Purely based on cognitive ability, the age of consent would sit right about 16
That's nice in theory, but what about in practice. What are the actual harms that come to a person if they are allowed to consent to sex before 16?
No idea what the situation is where you live, but the age of consent in several Australian states is 16 (except for in situations where one partner is under the care or supervision of the other -- thus, teacher/student relationships are not allowed). Kids 12 and over can have sex before this, though -- the only restriction is that one partner cannot be more than two years the senior of the other.
The point of the legislation is to prevent someone being coerced into having sex against their will; in practise, there seems to be a legal grey area in which a 15yo/19yo consensual relationship is unlikely to involve a conviction being recorded even if brought before a court.
Sweden is very liberal about the protection of women and what should constitute sexual abuse. He was a big name, and he broke the law to the point he used his influence to do things that would get other men arrested too. And then instead of answering the charges, he fled the country. Over something that might get him $1000 in fines and told not to come back to the country.
The problem is with the process that led to charges being laid. One of the women involved in the case, in particular, tweeted ecstatically about throwing a party at her house for Assange after his alleged crime occurred (tweets that she later unsuccessfully tried to delete), stated publically that she had never at any point felt threatened by Assange, and had previously published a seven-step guide on the internet on how to get back at men who cheated on you by accusing them of sex crimes. And then there was the on/off/on-again indescision of the Swedish public prosecutor, and the acknowledgement by the same that both women consented to having sex with Assange at the time.
Whether or not there's anything more to it than this, I don't know; maybe it's just a case of an over-zealous prosecutor combined with some odd Swedish laws. But it's enough to make me, personally, feel rather uneasy about the whole process. Nobody should be able to fraudulently accuse you of sexual assault just because they happened to not like you later on.
Well, the last time I tried an NTSC formatted DVD, reverse 2:3 pulldown algorithms didn't work for me at all... but that was at least five years ago. If things have improved, then I'm glad to hear it -- although stuffing 24fps into 30fps and then reversing the process, all at the expense of encoded resolution, still seems pretty dumb to me.
Nevertheless, judging from the wiki links you gave, it still seems as though some devices handle the transfer less than perfectly. Which brings me back to my original question. I'm sill really surprised if people find a true 24fps film jittery (but as I say, that could be differences in perception.)
Just to check here: are you talking about watching films at the cinema, or films on/transferred from a Region 1 DVD? There are huge problems with transfering content from the cinema (24fps) to Region 1's NTSC format (30fps), as you might well imagine, and there's no way you're ever going to get a non-jerky pan when watching an NTSC-encoded DVD.
(Personally, I've never found 24fps (or PAL format DVD transfers) to be at all jittery, but that might well be differences in perception... I do, however, avoid NTSC format like the plague that it is.)
Well... you gain the height of the menubar in available screen realestate, provided the single menubar gets incorporated into the system tray/notifcation/bleh panel which was always going to be there anyway. I'm assuming this was the reasoning behind Ubuntu's Unity interface -- creating more vertical screen realestate on small screens, and using the area of widescreen panels more effectively.
As for the actual question, though, I suspect that most people wouldn't have a beef with a Windows Phone if they were forced to own one. I dare say they're usable for the most part, and I trust it's possible to replace the abomination of a homescreen that they have. But why would anyone actually bother to switch to a new platform unless it can offer something substantially better than iOS or Android? MS came on the smartphone scene way too late, and with far too little new to offer.
Actually, I usually find that Atheists have a much worse understanding of science and don't understand why science can't disprove God (one big reason being that science is based on OBSERVATION, and you can't observe a lack of something).
Science can't categorically disprove God, but it can disprove (with an extraordinarily high degree of confidence) the idea that the world is 10,000 years old.
I have a lot of respect for people who are sensibly religious (even though I suspect that they're wrong); I have no respect for anyone who persists in believing in a silly fallacy like creationism.
You can already precache a 10km square area around any point (saved permanently) plus cache 150 Mb of rolling data. That's been good enough for me to travel everywhere I've wanted so far (including a five month backpacking trip last year).
Yes, it would be great to have continent maps available for download, but the current options are a lot better than nothing.
