You're ignoring the savings that improved productivity gives us. At that point, everything's cheaper. That's why standards of living so greatly improved with the Industrial Revolution. We had machines take over a lot of manual labor, and the standard of living improved for everyone. Yes, the rich got richer, but the poor got richer too, and everyone could buy more things or services.

There will ALWAYS be work to be found. When better-off people (even middle-class) can buy their necessities with less money than they used to be able to because everything's cheaper, they'll have more money left over to spend on other stuff. Somebody's going to fill that role. This is what we mean when we say "the pie gets bigger".

Question: Practically speaking, why would anyone want to fork the Android SDK? If someone wants to make an alternative IDE, they could still build it on top of the existing SDK and require you to download the Android SDK, similar to how the eclipse plug-in works now (I think). I suppose someone with ulterior motives could replace portions of the SDK to insert calls back to their data center into a developers code. But someone like that's not going to worry about what Google tells them.

Can't you just lock your phone before they grab it? One button and the phone is locked. They may be able to pull your SD card but they won't be able to access your accounts.

7,338 tanks destroyed by phalanxes

Isn't profit an indicator of things getting better? If I sell you something, I hopefully make a profit, and your life is better because you valued what I sold you more than you valued what else you could have bought with that money.

This is ridiculous. Nobody's forcing the town to make this deal. If they thought it was a money-loser, they wouldn't have made the deal. If YOU think it's a money-loser, and you can get enough people to agree with you, feel free to vote the bums out on the basis of, "We've got idiot lawmakers who are no good at math." If you can't get enough people to agree with you, either you're wrong, or you live in a town full of other people who aren't good at math and are throwing your tax money down the drain, in which case you should consider either not paying taxes, or moving.

Or WALL-E?

Then if the state of North Dakota decides it's in their best interests to pitch in to pay for tsunami monitoring in California, they can voluntarily write a check every month. OR, if North Dakota benefits from California not being overrun by a tsunami, then they won't mind paying a little more for the goods they receive from California, which will be used to pay for tsunami monitoring.

I imagine most home users don't have IPv6 addresses. Ideally, everyone would slowly start to switch over to IPv6, with sites having both v4 and v6 addresses serving the same content, and users that are connected with a v6 address getting addresses from a DNS that supports v6 would connect using v6. But where I live, I don't get an IPv6 address with Fios. I imagine the big ISPs don't give residential users v6 addresses nationally and globally.

But most apps will let you press the back button until you're out of the app. This actually does save you some memory because the activity that was active will unload when you back out of it, as opposed to continuing to run in the background when you press the home button. Most apps that need to run in the background will have a service component that runs in the background, and a UI activity that lets you interact with it. If you kill the UI by backing out of it, the service component still runs in the background. In this case, the only way to get out is to press the home button. That makes me wonder, did they disable the back button on the main screen on purpose? Are the UI and the service functionality all wrapped up in the UI activity? In which case killing the UI would also kill the whole app? Or is there a service component as well, and this is just a UI quirk?

I'll pay for my own security, pay for my own fire protection services, and save my own money for retirement as I see fit.

I'm in the same boat. I can't believe they can just do this. Unbelievable. I'm just sitting here in shock. Luckily, my school work will be finished in a couple months. Hopefully my wife won't accidentally update the firmware in the mean time, or I'm in big trouble.

I gladly trade my privacy for the convenience Google provides me. I use a lot of their services, and I get two benefits. I get to use their services for free, and, on the rare case that my eye wanders over to an ad, it's usually something I might want to buy.

It's good to be concerned about protecting your privacy. But that doesn't mean that you have to keep your browsing habits, email conversations, etc. from everyone just for its own sake. Google proposes trading that information for lots of convenience. I gladly make that trade. I feel that the services they provide me are worth more than keeping my internet life a secret from them. So Google wins, and I win. I couldn't be happier.