"Android" understood as a whole includes the carriers and manufacturers - when you choose which phone to buy, you're also choosing the ecosystem. It's not a problem of the operating system's technology itself, but no one is seriously claiming it is.

Google needs to be more aggressive in finding ways to own the experience better. It's already heading in the right direction: Nexus started off more as a developer's phone and reference model, and is turning into a kind of cattle-prod to other manufacturers. Google's ownership of Motorola also helps. Perhaps the "openness" of the first few years of Android, and the resultant fragmentation, was a bit of a honeypot, enticing manufacturers to build products for that ecosystem. But it's time (without, of course, withdrawing the source code from the public) to tighten control of the user's total ownership experience. Including updates.

I can't run Google Now or Chrome on my G2, because it's stuck at Gingerbread (and I don't have the time or inclination to root it.).

Fragmentation is a problem. In the future, I'm going to stick to Nexus products, but the Android ecosystem (by which I mean "all the phones which use Google Play to buy and download apps") is bigger than, and not driven by, the Nexus line.

They are definitely fiction. Just not Hollywood-style fictions or cinematic ones.

Romeo and Frittata, as it were.

Yet Scotland has its own parliament and a national football (soccer) team. Scotland is generally considered a country that is part of the United Kingdom.

Not one to cite wikipedia as a source, but it treats the constituent nations of the United Kingdom as countries that are all part of the same state, which is also a country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_of_the_United_Kingdom.

Maybe they're like intestinal fauna.

Again, no, it isn't. Monogamous marriages were a secular Roman practice (most societies before that were polygamous.) The Catholic church may have interpreted some scripture to turn a civil practice into a sacrament, but the civil practice preceded it historically and structurally.

The etymology of "marriage" is from the Latin "maritare."

Thank you for clearing this up. The original article needs to be updated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWXMJP1J-3Y

My old MBP is 4.3333 years old.

4.3333 years old.

4.3333 years

I was going to say "and that's why you're still a virgin", but you mentioned your wife, so, um ... never mind.

Reparability means that it is not so damaged that it cannot be repaired: it connotes something about the level of damage of the object.

"Unrepairability" may be a useful neologism to distinguish those products that are designed to restrict just who can repair them.

"Lemmy is reading a live-stream of Bill posting a video of Charles watching Gilmore Girls on CWTV."

I have to agree with this very strongly. Many people could do quite well in math, but got tripped up by one or two bad classes (or bad years) along the way, and if there is one thing that really separates the natural sciences from the other fields, it's the nested skills sets and dependencies on a ladder of skills - so if you miss a rung, you don't easily move up. Because higher education in the sciences and engineering is competitive - based more on regulating access to high-paying careers than on really developing people to their benefit - there has not been a lot of focus on overcoming those who've fallen off the ladder.

One suggestion I'd add to yours is to consider exercises which involve data visualization and the presentation of research. Many humanities and social sciences students are good communicators - letting them bring that strength into your classroom will make them feel like they belong there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U8CZAKSsNA

Within the US, bringing a bottle of water onto an airplane is considered a potentially terrorist act.

If this had happened to the US (especially in the context of attacks on nuclear scientists) it would unquestionably be treated as a terrorist attack.http://it.slashdot.org/story/12/06/20/0027250/us-israel-behind-flame-malware#

Pre-1913 American society was a disaster for most Americans. Economic history has proven your models wrong every time.

Right now, corporations are sitting on larger cash reserves than ever, yet they do not hire. Surveys of businesses report that the number one reason they aren't growing or hiring is the lack of markets: people are spending too little, because they are insecure about the future and have little discretionary income.

The reason that little is produced in the USA is: free trade, which allows manufacturing to occur where there is no environmental protection or labor laws, at all. This was part of a national economic strategy - advanced largely during the Clinton administration - which sought to build the US economy on services, research and creative sectors, while allowing the developing world to focus on manufacturing. We're still living with the fallout of that decision (which relied, incidentally, on getting the rest of the world to commit to US intellectual property guidelines.)

Germany, on the other hand, is still a manufacturing powerhouse and next exporter. Do you know why? Low income inequality, strong environmental and labor standards restricting the flow of cheap goods from coming into the country, and broad national support of a manufacturing infrastructure.