No. "Apps featured in Google Play" isn't the same as "Featured Apps in Google Play". Neither phrase was from Google, either, but from the summary.

The summary is wrong in others ways, too. It says that Google is going to begin screening apps. The actual announcement says that this has been going on for several months. It also says that the process is "human-based", which the announcement doesn't say, just that the process "involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle." This leaves open the possibility that the team in question automates the actual screening, which is obviously much more normal for Google.

Really, your best bet is to ignore the summary and the linked article and just read the post from Google: http://android-developers.blog...

Income tax: Best Buy gives you $800 paycheck, you pay $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, Future Shop pays $200 in taxes.

Consumption tax: Best Buy gives you $800, pays $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, pay $200 in taxes.

Nope.

In a competitive market, costs tend to be more stable. They don't race to the bottom; they just don't spiral out of control. With the hundreds of supermarkets in my area selling fruit at $5/lb, I'm going over to the smaller specialty stores to buy the same fruit for $1/lb. Pizza parlors have the same deal: you keep seeing $2.50/slice pizza and $2.25 for a 32oz soda, but once in a while they all get pissy because someone breaks rank and starts selling $1/slice pizza, $5 whole pizzas (instead of $9.99), and $1 sodas--and turning a huge profit. The independent shops... just keep their prices high, and keep selling, until that idiot realizes he's not going to get 3 times as much business that way.

In a competitive market, the price usually moves toward a cross-over point in the supply-demand curve, where raising the price brings in less profit. Without competitors, people aren't able to shop around, so the price can be raised more before people find an alternate means (harder than just finding an alternate supplier).

Aside, and less related, some markets aren't competitive, but appear to be. Rental housing, for example, is not competitive: entering the rental market is high-risk, as too many players in the market quickly causes massive economic problems; the rental market will tend to supply enough units to meet demand, but won't tend to allow new competitors to come in with lower rent prices to drive costs down, because they won't be able to fill units to cover costs. Prices in the rental market tend to increase when more wealthy people move into the area, as they're willing and able to spend more for the same apartment units.

Market is hard shit.

This is really kind of dangerous. It's a "we know it when we see it" kind of law. What if your company is HQ in Bermuda, and you operate an independent subsidiary in UK? How is this different from your company being HQ in the UK, yet purchasing services from a company in Bermuda?

The real problem is countries getting too greedy about profits all over the world, though. America wants to tax Apple for iTunes sales in Europe, and whines when Apple opens a European subsidiary that gets contracts and sells its iTunes tracks and thus doesn't have American income. Well, that's a European company operating in a European market making European profits; do you also want to tax Mercedes-Benz for their profits in Germany?

Mobile and PC games are just as shitty as all those Steam games you get on XBox One. Welcome to Unity.

Currently, I'm on http://it.slashdot.org/

They're doing the 90s Security Secret Sauce thing, where using encryption somehow means security. They don't have a threat model for this; they just said, "Oh, we get hacked sometimes! Turn on HTTPS!"

It's not just talk; it's conditioning.

This opens the discussion for a plan to fight crime. This plan is in definite, actionable terms: block copyright-infringing sites. The more you hear things like that, the more normalized they sound.

Blocking Web sites alleged of a crime is about evading due process. Rather than convict someone of a crime, find them guilty in a court of law, and then take action, you just claim they have committed a crime and pass sentence. In this case, sentence is effectively removing their Web site through state action.

Actually, Mastercard and Visa aren't even companies. They're associations of banks. There are incorporated entities under those names (many of them, actually, one per country, plus Mastercard International and Visa International, which themselves have many national subsidiaries), but they don't issue credit cards, and only operate some pieces of the transaction processing networks.

As someone who regularly meets with representatives from both, discussing areas where the competitors are trying to collaborate on standards but without giving up any edges, I call bullshit on this claim. They're most definitely separate, and competitors. It is true that their interests align in some cases, and they work together almost as much as they compete, but your claim that they're the same company is just ludicrous.