Making a phone that can do both CDMA and GSM, and work on multiple carriers' LTE, is a political and business obstacle caused mostly by Qualcomm's complicity with anticompetitive American carriers, not a technical one.

The radios in these phones are overwhelmingly software-defined (and constrained by limits dictated and imposed by the carriers, the most important of which is "thou shall not support the frequencies of any other US carrier, even if the phone is nominally unlocked"). Even in cases where the RF amplifier might not be optimized for a particular carrier's band, the line between "doesn't work" and "doesn't work as well as it does with other carriers" is a lot blurrier than most people realize. Put another way, it's not rocket science. American phones aren't physically INCAPABLE of interoperating with multiple networks... they're arbitrarily PROGRAMMED to be incompatible.

Huge warning about the Z3 -- Sony implemented a chunk of the camera firmware in a way that causes it to be crippled forever if you unlock the bootloader... and as of at least a few days ago, there was no root exploit that didn't depend upon having an unlocked bootloader. There probably will be one eventually... but you might be waiting a LONG time to get it. Ask yourself whether you'll still be happy with the phone if you end up not being able to root it for months (or ever), and if you'll still be satisfied with it if the low-light performance goes to hell as a consequence of unlocking the bootloader.

Put another way, don't buy a Z3 unless you know beyond doubt there's a working root exploit for it that doesn't require an unlocked bootloader, and make equally sure that the phone you're buying has a ROM that hasn't slammed the door and locked out that root method. You'll still lose a chunk of the camera's functionality for the duration of your use of a custom ROM, but at least you'll preserve the ability to restore the phone back to stock at some future time if desired.

In other words, AT&T and Verizon will sell crippled, ruined, defective-by-design phones with locked bootloaders masquerading as real "Nexus" devices, tainting the brand name as badly as Verizon's Galaxy Nexus did. :-(

My guess is that UDF is probably encumbered by one or more patents that are licensed under terms that allow them to be used for free if the manufacturer already paid the royalties related to the optical disc recorder/media, but would require separate and additional royalties from the manufacturer of any non optical drive. With optical drives, those patents are unavoidable and have to be paid either way. With hard drives & flash drives, they'd be an extra cost that's currently discretionary.

At the rate Microsoft is going in their mad race to piss off & alienate just about everyone with a high-end workstation (by pushing Windows towards dumbed-down touch-based interfaces), that goal is actually starting to look attainable. Five years from now, one of two things will likely happen:

* Microsoft will have finally pissed off & alienated enough users for some critical mass of high end desktop/workstation power users to decide Windows is annoying them more than making their lives easier, and vendors like Adobe will notice & release their flagship software for Linux (effectively destroying what little market would remain for high-end Windows applications).

* Hedging their bets, companies like Adobe will port their flagship apps to Linux... then port them back to Windows with "kde6.dll" as a dependency. IMHO, this is Microsoft's ultimate nightmare scenario. If the apps high-end workstation users care about are all native KDE apps with equally good Linux versions, there's literally nothing left at that point to keep them chained to Windows. They'd basically be running Linux under a Windows kernel through a compatibility thunking layer anyway. ESPECIALLY if the apps are licensed in a way that allows users to buy the app once, then install & run it under BOTH Windows AND Linux.

Why KDE, and not Gnome? Licensing & logistics. KDE is Apache-licensed, so there's nothing to stop Adobe from bundling an installer for KDEwin directly into their own installers to auto-install it if the user hasn't done so already. And KDE for Windows already exists in beta form (see: http://windows.kde.org/ ).

Five years from now, we might not all be running Linux per se... but most of us will probably be running "Winux" (Windows kernel, Linux UI).

Not really... it just would have meant the authorities would have needed a proper court order to make Mastercard/Visa/Amex tell them who that one-time number was associated with, and furnish them with a list of every other transaction that person engaged in over some finite window of time. We're not talking about Bitcoins here, just very long credit card numbers still associated with exactly one real-world account, from a universe of potential numbers that's too sparse to effectively guess a valid number (let alone use one to commit fraud). At the end of the day, they STILL had to bill someone for it, so it was no secret who that number was associated with.

~3 years ago, I seriously considered buying a postmix drink dispenser and installing it in my kitchen. I ended up abandoning the plan for two reasons:

1) fountain Pepsi One is like the all-aspartame variant of Diet Coke... it's only manufactured on demand for large customers who are big enough to be their own distributors, and no distributor (as of 2011) carried it. And even if they did, it's aspartame+saccharin blend, not sucralose+aceK like the canned version.

2) fountain Diet Mtn Dew is 100% saccharin-sweetened, and 100% disgusting.

Should one or both someday change, I might reconsider it as an option. Especially if Samsung or LG ever makes a refrigerator whose in-door water dispenser can do double-duty as a postmix drink dispenser for 2 or 3 different drinks.

No. The testing is real and rigorous... at the point in the manufacturing process where the syrup itself is manufactured by Coca-Cola or PepsiCo -- the last stage where they're in a position to enforce total quality control. It's almost pointless to enforce quality and consistency standards at the bottling plant if the syrup itself is variable in quality or consistency from batch to batch.