I'm not sure it was quite as simple as that. Google had one huge thing going for them at the time, which was that g+ wasn't facebook. They hyped the network and its privacy advantages very well, made the initial intake through invites desirable and exclusive, and close to the official launch there was an enormous amount of interest, both here on/. and in the MSM.
Where Google made a massively huge mistake was in closing people's Google accounts because of a misguided belief in real names, just before launching g+ to everyone. Almost overnight, g+ went from desirable to detestable in public opinion. I suspect that if Google hadn't been so stupid, they may well have succeeded in taking over from facebook -- don't forget that they'd successfully taken over altavista's search market back in the day. In the history of PR cockups, Nymwars was pretty big.
I guess it depends what you consider impressive; and music is, of course, highly subjective (otherwise we wouldn't have this thread!)... But there's not much evidence of Mozart being harmonically creative in his works -- he tended to avoid any form of dissonance, used very simple chord progressions and modulated almost always into closely related keys (often painfully telegraphed with leading accidentals). Don't get me wrong -- he wrote some nice stuff (Figaro is great operatic fun; the Requiem is decent). But his work was not particularly inventive, didn't push the envelope in any sense, and I would argue that his wider-scale impact on classical composition was essentially zero.
The period between the end of Bach and the middle of Beethoven is really best avoided, unless you're into twee. And it's not until the 20th century that things really started to get interesting again.
Pachabel's Canon is no more sophisticated than A Whiter Shade of Pale although I suppose it has the distinction of doing it first.
Well, Pachelbel's Canon was at least a canon, giving it some degree of greater complexity. Plus he cut the Hammond organ part out in the final edits, unlike sodding Procol Harum.
I attended a Welsh National Opera performance of Don Giovanni late last year, and I enjoyed it. But, it's the pop music of it's time and it is decidedly populist in its ambitions. Simple story. Nice tunes. Harmonious backing in straight major and minor chords. Job done.
Hendrix habitually threw 7ths, 9ths, augmented 4ths into his chords; intervals which (apart from possibly the occasional 7th) Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated.
But Mozart, by and large, wrote utter rubbish -- really talented guy, shame about the musical immaturity. And the same goes for the rest of the Classical period, which was a ghastly regression after the Baroque and the closest classical music ever came to the inanity of most current pop music.
If you're going to single out someone unusual like Hendrix, I'd suggest you'd be better comparing his works to someone like Shostakovich or Prokofiev. Personally, I'd argue that whilst popular music has occasionally sought complexity in composition, it very rarely achieves success by doing so. Classical music, on the other hand, has mostly been successful when pushing the envelope (with the exception of the afore-mentioned Classical period, when people had a collective and inexcusable brain-fade and wrote some pathetic harmonically simple stuff...)
The fragmentation issue is something Google desperately needs to solve if it wants to avoid the same fate that desktop Linux did.
Hmmmm... I'm not sure the fate of desktop linux (which never broke past even 1% of the market) is comparable to Android, which is nearing 50% of the smartphone market. Given Android's success, I'm not sure most users know or care about fragmentation -- all they want is for apps to work on their phone, and this is a good step to ensuring that.
What I'm really confused about, though, is why a trolling post like this has been modded up to +5. You make one good point (regarding fragmentation) but then sully it with a load of FUD, including a set of extremely biased and misleading links. Seriously, I've been reading/. a very long time and known some dedicated trolls, but nobody has come even close to the one-person-war against Android that you've been waging these last few months. Did Android steal your lunch money when you were a kid?
All the developer has to do to get around this is to add "The app is also able to sync with other phones using SMS" to the description. Then the careful user compares the permission list with the description and accepts it.
No, the careful user asks him/herself, "why on earth does an app need SMS capability to sync? I don't want to install software that sends out SMSes!" and doesn't install the app.
The stupid user, OTOH, goes right ahead and installs it. The question is, how much should we be protecting people from themselves?
There's a lot of ifs and buts in that paper -- the need for ASE to be installed is primary, the exploit still needs a buffer overflow to work and I trust that the specifc Tcl scripting vulnerability has been fixed now in any case. It's a very specific example using software that is unlikely to be on an Android phone, and it doesn't seem like an example of installing an SMS app, then installing UNO, to me.
