You can e.g. mount an ext3 filesystem using the ext2 driver, and ext4 FS using the ext3 module or an ext2 filesystem (as-is, without converting it) using the ext4 module. In fact on current kernels the ext4 module is the preferred way to mount any ext* partition: you get a speed boost even without on-disk changes.

And, BTW, NTFS is not a filesystem, it's a commercial brand for a family of filesystems with frequent small incompatible changes. Try reading a disk formatted on a recent Windows on an older version...

Not everyone searches "who is better republicans or democrats" on Google. :-) (BTW, the first result for me suggests that the "Democrats are better for the economy").

When I search for "cookies" I very much appreciate that the first result is the Wikipedia page for HTTP cookies and the second one is the documentation for the cookielib module in the Python standard library. Both are very relevant results for me.

My grandmother, on the other hand, is probably happier to get a website with recipes.

People in the US searching for "United" probably want an airline website, in the UK some people might be more interested in a soccer team.

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.

You may have missed the important "then presses the button" part of my comment.

Having sex or making porn (consenting adults): GOOD
Killing people: BAD

IMHO certainly it has not installed the backdoor, but if you wanna be sure I suggest to buy a compatible phone, wipe everything on it, recompile and install Android from source avoiding any proprietary program. We probably agree that's very unlikely that any backdoor would be present in any free/open source program, much less one with such high visibility.

Yes, some Google apps are proprietary (Market, Maps, Videos...), you may want to use open source alternatives if you really don't trust Google.

The latest version (4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich) of the Android source code is available at: http://source.android.com/

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.

No they are not.

Even if they're not mentioned in the Qur'an, they're an integral part of the official Islam in many parts of the world. See the Surah Quran 55:72:

""" It was mentioned by Daraj Ibn Abi Hatim, that Abu al-Haytham 'Adullah Ibn Wahb narrated from Abu Sa'id al-Khudhri, who heard Muhammad saying, 'The smallest reward for the people of Heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy-two houri, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby, as wide as the distance from al-Jabiyyah to San'a. """

See also: http://wikiislam.net/wiki/72_Virgins

Look, I love being politically correct as much as most left-wing Europeans, but anyone who yells "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") and then presses the button counts as a religious fanatic in my book.

I get your point, but please note that WebGL is a web standard (implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer) and VP8 (I assume you mean VP8, the video codec used in WebM, and not literally VP6 that's obsolete) has multiple free/open source implementations and even its patents are available with very liberal conditions that make them compatible with free software licences.

WebM unfortunately is not (yet?) part of the HTML standard due to strong opposition from Apple and Microsoft, but it's interoperably implemented in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and Internet Explorer (the latter two require the installation of the WebM codec in the OS, all other browsers just work out-of-the-box). It's also the thing that allowed me to not install a proprietary Flash plugin on my last two computers, so I kinda like it.

Avoiding lock-in and proprietary techs on the intertubes is a very good thing, but neither WebGL nor WebM are a problem here, IMO.

It's not immediately obvious, but there are two advantages in having a program running in NaCl rather than directly on top of the OS:

1) portability: exactly the same code runs in any OS that has a browsers that supports NaCl (right now this means Linux, Mac OS X and Windows);

2) security: users can safely try running it even without knowing if MAME can be trusted (users often are not good at making security decisions); obviously this is not terribly important in this particular case since MAME is free software and is very unlikely to contain any malicious code, but even code written by the good guys can have security bugs that can be exploited if the thing is run directly on top of the OS. With NaCl you only need to keep a single program secure (the browser) to be protected.

1) NaCl is free/open source software, both the SDK and the client implementation in Chromium; ActiveX was proprietary and every program required to be signed by Microsoft to run by default;

2) NaCl is secure (see this IEEE article, it's very interesting) and designed to be portable to different browsers and OSes; you can safely run untrusted code, just like you would do with JavaScript; ActiveX required not only to trust that the controls weren't malicious, but also to trust that they all were free of security bugs: if only a single signed ActiveX control somewhere had a security bug, it could be exploited to p0wn Windows PCs (that's why Microsoft had a growing list of signed controls and another growing list of signed-but-blacklisted controls).

Native Client is certainly not perfect, but please don't compare it to ActiveX. Entirely different beast.

Disclaimer: I speak only for myself and not anyone else. IANARE.

It's called capitalism, here's how it works:

1) download the Android 4.0 ICS source code from http://source.android.com/

2) integrate any missing driver from the WebOS Linux kernel to the Android Linux kernel;

3) compile & install;

4) sell the damn thing at $250-300;

5) profit!!!

You're welcome.

There has been no trial, in the US or elsewhere, so we should assume that they are innocent.

Remember:

First they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the gays, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't gay.

Now someone is knocking at my door...

That's not true, there's nothing in the x86 architecture that requires a video card. And in fact you can buy x86 servers without one, discrete or integrated.

It's actually the BIOS, and there are open source implementations that you can change the way you like, e.g. to not require a graphics adapter.

For Wave, you can download your data and the Wave source code (Google has released it as free software) and run your own server.

That's hardly "the whole product will be gone", IMHO.

Of course YMMV with other services.

Standard disclaimers: I speak only for myself and not for my employer or anyone else. IANAL. IANARE.