I hope it isn't a mildly revamped G2! The G@ has a below-average loudspeaker

There are a lot of decent criticisms of the G2. The SlideAside is pointless (and doesn't work with a ton of common Android apps), the screen is too big for some people, the buttons on the back are something you can adjust to but they're needlessly quirky and more prone to accidentally being pressed in your pocket than side-buttons are. I'm still not sold on having the headphone jack on the bottom instead of the top.

But the speakers? The G2 has virtually perfect frequency response and a very low distortion level according to:

GSMArena, for one, actually measure the volume. ...who also measure frequency response and other components of sound quality.

They note that the speaker on the G2 is better than average sound quality, though average volume-wise. There's absolutely nothing in their tests indicating a below-average speaker:

http://www.gsmarena.com/lg_g2-review-982p8.php

The LG G2 showed nicely clean output in both parts of our traditional audio quality test. The smartphone got pretty decent scores, but was led down by its volume levels, which were only average.
The scores stay close to perfect even when you plug in a pair of headphones. The stereo crosstalk worsens a bit but the rest of the readings are virtually unaffected (frequency response actually improves a bit). Unfortunately, the volume levels remained just as uninspiring.

Which seems like they're heavily over-weighting volume--unless you're hearing impaired enough that you normally max the volume on your handset, then maximum volume is far less important than the audio quality. But even by their weighting, it's still good audio quality with average volume level.

But the Nexus 5 will probably be half the price of the G2. And run stock Android and receive updates.

The last sentence is why I wrote "the Nexus 5, presuming it follows the Nexus pattern, will run a standard Android OS and UI (and get faster OS updates)".

I'm not making a case for either phone being better, simply saying that the idea that one is a mildly tweaked version of the other is laughable.

the Nexus 5 (or whatever it’s going to be called) seems like a mildly revamped version of LG’s G2.

No, it really doesn't. The two most-often mentioned features of the G2 are:

a) The gorgeous 5.2" screen; and
b) A 3000 mAh battery; and
c) The rear-panel placement of the only buttons (power/volume), as opposed to the traditional volume rocker on the side that most smartphones have.

This has none of those--it has a 4.95" screen and a 2300 mAh battery. And the buttons are laid out like a standard smartphone. Those things alone are significant alterations that make these phones different in the most visible and usable ways.

The G2 also has a 13 megapixel rear camera; this has an 8 mp camera.

The G2 also has a customized version of Android with knock-on and other features; the Nexus 5, presuming it follows the Nexus pattern, will run a standard Android OS and UI (and get faster OS updates).

Without digging into it for more than 30 seconds, I see a phone with a different screen, different camera, different battery, different physical button layout, and different UI, and with significantly different physical properties (e.g. wireless charging on the Nexus)--these might be distant cousins, but they are most decidedly not "mildly revamped" versions of the same thing.

Right, and then let's start mixing it into aids victims treatments, and then let's mix it into the food at homeless shelters, and then let's coat welfare checks with it, and then let's let's let's...
And then let's... http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

For some reason, it's not considered an epidemic when a doctor being paid by insurance companies prescribes methamphetamine manufactured by a pharmaceutical corporation under the brand name "Desoxyn"

Yes it is.

NIH: "The original amphetamine epidemic was generated by the pharmaceutical industry and medical profession as a byproduct of routine commercial drug development and competition" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2377281/

White House: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has classified prescription drug abuse as an epidemic". http://www.whitehouse.gov/ondcp/prescription-drug-abuse

Not true... I have no opinion either way, but it's entirely possible to have a very good understanding of how semi-random numbers affect cryptography, and also of how rdrand generates them, without having the programming background to be able to safely remove it from the kernel. Crypto is about math, not programming, and contrary to popular opinion (apparently), the two do not always go hand-in-hand.

RdRand could generate entirely non-random numbers and it still wouldn't make the output of /dev/random any less random. It's designed so that additional inputs can only increase the entropy, never decrease it. There's a danger if you over-estimate the amount of entropy that a particular input adds to the pool, but the bits mixed in from rdrand don't increase the entropy counter so that's not a problem in this case.

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=c2557a303ab6712bb6e09447df828c557c710ac9

It does, though it's configurable. https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/LinuxPasswordStorage has details.

It only unlocks the wallet for the user it's running as, it doesn't have crazy admin privileges.

If you care about security, you're already running the browser as a restricted user anyway--even if you did stupidly share passphrases between wallets (or accidentally mistype the wrong passphrase into the browser unlock window) it still shouldn't have FS permission to your primary wallet.

Plus you can run Chromium if you want to be able to audit the source, presuming you don't think someone's Ken Thompson'd chrome into gcc (or CPU microcode).

Seriously. Even in 1999 there were stories about how cell reception would leapfrog copper wire not just in Africa but in South America (where I was living, and it happened in a total no-brainer). There might as well be a story saying that Lagos won't see a huge Blu-Ray rental infrastructure built out.

You can indeed run interpreted stuff on iOS. You just can't downloadand run interpreted code.

Yes, you can. Point the browser at slashdot. Congratulations, you just downloaded and ran interpreted code. Developing for the browser is both potentially a useful skillset to learn for the future and doesn't require any Apple dev kit or App Store approval or anything.

It's far from ideal, but it's not like the TI-83 was exactly giving you a full comparative environment to contrast Haskell, Scheme, Prolog, Forth, and Dylan (or whatever). If you really want something to learn to code on, an actual computer or unlocked tablet (with keyboard) of some sort is going to be a better bet than either.

Works fine with NFS, FWIW.

If you mean the rtfm command, it was part of the Andrew system; it was implemented first at CMU.

If you mean RTFM as an acronym, the earliest known citation comes from the LINPACK manual in 1979, but oral tradition has it originating in the US Air Force in the 40s or 50s.

MIT's "rtfm" ftp server (which hosts USENET FAQs) came later.

If you think there's a glut of contract IT workers now ...then you lack a basic understanding of labor markets.

Computer Programmers: 3.7%
DB Admins: 1.3%
Network and sysadmins: 3.9%
Network and data analysts: 3.9%
Software devs, application, and systems software: 4.0%

Those are the current unemployment rates for workers in those occupations. It's pretty much the same for all IT occupations; there are few enough workers that companies are having a tough time filling jobs, and even moderately skilled employees aren't having trouble finding jobs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323936804578229873392511426.html

Have you ever observed the FCC reduce its regulator scope, or has it always been increasing its regulator scope?

That's completely irrelevant to question at hand.

One last time: there's a set of people who are FCC licensees. Those people are potentially affected by the IPTV regulations. There's a different set of people who license copyright from third parties. These sets are distinct but not disjoint. Members of the latter set are not affected by the IPTV regulations, except insofar as they happen to overlap with the first set of people. There is absolutely nothing clever or insightful about this, it's plainly obvious and I only pointed it out because the post I was replying to conflated those two sets of people.

The FCC licensees include everyone that the FCC has demanded have a licenses.

Which is a wildly different set of people from "Everyone who's licensed content from a third party," which is what I was pointing out (and is certainly important given the conflation of the two on the part of the post I was replying to).

In other words, you arent saying much.. even though you thought yourself clever.

If you don't think there's a massive difference between the set of people who license copyrighted material and the people who are FCC licensed, I don't know what to say.