...a $350 Android phone is a high-end device--or, at best, at the upper end of mid-range. Roughly 60% of Android phones retail for $200 or less. (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS25037214). The $350 price point lands right near the top quintile of all Android phones. By contrast, there does not exist a low-end iPhone for sale at retail. That's a conscious decision on Apple's part, and matches their overall M.O.

Your phone is not one of the low-end phones that give such a bad user experience. Your phone is quite nice--and quite expensive--compared to the fleet of Android devices as a whole.

...well, that's sort of one of the features of Android. It's open, and it's run-on-what-have-you, so it should hardly be surprising that a significant chunk of the install base is running on cheap, low-end devices. It's a big part of the reason Android has such a large market share compared to iOS.

If Google can't pull low-end Android users onto high-end devices instead of iDevices, well, that's partly a failure of marketing, and partly the natural challenge of living in such a diverse world of devices. If a significant chunk of your market share consists of budget devices with bad user experiences that are targeted to non-technical users, you can hardly be surprised when those users clump the OS in with the phone itself.

I think they should automatically kick it off on your 3D printer when you load the page.

Two copies, just to make sure you don't miss it.

"You can tell everyone that you were here when the human race learned...
that this collider isn't powerful enough to tell us anything new.

(Paraphrasing from memory - that ep was on last night.)

Nerd fail, invalid use of significant digits ;). Though I was thinking the same thing, one in a million doesn't seem very significant. It's like 5 people dying in my country of 5 million, that's one bad car crash not exactly dropping like flies.

Fair enough, many climb Mount Everest for no better reason.

Well mostly you'll be living in a bunker living off a long supply chain from Earth. It'll be a lot like living on a submarine that you mostly endure rather than pioneer. Many will envy you going, not so many the actual living conditions.

Name the third guy to set foot on the moon. I'm not saying there's no fame, but there's many easier ways to celebrity status. Except if you're the next Neil Armstrong.

True. But I imagine it'll be a rather unglamorous and unthankful task. Remember that you're a million miles away from any fans or fame, no vacations or time off and it's unlikely any amount of money will get you fresh bacon and eggs.

And as for changing the world, they won't send you up there just to be a warm body. If you can change the world up there, you can probably change the world down here too. There's thousands of people who can say they contributed to the Apollo program, even though they never went to the moon.

Except the article was talking about getting killed by the radiation exposure during the trip.

Presumably you aren't suggesting flying to Mars in a hobbit-hole. (Though if you could sneak a couple of tokes on Gandalf's pipe you might experience a good simulation.)

4300 years ago...

I guess the Sixth Dynasty of Old Kingdom Egypt didn't notice they got washed away, and went on building their pyramids like nothing had happened.

And Sargon must have clung to the side of the ark - or snuck on disguised as a dinosaur - so he could get back to building his empire as soon as the ground dried out.

I reckon the author is better at manipulating reality than he is at manipulating search results.

How did that work out for him?

Setting aside the sheer depravity of this argument, we have ample historical context for what happens when society cuts off the neediest. France, Haiti, Cuba, China, Russia, Algeria, Egypt, India, Scotland, The Phillipines, Mexico--just to name a few places where social and political inequality have driven massive, bloody revolts.

Wealth and political power calcify with the already wealthy and powerful. The middle and working classes slowly lose what wealth they have through attrition. Poverty becomes a virtually inescapable sink of destitution. Eventually, enough people end up having quite literally nothing to lose that you get vicious, deadly, destructive revolutions that take generations to recover from.

If you insist on taking a "pragmatic" view of not even bothering to -try- to improve the lives of the impoverished, try to at least understand the historical ramifications of what you're arguing for.

UK & Greece: no porn and no money.

Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.

My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.

Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...

And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.