Google doesn't even try to make money on Android, so that question shows how much you miss the point. Google makes money on web services, and the goal of Android was to have tons of smartphones connected to their services constantly. Android has been very successful at that, along with making sure they aren't beholden to Apple in order to do it. Although I'm sure Google would prefer people used Android over the iPhone, it doesn't really matter to them as long as they are using both platforms to connect to Google services. Platform doesn't matter, profits are still profits.

Potential big difference I see: With Windows 8, you're mostly stuck with the touchscreen interface outside of a few plugins that can hack it into something not completely unusable on desktop. On the other hand, the open source nature of Android makes it possible for OEMs to update the interface to something more like a traditional desktop. We've already multiple OEMs and third-party launchers change the basic interface for Android phones and tablets, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to make a new interface designed for the desktop. Although given the general dislike for OEM skins, it remains to be seen if those interfaces are useful.

But the whole point of having a division of powers within the federal government is that each branch can decide independently what it wants to do or not do, regardless of what the other branches do, when exercising the powers specifically granted to that branch by the Constitution....

Except when I disagree with how they are exercising their powers, then they are shutting down the government.

What more do I ask? A good product in an unencumbered format at a reasonable price. They're never going to fully stop piracy, so all this wrangling over mucking up the standards is pointless. But as the music industry showed, you don't need it if you make purchasing and using the product more painless than downloading illegal versions. But I guess that's a pipe dream since execs would rather try to squeeze consumers for every last penny than make purchasing and using the product painless.

Except this change still doesn't describe what the big players are doing. All it does is standardize a call to DRM binaries without any standardization of what those binaries do. It in no way describes what the big players are doing in these binaries, meaning we are still going to be left downloading closed proprietary plugins that are only available for supported platforms. Since one of the main goals of HTML5 was to get rid of the plugin mess that was necessary to play media on the web, this is a backwards step that solves nothing.

I did not read anything in the improvement list that solves why people didn't want the old versions. Just improved specs, but a faster tablet no one wants is still a tablet no one wants. What is going to prevent this from being another billion dollar loss? Building fewer upfront so they don't have to throw as many away?

I've thought about the same thing, but doesn't the phone need to be unlocked for NFC to work? (at least on Android, which is what I'm assuming you're talking about since you mention Tasker). I've seen some mods to get around this, but they never worked on my GNex.

IIRC MIT took it over. I believe this is its current incarnation.

If you are really that worried about your grandmother or anyone else stealing your passwords and using them maliciously, maybe you shouldn't give them access to your computer under your account? Or maybe not store your passwords in the browser on a computer that you're loaning to people that would use them for harm if they can?

Are you sure about that? I thought Apple created and patented their own non-standard pentalobe screws and only sells the screwdrivers to Apple techs. It was specifically designed to not work with the screwdrivers available for camera repair or at Ace Hardware. There are many standard screws which are just as high-quality as the Apple pentalobe, going this route only serves to hinder any unauthorized "tampering" with the devices.

I guess I can never underestimate the spin Apple fans will go through to argue that Apple's user-hostile policies are actually good for you.

I never said they were. It's just that first posts for most Windows 8 articles have been obvious shills for a while now, and this account stepped up the game by being a thinly veiled shill. That does not mean every pro-MS commenter is a shill, just that the the guys pouncing on the most visible comment frequently are.

The astroturfers are stepping up their game this time around - they even bothered to have the account make a few other posts before making the first post here so it wasn't completely obvious it was astroturfing. Next time they might even use accounts with posts more than a few hours ahead.

New != Good
Sticking with the old version != unwillingness to learn

If the old version works better, why should they change? That's looking at it's own merits. Changing just because it's newer isn't.

Change for the sake of change == bad

I think The Old Reader is the best replacement for Google Reader because it seems to be the only RSS reader I've found that is actually trying to do what Google Reader did. The others I've tried (specifically Feedly and Netvibes) seem to have different goals but can be adapted to behave similarly (but not the same) to Google Reader. I actually went with Netvibes for about the first month after the GR announcement because TOR was pretty lacking in the feature department and extremely slow due to the crush of new users. However, TOR had been rapidly updating the feature set, and I switched back over after they fixed up the mobile site and expanded their keyboard shortcuts among other tinngs (they've been great at adding features requested on the user feedback site).

When picking out a replacement to GR, I thought the most important thing was having the same goals as GR did in order provide the same functionality, and TOR has that in spades. I've never figured out why Feedly gets so much love in the GR replacement posts on tech sites. Need to install a browser extension? Yuck. The app wants to look like a magazine? Yuck. If you want to a pretty app to read articles like a magazine on your tablet, Feedly is nice, but it's not a replacement for Google Reader. The Old Reader is, especially now that the mobile site works as well as the Google Reader app ever did.

Yeah, but then you might have the ability to buy things through an avenue in which Apple can't take a cut, and why would you ever want to do that?