Interesting example of bypassing sandboxed permissions, though.
If one of the apps decided to copy your contact list and upload it, nobody would be the wiser because there is no way to monitor/protect your device unless you JB it, and with 5.x, JB-ing is a pain in the ass.
The argument is that with curation from Apple, any app that seeks to do this will be found out and not allowed on the App Store. I'd still feel a lot safer if I could see what permissions each app was requesting, though -- there may be things that Apple feels OK with that I don't feel OK with. At least Android will tell you if a device wants to access your contacts.
So, I can either just click a link on the iOS App Store and KNOW all that stuff has already been done for me, or waste two hours scouring the internet just to figure out whether some stupid egg timer app is going to sell my soul to the Ukraine right?
No, you spend two seconds looking at the permissions requested by the app you're installing. If you're installing something that sends SMSes to the Ukraine, then you'll be clearly warned about it before you install it. If you are truly unable to assess whether an app is requesting appropriate permissions, then you're probably better off with a curated/walled-garden approach; but most of us are more sensible than this.
So how does one know? All of this pontificating about dumb or lazy users doesn't really help. How do I distinguish a download of Uno, for example, that has embedded malware from one that doesn't?
One word: permissions. When you install an app on Android, you will be prompted with the permissions the app is requesting, and asked if you want to install it. You, the user, have a very good breakdown of exactly what an app can do before it gets installed. And for sending SMSes, it's extremely clear -- the permission is described first as "Services that cost you money" and will then list that it can send SMS messages. It should be obvious that Uno has no need to be sending SMSes on your behalf.
So anyone who gets burnt by these schemes would have to (a) search for a dodgy "free" version of a popular paid app and (b) install it even when there was a warning that it was going to potentially send costly SMSes. I know there are suckers born every minute, but you'd have to be a really, really cheap and stupid one to get hit by this.
Of course, potentially Google should have predicted this and included an "Allow always/allow once/reject" prompt the first time a third-party app attempts to make a phone call or send an SMS. It's probably not a bad idea...
The broader and more up-to-date picture is probably from Google... as of 1st December, only slightly more than half of Android phones were running Gingerbread (which has been released on AOSP for over a year now). Most of the rest are running Froyo, but there's still 10% of all devices running Eclair!
It's not a pretty picture, and given the huge advances made first with Gingerbread and then ICS, it doesn't do Android any favours to have so many devices out of date. That said, a lot of phone makers have promised updates to ICS in recent weeks, so hopefully Google has done a bit of arm-twisiting behind the scenes and ICS adoption will be better.
And yeah, there's people working to port ICS to the Desire HD line, too. Haven't decided if I want it, yet.:)
The difference is that the "vanilla" Nexus S already has an official OTA to ICS. Sure you'll get upgrades eventually with other phones, but it'll never be as fast or as seamless as with the Nexus phones Google supports.
It's worth noting, incidentally, that there has been a huge improvement in the stock apps Google's shipped with ICS -- I've stopped using the third-party contact apps, launchers or photo galleries that I used routinely with GB because the stock apps are now so much better than anything else available. The need for a Sense (or TouchWiz, or whatever) overlay is getting less and less. If there's an ICS build available for the Desire HD with HW accel, I'd strongly suggest trying it -- there's no way I could ever go back to sluggish GB again.
The correct answer is then to drop touchwiz. I really wish google would demand that these frontends be nothing more than an apk if you want to use their trademarks.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the ability for companies to "brand" their phone OSes is the secret to Android's success. Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc, all feel that they can add in some unique special sauce that makes consumers flock to their brands. (They're wrong, of course; but marketing dudes are a bit strange in the head sometimes...) There's probably a lot of pressure on Google from hardware manufacturers to preserve this "freedom".
Customers, OTOH, could always choose a Nexus phone if they cared about it; not only do you get the pure AOSP experience, but you also get the guaranteed permanent ability to unlock the bootloader and gain root access out of the box. Having personally moved to a Nexus S after an HTC Desire, there's no way I'd ever go with any phone other than a Nexus again.
