vehicle"), or the Middle English word carre ("cart") (from Old North French), or karros (a Gallic wagon).
Try accessing a site with half a browser, get half a site. Guess what, flickr is useless when you disable images too.
The internet was designed to be segregated into different categories. Com = commercial, org = non-proft, gov = government, edu = educational. The problem is that the TLDs controlled by the US exercised no control over assignments to those domains, .com became a buzzword, and everyone grabbed for a .com, even if their content was better suited to another TLD.
In Australia, you have to have an ABN (Australian Business Number) to register a .com.au (it's not hard to get one, takes one phone call). You need to be a registered non-profit to get a .org.au. For personal use, you can get an .id.au.
I have no problem in an .xxx domain. If you're worried about being filtered (and I am - I'm in Australia after all), then you need to fight that battle where it counts - against filtering. As is stands, the non-country TLDs are largely pointless. The only reason to having more than one is to increase the namespace. Otherwise .com, .org and .net are functionally identical.
She starts a program that displays a medical logo -- the one with two snakes wrapped around a staff
Caduceus.
Which is what I said. Persistent world's aren't free. The "traditional" multiplayer still is.
Multiplayer still is free. The only sort that isn't is persistent world multiplayer, where your activity is taking place on a third party server, which has to be paid for and maintained.
I started playing back in the early 90's on various MUDs which were a) free and b) a lot more creative with their game mechanics.
Which were basically an early form of MMO (large number of players, persistent world, etc). So it's not that you hate the concept of MMOs, you just don't like any of the current, popular MMOs.
Stop re-phrasing my statements inaccurately. I'm not making general statements, stop generalising them. If you are a monopoly, and you are competing in a market distinct from your monopoly, and you leverage the special properties of your monopoly to inhibit the competition in the second market, then you should be stopped.
What if Ford (assuming Ford were a monopoly) required stupidly expensive tires? Then, unless government intervened, all other tire manufacturers would go out of business (if Ford is the only car, and their tires "won't work" with Ford for whatever reason, then their product is useless) and Ford would have a monopoly on the tire business (or their supplier would).
Eventually somebody else will come along and make another one, and if its a superior product, people will switch to it.
No, somebody will make another one, Ford will cut prices so that the other product is priced out of the market and shuts down, then Ford will jack the prices back up again to recoup the losses they sustained while undercutting the newcomer. A newcomer to the market won't have the capitalization to run in the red for as long as an incumbent monopoly.
But along your logic, if they are forced to offer a tire/sun-visor choice, then why would anybody bother creating and selling another car?
Because there's more to a car than a sun visor and tires? Because they think they can make a more efficient/prettier/faster car than Ford? Because they think they can make cars cheaper than Ford can? Hell, because they think they can make cars exactly the same as Ford, and think the market will reward them for offering variety. They'll make cars for the same reason anyone's ever gone into business - because they think they can make money.
Owning a computer is not a constitutionally derived right
You know what else isn't a constitutionally derived right? Having a corporate charter. By that logic, we should just pull Microsoft's corporate charter - after all, if it's not in the constitution it's up for grabs, right?
Its the FREE MARKET
Not free for the consumer, who now has no choice. Not free for the competitor, who cannot compete, not due to the quality of their own product, but due to another company's control of the market.
the moment you intervene is the moment things slide down the slippery slope and destroy competition incentive.
There's no competition incentive anyway with an monopoly in your market. How can you kill that which is already dead?
To the average consumer, brakes are as important to the car as the browser is as important to the OS. How else would they access Facebook?
That might be the case now, fifteen years after they were first added, but at the time, no, they weren't. There was a nascent browser market, and MS attempted to kill it in it's infancy, and roll it into their OS monopoly.
And to your Holden argument, well, you are suggesting that because a manufacturer is the 'only' one in the playing field, they have to accommodate other companies in on their revenue stream because its 'unfair' to default to their built-in features.
In essence, yes. Monopolies are abberations in a free market. They sometimes exist, due to natural laws, or simply the extreme competency of a company, but they are problematic. The laws of a free market do not apply to monopolies - therefore they need external regulations to keep them under control. This is understood and accepted by pretty much every free market theorist from Adam Smith onwards. If this were not the case, monopolies could spread from industry to adjacent industry via lock-in until the free market is totally strangled.
The more market intervention by governments, the less incentive there is for folks to create and sell (or even distribute) better operating systems.