My point is that there's a HUGE gulf between the amount of processing required to get stevia from harvested leaf to the point where someone could use it in an adhoc manner to sweeten their coffee (with large tolerance for day-to-day variability), and getting it to the point where it behaves as consistently and predictably in bulk manufacturing processes as aspartame, sucralose, or ace-K, and consumers can expect every can to taste exactly like the last.

ARM TrustZone can do it quite effectively... which brings about the opposite problem. The key isn't under the user's direct control, and can't be recovered by the user. The same evil can be used to encrypt proprietary binaries so they can't be pulled off and used with AOSP-derived ROMs. It doesn't matter how nominally-open the operating system is if the hardware it's running on is a black box without public documentation or drivers.

Robust encryption whose key is under YOUR direct control (as the device's owner and end user) is a very good thing. Robust encryption that uses keys known only to the device itself is just another insidious form of DRM aiming to lock down and control the entire user experience.

It's shit like this that's forcing me to leave AT&T and go to T-Mobile so I can have a rootable Galaxy Note 4 with unlocked bootloader. Yeah, in theory, I could buy the T-mo variant and use it on AT&T... but AT&T's new pricing structure unsurprisingly manages to be at least $10/month more than I'm spending now... and that's WITH their alleged BYOD discount. And on the slight chance they allowed me to insure a T-mobile Galaxy Note 4, I'd be completely fucked if I had to use that insurance, because they'd almost certainly replace it with a bootloader-locked AT&T version that's the entire reason for hating them in the first place.

Individual bottlers might do their own thing (Pepsi's south Florida bottler for Diet Mtn Dew in 2-liter bottles specifically seems to have some MAJOR quality control problems... at least half the bottles I've bought over the past couple of years have been AWFUL), but Coke & Pepsi THEMSELVES are INCREDIBLY anal-retentive about making sure that the syrup itself has absolutely predictable and consistent taste before it leaves the factory.

Yes, and it's sweetened with Rebiana... the specific processed stevia-based product I was talking about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Stevia might be "naturally occurring", but by the time you've processed it enough to transform it into a bulk ingredient with predictable & consistent taste & sweetness, it's practically an artificial sweetener itself.

There's no grand conspiracy against stevia. The fact is, people expect ${THIS} can of Diet Coke to taste EXACTLY like ${every_other} can of Diet Coke, with zero acceptable variation from batch to batch and can to can. That's a MUCH harder problem to solve on an industrial scale than "add a drop or two to your coffee until it tastes sweet enough". Coke & Pepsi actually do double-blind QA taste tests comparing every batch to at least one other batch, and consider a batch that can reliably be distinguished from the reference batch to be an official failure. They experimented with stevia when it first came out, and almost immediately concluded that no presently-available stevia-based sweetener was capable of giving them the kind of flawless consistency they insist upon.

Actually, it IS... in the fountain varieties. AFAIK, there are at least three varieties of "fountain" Diet Coke... all-saccharin (popular with convenience stores and low-volume users who prefer it for its long, relatively temperature-indifferent shelf life), saccharin+aspartame blend (used by most fast food restaurants & 7-11 -- still has a reasonably long shelf life, but has to be kept cool to prevent the aspartame from prematurely breaking down) and all-aspartame (AFAIK, it's classified as a "specialty item" manufactured on demand only for the largest clients, including McDonald's and Burger King), which has a relatively short shelf life (~3-6 months).

In theory, most restaurants probably have enough product turnover to use the all-aspartame version... but Coca-Cola doesn't want the burden of having to actively engage in the kind of aggressive inventory management and rotation they'd have to do to make the all-aspartame more widely available. I believe it was actually McDonald's that approached Coca-Cola and convinced them to make it for them as a special product, then a few years later Burger King used it as a bargaining chip when negotiating their switch from Pepsi products to Coke products (basically telling Coca-Cola, "You're already making it for McDonald's... going forward, make enough extra for us whenever you make a batch for them.")

As far as I know, sucralose & ace-K aren't used by ANY Coke or Pepsi fountain drink. I believe the problem was that syrup is a low-margin cost-sensitive market segment, and restaurants wouldn't pay significantly more than current prices to get diet drinks made with sucralose & Ace-K.

Anyway, that's the real reason why "diet coke" from gas stations & nightclubs tastes like complete shit, and why Diet Coke from McDonald's and Burger King tastes better than fountain Diet Coke from just about everywhere else.

Not quite. The treaty under which Texas-the-Lone-Star-Republic joined the USA gave it the right to secede at will... and it did.

After declaring independence, Texas proceeded to join the Confederate States of America, actively participated in warfare against the USA, and was conquered along with the rest of the CSA by Union troops & annexed by the USA as a vanquished military district.

Had Texas remained neutral & kept out of the war, it could have legitimately asked to rejoin the USA after (or during) the Civil war under freely-negotiated terms. As a conquered enemy land, Texas was in no position to negotiate anything.