Quite the opposite, actually. It's often been argued that a major reason for Google's purchase and development of Android was to safeguard Google's search empire. Except from an ad-revenue-generating sense (and possibly also a kick-Apple-up-the-arse sense:) Google doesn't care whether you're using Android or not. What's of primary importance is that you're using their search tools to generate them income through advertising. Android is simply a very good means to protect that ad revenue castle.
A boot-to-Gecko OS that promotes Google search is a much better option (as far as Google is concerned) than a boot-to-Gecko OS that promotes Bing or somebody else. I'm sure they'd much rather Android stayed dominant, but it doesn't hurt them to have allies in their camp rather than enemies outside the gates.
I don't mean to say that Google couldn't create human-like voice recognition, but the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example. That alone is so Apple-like.
If you're seeking humour and witty conversation from your phone, then I'm not sure you're speaking for the majority of people; most of us have human friends for that. My ideal voice recognition software would do the task required and only that task -- I don't want software to quip back at me, and I especially don't want it to make jokes about referring to me as "an ambulance" if I'm injured and dying. Humour and computers don't generally mix well.
Based on past statements by Google (Marissa Meyer once criticized interfaces that looked like they were made by humans, instead favoring interfaces made by machines...), they just don't seem to get people. They definitely come off like an engineering company without the balance of human interface design. This was also the perception of Microsoft for many years, incidentally.
That's a good analogy. It was amazing how MS failed to get UI design, and how Apple gained a virtual monopoly in the PC market because everyone cared so much about the usability difference. Why, last I checked, Apple had 93% of the PC market share, with MS sitting on a lowly 7%...
I'm getting the impression that Apple fans think that design is everything, and that functionality should be sacrificed for cute animations and humorous backchat. I don't think it works like that for most people.
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Purely based on cognitive ability, the age of consent would sit right about 16
That's nice in theory, but what about in practice. What are the actual harms that come to a person if they are allowed to consent to sex before 16?
No idea what the situation is where you live, but the age of consent in several Australian states is 16 (except for in situations where one partner is under the care or supervision of the other -- thus, teacher/student relationships are not allowed). Kids 12 and over can have sex before this, though -- the only restriction is that one partner cannot be more than two years the senior of the other.
The point of the legislation is to prevent someone being coerced into having sex against their will; in practise, there seems to be a legal grey area in which a 15yo/19yo consensual relationship is unlikely to involve a conviction being recorded even if brought before a court.
Sweden is very liberal about the protection of women and what should constitute sexual abuse. He was a big name, and he broke the law to the point he used his influence to do things that would get other men arrested too. And then instead of answering the charges, he fled the country. Over something that might get him $1000 in fines and told not to come back to the country.
The problem is with the process that led to charges being laid. One of the women involved in the case, in particular, tweeted ecstatically about throwing a party at her house for Assange after his alleged crime occurred (tweets that she later unsuccessfully tried to delete), stated publically that she had never at any point felt threatened by Assange, and had previously published a seven-step guide on the internet on how to get back at men who cheated on you by accusing them of sex crimes. And then there was the on/off/on-again indescision of the Swedish public prosecutor, and the acknowledgement by the same that both women consented to having sex with Assange at the time.
Whether or not there's anything more to it than this, I don't know; maybe it's just a case of an over-zealous prosecutor combined with some odd Swedish laws. But it's enough to make me, personally, feel rather uneasy about the whole process. Nobody should be able to fraudulently accuse you of sexual assault just because they happened to not like you later on.
Well, the last time I tried an NTSC formatted DVD, reverse 2:3 pulldown algorithms didn't work for me at all ... but that was at least five years ago. If things have improved, then I'm glad to hear it -- although stuffing 24fps into 30fps and then reversing the process, all at the expense of encoded resolution, still seems pretty dumb to me.
Nevertheless, judging from the wiki links you gave, it still seems as though some devices handle the transfer less than perfectly. Which brings me back to my original question. I'm sill really surprised if people find a true 24fps film jittery (but as I say, that could be differences in perception.)
Just to check here: are you talking about watching films at the cinema, or films on/transferred from a Region 1 DVD? There are huge problems with transfering content from the cinema (24fps) to Region 1's NTSC format (30fps), as you might well imagine, and there's no way you're ever going to get a non-jerky pan when watching an NTSC-encoded DVD.