The story with browsers is an interesting one, because Microsoft's attempt at bundling was essentially defeated by Netscape committing seppuku. They released their browser for free. IE is not free, it's simply baked into the cost of Windows. Netscape couldn't do that because their browser was their only product. When Netscape died, their browser lived on to compete with IE, preventing the monopoly MS was trying to achieve. This is obviously not the usual outcome, as most industries have a greater than zero production cost per widget.
If this had not occurred, and MS had achieved its monopoly, what do you think would happen? Microsoft would have probably continued to drive web technology. As it refused to accept standards, ActiveX and other properietary MS technologies would have gained dominance. Via tighter integration with the browser, and proprietary protocols, MS would have been able to displace Apache with IIS. This would have allowed MS to lock-in serverside development. Java would have been shut out in favour of .NET, ASP would become the only options, rather than ASP/Perl/PHP/Rails like we have now. Every website would have to run on windows, in order to use ASP/.NET. How well do you think Google would have done, competing against MS while relying on their technology, and being required to have tens of thousands of Windows licenses for their massive clusters? How much traction do you think linux would have gained if it hadn't had a solid base of server-installs to grow from?
MS would have spread from having an OS monopoly to monopolies in browsers, http servers, development languages and server OSes. This is what anti-trust laws are designed to prevent - monopolies taking over the free market. In this particular case, thanks first to Netscape and later to open source software, this didn't happen. But in industries where your widgets cost money to produce individualls, instead of being able to be electronically replicated at negligible cost, this is not possible. Restraining monopolies protects free markets, it doesn't hinder them. Ideally, free markets shouldn't need protection, as in an ideal world, there would be no monopolies. We don't live in an ideal world, there are monopolies, and they need restraining.
Well, it'd have to be local apps that can interoperate with others of the same class (so all parties don't need to purchase the same software) and a free service that runs a synchronisation server (otherwise you've got the extra overhead of running and maintaining that yourself).
As to the security "hole", it's not really. It's a possible security problem, as you need to trust your provider, but it's not a "hole" in the way that security vulnerabilities are a hole. Having local apps synchronize to a server has the same hole - whether the app is browser-based or not doesn't really matter.
There isn't a problem with being a monopoly. There is a problem with abusing a monopoly. Monopolies are dangerous things in a market economy. Ideally, they shouldn't exist. If you are have a monopoly, there are some legal restrictions on things you can do with it. One of the things which is illegal is using your monopoly presence to squeeze competitors out of adjacent markets. Microsoft did this with Netscape. They used their desktop OS monopoly to squeeze Netscape out of the browser monopoly. This was illegal; they are now being punished.
Your car analogy is even worse than such things usually are. This isn't about "market leaders". This is about "monopolies". Windows is a monopoly. Mac OSX isn't a competitor - a Mac is a piece of hardware. If you want an OS for your commodity x86 hardware, you can't go buy OSX. Brakes are also not a good example, as they are an integral part of a car, and always have been. Back when the browser bundling occurred, browsers were "aftermarket" components of operating systems.
A more apt analogy would be if Holden was the only manufacturer of cars. There exists a market for car MP3 players. Holden starts manufacturing their own MP3 players, installs them in all their cars, and bakes the cost of them into the price of the car. All the third party MP3 players then go out of business, because the only cars people can buy all come with MP3 players. Holden now has an additional monopoly in car MP3 players, not because they have a best-of-breed product, but because they leveraged their existing monopoly. It would be entirely appropriate to force Holden to make MP3 players optional extras, and restore the market.
Note this doesn't apply if Holden is "the largest car manufacturer"; it applies if they are "the only car manufacturer".
I imagine you're not in the US.
I'm from Australia, and our ISPs love bittorrent, for the reason you describe - it drives people towards their higher data, more expensive, plans. In the US, however, their ISPs generally only sell unlimited plans. They are therefore financially motivated to try and stop people from actually using their services. They get the most money from people who subscribe, but don't use much bandwidth. People who use a lot of bandwidth actually cost them money.
Their behaviour is a result of their business plan. It seems most of them realize this, but having pimped the "unlimited" data plans for so long, they encounter consumer backlash when they try and change to metered useage.
I have a love/hate relationship with WebApps. Their UIs are generally slower and clunkier than that of a local program. They generally don't have as many features, and lots of operations are more difficult to do remotely.
However, for collaboration and remote access, they're simply awesome. I'd never use Google Docs to write a report or an essay. But Google Docs was awesome for setting up a wedding spreadsheet that both my fiancee and I can access and update when we book things, or get RSVPs.
