This isn't about Apple.

"LOL everybody knows that he is just talking out off his ass"

Yet these same tactics got North and South Korea to start talking about peace. But we should listen to the children on slashdot who go "LOL Trump ass derp derp" who have done nothing and achieved nothing in their lives, over a guy whose brash negotiating tactics helped mend global geopolitical rifts that are older than most of us on here.

I said very clearly let's drop "the patent system". It's right there in my post. Your reading skills are sh-t.

Trump is just negotiating. The thing you have to understand with Trump (that 80% of the public don't get) is that 80% of his statements that get hyped in the dumb media as "controversial" are actually just part of him negotiating ... Trump knows that the last thing China wants economically is for significant amounts of US manufacturing to leave China. That's part of negotiating, you strengthen your hand by saying things like this, to increase your leverage in negotiations, to get more of what you want out of future arrangements.

Yet those people who have dropped out the labor force aren't dying of hunger - America has one of the lowest rates of malnutrition deaths in the world - which makes one wonder if stronger welfare systems are helping support people who aren't working as compared to 30 or 50 or 100 years earlier? It's an open question, I'm not sure. Something/someone must be supporting these people.

There are also people employed on the black market that aren't officially in the labor force (eg drug dealers).

You have a point, but we could partly solve this by dropping the patent system (the average smartphone has over 250,000 patents covering it), then instead of obscene profits all going to a tiny handful of mega-wealthy shareholders, we could have products made in America that are also still affordable, as getting rid of the patents would cause a huge drop in the price of the products, which would (A) offset the increase that goes to paying a living wage to American workers and (B) help keep the products comparably affordable to said middle-class workers.

AMP is basically an attempt to do 'embrace and extend' the open Web with their own replacement 'ecosystem' (which is 'on paper' supposedly open, but in practice it's basically 'their ecosystem'). This is a classic page out the book of the old Microsoft. They're effective trying to replace the Web (with its pesky competitors OS-wise, software-wise, advertising-wise) with 'GoogleWeb'.

Anyone who can't see the serious problems here, lacks imagination.

The more webmasters who join and make their websites AMP-compliant, the more we help Google take over, and the more power we hand them to crush anyone who doesn't join (e.g. through lowering the rankings that don't support it). They'll make billions, webmasters get whatever they're paid to do the site.

So as for whether or not to go along with it, well, we all need to pay the rent, so it's up to each person to decide you either sell out to the devil or stick to your values.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Yes, a market-leading company with a high-quality product and robust sales is just about to go bust, right:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/0...

Generally, investors aren't stupid enough to think smoking a bit of weed in the context of an informal media interview has any serious implications for the future of the company however, if the stock is under pressure, it's far more shareholders are responding to things like legitimate market news of actual new competition:

https://www.highsnobiety.com/p...

But of course the average Slashdot reader focuses on things like the weed, and doesn't even follow such actual market news. Investors are generally much better at looking at what really matters.

I use (the old) Skype as it allows a convenient way to screen sharing + group video chats + ability to run multiple accounts at once (this makes it useful for remote support for clients .. I can switch from video to screen sharing mid-chat etc.). Neither WhatsApp nor FB messenger can do those things; HangOuts is a privacy nightmare and seem to be very few people using it. Actually, there doesn't seem to be any reasonable alternatives, and the new UWP skype is a feature and UI regression. Skype came many years before almost everything else - when Microsoft bought Skype they had a relatively widely used product, early mover advantage, a decent range of functionality that still surpasses almost everything else in the market today, a parent company with a huge budget, unparalleled marketing reach and platform distribution... and they still managed to run it into the ground and F'ck it up completely with this 'new Skype'. It's practically a case study in how not to manage software. And yet I keep thinking about that Microsoft project manager who giddily tweeted about the new Skype like an excited schoolgirl.

There's a broader reason why this sort of misguided sympathy can be dangerous. Consider, for example, that there are people (who are actually taken quite seriously as 'philosophers of ethics') pushing for laws to outlaw "harming" robots, precisely because of this childish sentimentality. Thus we may well face a situation in the near future where smashing your own robot (against its artificial pleas) could put you in jail - and then you have genuine harm being done against actual human beings who are innocent of any genuine wrongdoing (i.e. they merely vandalized their own private property / inanimate object), and may be locked in a cage - families thus possibly losing breadwinners etc.

Certainly this sentimentality is mostly good for our society, but it needs to also be firmly guided and constrained by rational considerations.

This example was not hypothetical - it's genuinely the current sad state of ethics w.r.t. robots.

Of course if robots attain sentience, that will be a different situation.

^ This

Here's one possible reason they might care - they may be entering the market, and this would 'conveniently' harm existing currencies that would be in competition with theirs: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co...

Indeed, this really drives home the "It's not a computer, it's just a toy / dumb appliance" mentality that the major smartphone and smartphone OS vendors have.

I have eight cores in my phone but I'm not allowed to use them for actually running stuff on? I've been purchasing computers since 1995 and every one I've purchased, I've been allowed to choose what to run on it, and had the choice to run software that max'd the CPU if I wanted to.

Sure, not every "Joe Public" type user is going to understand how to do this without overheating their device (I've seen people do bad things like block laptop vents), but mass-banning the entire range of applications? A computing device *should* be able to run at 100% CPU under ordinary circumstances without overheating - if it can't, it's faulty.

This is why smartphones have failed utterly at competing with the desktop, and why desktops are still years ahead for getting real work done ... five or ten years ago I predicted that smartphones would usurp the desktop, and I was wrong, they remain basically toys / dumb appliances, with a few useful applications (e.g. navigation, flashlight, camera).

It also seems like an odd coincidence that they do this shortly after we hear that Google might be considering entering the cryptocurrency space: https://cryptoinsider.21mil.co... .... so a move that just might happen to help hurt competing currencies?

If you download the APK

So I must jump through extra hoops, for no reason, because the developer wants to spite the vendor, due to an issue over a feature I don't even use ... no thank you, I don't jump through hoops for nobody. I'm a software developer and I don't make my users jump through unnecessary extra hoops on my own emotional wims. I'll just use alternatives.

As I said, I used to be a VLC fan, but this grates me.

No, it has nothing to do with performance, here it is straight from the developer's mouth:

https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=35&t=145236

Huawei devices are now forbidden to download VLC. We're fed up with their OS breaking VLC all the time.

Huawei basically kills VLC when the screen is shutting down. So that kills VLC when it plays audio in background.

This is childish behavior as a developer; there are many other (better-for-users) ways to deal with - including, if you detect those devices, show a message explaining that background audio won't work on this device for reason X. I am affected by this issue; I used to like VLC and actually would have wanted to use it to play videos (I don't care about background audio), but this petty behavior - randomly blocking long-time VLC fans like me from using it (for no reason as I don't even use the background audio feature) by banning entire ranges of devices. They're basically 'attacking' their own users just to spite a particular vendor.

They're actually good phones, really fast, perform well, there is no 'performance problem' - this is a very specific issue and behavior that isn't a performance issue. Other developers seem to manage to release Apps that work for these phones without mass-blocking them.

Developing for a broad variety of platforms means encountering issues with specific platforms, and dealing with it in a reasonable way; if you're a developer you have to expect that.