(Personally, I've never found 24fps (or PAL format DVD transfers) to be at all jittery, but that might well be differences in perception ... I do, however, avoid NTSC format like the plague that it is.)
Well ... you gain the height of the menubar in available screen realestate, provided the single menubar gets incorporated into the system tray/notifcation/bleh panel which was always going to be there anyway. I'm assuming this was the reasoning behind Ubuntu's Unity interface -- creating more vertical screen realestate on small screens, and using the area of widescreen panels more effectively.
As for the actual question, though, I suspect that most people wouldn't have a beef with a Windows Phone if they were forced to own one. I dare say they're usable for the most part, and I trust it's possible to replace the abomination of a homescreen that they have. But why would anyone actually bother to switch to a new platform unless it can offer something substantially better than iOS or Android? MS came on the smartphone scene way too late, and with far too little new to offer.
Actually, I usually find that Atheists have a much worse understanding of science and don't understand why science can't disprove God (one big reason being that science is based on OBSERVATION, and you can't observe a lack of something).
Science can't categorically disprove God, but it can disprove (with an extraordinarily high degree of confidence) the idea that the world is 10,000 years old.
I have a lot of respect for people who are sensibly religious (even though I suspect that they're wrong); I have no respect for anyone who persists in believing in a silly fallacy like creationism.
This problem is my area of research (didn't RTFA, just assuming this is how they did it).
Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of amusing?
Amusing and also kinda sad. At the least the poster deduced things correctly, I guess ...
Wonder if this is the first time someone's discovered they've been scooped by reading /.??
You can already precache a 10km square area around any point (saved permanently) plus cache 150 Mb of rolling data. That's been good enough for me to travel everywhere I've wanted so far (including a five month backpacking trip last year).
Yes, it would be great to have continent maps available for download, but the current options are a lot better than nothing.
I'm not sure it was quite as simple as that. Google had one huge thing going for them at the time, which was that g+ wasn't facebook. They hyped the network and its privacy advantages very well, made the initial intake through invites desirable and exclusive, and close to the official launch there was an enormous amount of interest, both here on /. and in the MSM.
Where Google made a massively huge mistake was in closing people's Google accounts because of a misguided belief in real names, just before launching g+ to everyone. Almost overnight, g+ went from desirable to detestable in public opinion. I suspect that if Google hadn't been so stupid, they may well have succeeded in taking over from facebook -- don't forget that they'd successfully taken over altavista's search market back in the day. In the history of PR cockups, Nymwars was pretty big.
I guess it depends what you consider impressive; and music is, of course, highly subjective (otherwise we wouldn't have this thread!) ... But there's not much evidence of Mozart being harmonically creative in his works -- he tended to avoid any form of dissonance, used very simple chord progressions and modulated almost always into closely related keys (often painfully telegraphed with leading accidentals). Don't get me wrong -- he wrote some nice stuff (Figaro is great operatic fun; the Requiem is decent). But his work was not particularly inventive, didn't push the envelope in any sense, and I would argue that his wider-scale impact on classical composition was essentially zero.
The period between the end of Bach and the middle of Beethoven is really best avoided, unless you're into twee. And it's not until the 20th century that things really started to get interesting again.
Pachabel's Canon is no more sophisticated than A Whiter Shade of Pale although I suppose it has the distinction of doing it first.
Well, Pachelbel's Canon was at least a canon, giving it some degree of greater complexity. Plus he cut the Hammond organ part out in the final edits, unlike sodding Procol Harum.
I attended a Welsh National Opera performance of Don Giovanni late last year, and I enjoyed it. But, it's the pop music of it's time and it is decidedly populist in its ambitions. Simple story. Nice tunes. Harmonious backing in straight major and minor chords. Job done.
Hendrix habitually threw 7ths, 9ths, augmented 4ths into his chords; intervals which (apart from possibly the occasional 7th) Mozart's audiences would never have tolerated.