In the end, it's horses for courses. I'll use both local apps and remote ones for different tasks. I'll probably never use either one exclusively.
What incentive does a distribution channel have for producing/marketing/shipping/promoting/selling an author's work? Either the author needs to be independantly wealthy enough to finance the whole operation (ok, they can hire it, they don't need to outright purchase the machinery as I posted above), or they need to convince someone to invest in/speculate on their work. Whoever does the speculation is going to require some stake in the work being produced. This stake is generally the exclusive right to distribute the work. If you don't let authors transfer this right, you take away anything they have to offer investors, and essentially require any prospective authors to have the funds to do it all themselves.
Even so, I'm not sure what parent poster is complaining about. Having the ability to sell distribution rights doesn't mean the original author no longer has any incentive to create sequels. They still own the copyright. They still own the rights to all their characters. And they want to create another work so they can sell the rights again, and buy another few meals.
The moral right to be identified as the author of a work is non-transferrable. But if you're going to have distribution rights at all, then you need to make them transferrable. Otherwise any author that wishes to distribute would somehow have to finance the purchase of printing machinery and international distribution channels themselves. Given that that's not feasible, they instead sell their rights to those that do have that capacity.
It's not illegal - it's just that, as you say, some courts instruct otherwise.
Consequences of using DRM: Development costs, bad publicity, it gets cracked first day, pirates pirate it.
Consequences of not using DRM: Pirates pirate it.
For every person who pirates a game, bugger all happens to the number of games that are released. That number's been rising for years, and shows no sign of stopping now.
Because nobody tells you that you have that power. In fact, they can explicitly tell you that you don't, or that you aren't allowed to use it. It requires someone confident and knowledgeable to stand up to that - and they try and stack the deck that way too by paying such a pittance for jurors that any competent person will try and get out of jury duty.
The problem with your story isn't the notions of juries - the problem is the environment that has fostered the idea that "juries are filled with 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty".
The government compels people to fill juries, but provides inadequate compensation for their time, and allows numerous loopholes. It's obvious to anyone with sense what the ultimate situation will be. It's also true that the judicial system has deliberately erroded the powers of juries, and withheld from them information about those powers they do hold. It's become such that people view the jury as an impotent relic from judicial history, rather than the last bulwark against injustice that it should be.
I took something else away from it too: the jury has the ultimate control over deciding whether a crime was committed. It can be illegal for you to chew gum, but it'll take a full jury to be willing to convict you. For example, in Michigan, it's a felony to commit adultery (750.30). I suppose adultery is about as common here as anywhere else, but guess how many people are tried for it... Juries are the reason draconian laws aren't enforced.
Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. US judges now instruct juries that nullification is illegal (i.e. that they can only judge the facts, not the law), and remove jurists who indicate that they are aware of their rights to nullify, or intend to exercise them.
The last barrier to abusive government is being dismantled. Which is why we now have an explosion in laws that many (most?) consider to be unjust - marijuana possession, non-commercial copyright infringement, etc.
Judges already have similar powers - they can throw cases if they believe the prosecution doesn't have a reasonably strong argument.
AFAIK, juries are there to decide innocence or guilt - a relatively simple boolean value. Judges are there to (among other things) decide amounts, which are based on more complex legal problems. It's appropriate for them to adjust damages. In any case, I have no problems with judges reducing penalties, or even declaring innocence after a jury has returned guilty, as long as it's not the other way around (increasing penalties, or declaring guilt).
Apples to oranges. You're comparing developing for a single device with developing for a whole bunch of them. If you supported only one Android model, the way you only support (essentially) one iPhone model, it'd be a fair comparison.
It sounds like the problem is your support contract. If you guarantee support for all models on a given date, then your costs are going to increase as more diversity enters the phone market. If your contract doesn't allow for you to increase your charges as the number of supported devices increase, then it's going to be a weight around your necks.
Which I believe to be a situation which needs to be reversed, rather than accepted as the status quo. I consider the increasing movement away from jury nullification to be indicative of the movement towards autocracy. If a government is truly by and for the people, it doesn't need to fear its laws being trumped by jury nullification.
Unfortunately, remove juries and you remove jury nullification. The purpose of a jury (ostensibly) is to ensure that punishments are not imposed arbitrarily by the state; they always have authority of the the peers of the one being judged.
"I consider...[trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
- Thomas Jefferson
Media terrorist, eh? All those poor DVDs and storage viciously butchered in his attempt to influenece their policies by fear...
Words have meaning. The meaning of terrorist is not "someone I don't like", despite US policy to the contrary.