But Mozart, by and large, wrote utter rubbish -- really talented guy, shame about the musical immaturity. And the same goes for the rest of the Classical period, which was a ghastly regression after the Baroque and the closest classical music ever came to the inanity of most current pop music.
If you're going to single out someone unusual like Hendrix, I'd suggest you'd be better comparing his works to someone like Shostakovich or Prokofiev. Personally, I'd argue that whilst popular music has occasionally sought complexity in composition, it very rarely achieves success by doing so. Classical music, on the other hand, has mostly been successful when pushing the envelope (with the exception of the afore-mentioned Classical period, when people had a collective and inexcusable brain-fade and wrote some pathetic harmonically simple stuff ...)
The fragmentation issue is something Google desperately needs to solve if it wants to avoid the same fate that desktop Linux did.
Hmmmm ... I'm not sure the fate of desktop linux (which never broke past even 1% of the market) is comparable to Android, which is nearing 50% of the smartphone market. Given Android's success, I'm not sure most users know or care about fragmentation -- all they want is for apps to work on their phone, and this is a good step to ensuring that.
What I'm really confused about, though, is why a trolling post like this has been modded up to +5. You make one good point (regarding fragmentation) but then sully it with a load of FUD, including a set of extremely biased and misleading links. Seriously, I've been reading /. a very long time and known some dedicated trolls, but nobody has come even close to the one-person-war against Android that you've been waging these last few months. Did Android steal your lunch money when you were a kid?
I don't have a Galaxy S II, but if you're only checking emails then your phone should last much longer than a day ...
OTOH, if you're checking emails in between surfing the web and playing Asphalt 6 ... :)
All the developer has to do to get around this is to add "The app is also able to sync with other phones using SMS" to the description. Then the careful user compares the permission list with the description and accepts it.
No, the careful user asks him/herself, "why on earth does an app need SMS capability to sync? I don't want to install software that sends out SMSes!" and doesn't install the app.
The stupid user, OTOH, goes right ahead and installs it. The question is, how much should we be protecting people from themselves?
There's a lot of ifs and buts in that paper -- the need for ASE to be installed is primary, the exploit still needs a buffer overflow to work and I trust that the specifc Tcl scripting vulnerability has been fixed now in any case. It's a very specific example using software that is unlikely to be on an Android phone, and it doesn't seem like an example of installing an SMS app, then installing UNO, to me.
Interesting example of bypassing sandboxed permissions, though.
If one of the apps decided to copy your contact list and upload it, nobody would be the wiser because there is no way to monitor/protect your device unless you JB it, and with 5.x, JB-ing is a pain in the ass.
The argument is that with curation from Apple, any app that seeks to do this will be found out and not allowed on the App Store. I'd still feel a lot safer if I could see what permissions each app was requesting, though -- there may be things that Apple feels OK with that I don't feel OK with. At least Android will tell you if a device wants to access your contacts.
So, I can either just click a link on the iOS App Store and KNOW all that stuff has already been done for me, or waste two hours scouring the internet just to figure out whether some stupid egg timer app is going to sell my soul to the Ukraine right?
No, you spend two seconds looking at the permissions requested by the app you're installing. If you're installing something that sends SMSes to the Ukraine, then you'll be clearly warned about it before you install it. If you are truly unable to assess whether an app is requesting appropriate permissions, then you're probably better off with a curated/walled-garden approach; but most of us are more sensible than this.
So how does one know? All of this pontificating about dumb or lazy users doesn't really help. How do I distinguish a download of Uno, for example, that has embedded malware from one that doesn't?
One word: permissions. When you install an app on Android, you will be prompted with the permissions the app is requesting, and asked if you want to install it. You, the user, have a very good breakdown of exactly what an app can do before it gets installed. And for sending SMSes, it's extremely clear -- the permission is described first as "Services that cost you money" and will then list that it can send SMS messages. It should be obvious that Uno has no need to be sending SMSes on your behalf.
So anyone who gets burnt by these schemes would have to (a) search for a dodgy "free" version of a popular paid app and (b) install it even when there was a warning that it was going to potentially send costly SMSes. I know there are suckers born every minute, but you'd have to be a really, really cheap and stupid one to get hit by this.
Of course, potentially Google should have predicted this and included an "Allow always/allow once/reject" prompt the first time a third-party app attempts to make a phone call or send an SMS. It's probably not a bad idea ...
The broader and more up-to-date picture is probably from Google ... as of 1st December, only slightly more than half of Android phones were running Gingerbread (which has been released on AOSP for over a year now). Most of the rest are running Froyo, but there's still 10% of all devices running Eclair!
It's not a pretty picture, and given the huge advances made first with Gingerbread and then ICS, it doesn't do Android any favours to have so many devices out of date. That said, a lot of phone makers have promised updates to ICS in recent weeks, so hopefully Google has done a bit of arm-twisiting behind the scenes and ICS adoption will be better.
And yeah, there's people working to port ICS to the Desire HD line, too. Haven't decided if I want it, yet. :)
The difference is that the "vanilla" Nexus S already has an official OTA to ICS. Sure you'll get upgrades eventually with other phones, but it'll never be as fast or as seamless as with the Nexus phones Google supports.
It's worth noting, incidentally, that there has been a huge improvement in the stock apps Google's shipped with ICS -- I've stopped using the third-party contact apps, launchers or photo galleries that I used routinely with GB because the stock apps are now so much better than anything else available. The need for a Sense (or TouchWiz, or whatever) overlay is getting less and less. If there's an ICS build available for the Desire HD with HW accel, I'd strongly suggest trying it -- there's no way I could ever go back to sluggish GB again.
The correct answer is then to drop touchwiz. I really wish google would demand that these frontends be nothing more than an apk if you want to use their trademarks.
Unfortunately, I suspect that the ability for companies to "brand" their phone OSes is the secret to Android's success. Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc, all feel that they can add in some unique special sauce that makes consumers flock to their brands. (They're wrong, of course; but marketing dudes are a bit strange in the head sometimes ...) There's probably a lot of pressure on Google from hardware manufacturers to preserve this "freedom".
Customers, OTOH, could always choose a Nexus phone if they cared about it; not only do you get the pure AOSP experience, but you also get the guaranteed permanent ability to unlock the bootloader and gain root access out of the box. Having personally moved to a Nexus S after an HTC Desire, there's no way I'd ever go with any phone other than a Nexus again.
dickbag move dude. dickbag move.
Quite the opposite, actually. It's often been argued that a major reason for Google's purchase and development of Android was to safeguard Google's search empire. Except from an ad-revenue-generating sense (and possibly also a kick-Apple-up-the-arse sense :) Google doesn't care whether you're using Android or not. What's of primary importance is that you're using their search tools to generate them income through advertising. Android is simply a very good means to protect that ad revenue castle.
A boot-to-Gecko OS that promotes Google search is a much better option (as far as Google is concerned) than a boot-to-Gecko OS that promotes Bing or somebody else. I'm sure they'd much rather Android stayed dominant, but it doesn't hurt them to have allies in their camp rather than enemies outside the gates.
You got the point, but missed the sarcasm ...
I don't mean to say that Google couldn't create human-like voice recognition, but the insider remarks that have been posted on various Android sites have so far stated that Google is not implementing Siri's "funny" remarks, for example. That alone is so Apple-like.
If you're seeking humour and witty conversation from your phone, then I'm not sure you're speaking for the majority of people; most of us have human friends for that. My ideal voice recognition software would do the task required and only that task -- I don't want software to quip back at me, and I especially don't want it to make jokes about referring to me as "an ambulance" if I'm injured and dying. Humour and computers don't generally mix well.
Based on past statements by Google (Marissa Meyer once criticized interfaces that looked like they were made by humans, instead favoring interfaces made by machines...), they just don't seem to get people. They definitely come off like an engineering company without the balance of human interface design. This was also the perception of Microsoft for many years, incidentally.
That's a good analogy. It was amazing how MS failed to get UI design, and how Apple gained a virtual monopoly in the PC market because everyone cared so much about the usability difference. Why, last I checked, Apple had 93% of the PC market share, with MS sitting on a lowly 7% ...
I'm getting the impression that Apple fans think that design is everything, and that functionality should be sacrificed for cute animations and humorous backchat. I don't think it works like that for most people.