I think SOE did enough damage to the people who played SWG without also losing their credit cards 5 years later

Because they will make it so that if you already do use an iOS device that you CAN'T use the Amazon or Google products on them. There is no Amazon MP3 store app for the iPhone right now for instance. That didn't matter as much when they were just selling song downloads that you could then transfer to iTunes on your computer, but if we're talking about streaming features you'd really need the actual app installed on your device (technically they could make it a mobile web app, but those never seem to work as well). So now you've got an open music store, but you can't put it on your closed device that happens to have a huge install base. That's not entirely different than where we were at with iTunes DRM versus Microsoft's DRM "that can play on any device except iPods", though they don't have quite as much of a market lead as they did back then.

I think it's because they use the exact same marketing-speak when they add something that actually is new and interesting as they use when they add something that isn't novel at all, like cut-and-paste. No, I don't expect them to say "this is really boring, it's cut and paste", but maybe they could just say "we have cut and paste now" or add it in a bullet point somewhere and leave it at that (AND they use this same lavish praise to describe features that they previously described as worthless and unnecessary when they didn't have them). Most companies have lists of standard features that are beneath discussion and spend their time talking about the ones that are, but Apple seems to require 5 paragraphs of praise for each and every aspect of their products.

That external antenna that everyone was raving about on the iPhone 4 is a good example of this too. Maybe if they weren't talking about how amazing it was to have an external antenna when that fact looked completely meaningless, then people wouldn't have jumped all over them when it became clear that having an external antenna was a really bad idea.

Wasn't there actually a cap on the number of cars that could be imported to the US from Japan, whereas there was no cap on truck imports? I thought the rise of small SUVs like the Suzuki Samurai was partly because they could be shipped to the US without a back seat, and since that made them a "truck" they didn't count against the cap. They'd throw a seat in it when it got over here and sell it as a passenger vehicle, but it was imported as a truck

I would consider "I won't use an app with ads" an unreasonable requirement, but it's obviously something that you're passionate about so I'll say to each his own. The problem is that if 99% of the market doesn't feel the same way that you do, then it's likely that you might not be able to find a single app in a category that fits your needs. Angry Birds has about a billion competitors though, so I think that's something different than what I'm talking about.

My problem is when I see apps like this or this that are obviously over-reaching. I don't think that it's just the case that most people don't look at the permissions of apps they're installing, though I do think that is part of the problem. I think that permissions of apps that the maker knows will come pre-installed on phones quite often have these crazy permissions (since the user didn't do the first install they didn't read it), and I think that there are also categories of apps where there are few competitors where they've essentially all agreed to ask for too much because like I said the "nuclear option" of not installing any app from an entire category is rarely taken.

They seem to all add this stuff in lockstep though, so there doesn't seem to be a way to vote with your feet on some things short of the nuclear option. If the advertising networks demand it, you're not really going to get some app deciding to buck the trend to get more downloads if it means they lose all their ads. There are so many monopolies, duopolies, and cartels (RIAA/MPAA) upstream of the consumer these days that competitive pressures aren't doing what they should.

I've seen more and more apps adding "Change Wi-Fi State" permissions, and i wondered why that was. I assume they do it because otherwise you can install the app, but then turn off GPS and/or coarse GPS system-wide and they get nothing. This way they can get it regardless.

I actually uninstalled Pandora when I saw that it had access to my contacts and calendar. I think that would have stuck out to me when I installed it, but I think it came pre-installed on my phone. A month later they updated it, and I saw that crazy list of permissions and uninstalled it

It looks like you're overstating that quite a bit, from that Wikipedia link you posted:

Inactive telephones

In the U.S., FCC rules require every telephone that can access the network to be able to dial 9-1-1, regardless of any reason that normal service may have been disconnected (including non-payment) (This only applies to states with a Do Not Disconnect policy in place. Those states must provide a "soft" dial tone service, details can be found at http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/IAD/pntris99.pdf)

if you read the PDF you see that the states without Do Not Disconnect policies outnumber the ones with them 32 to 18.

It is definitely subjective, and how that subjectivity translates to ticket sales is the point of this article. If they had titled this article "Hollywood isn't going to pay more money to make a movie than they can possibly make back selling tickets", we'd all just say "that makes sense." Fantasy is a niche, and R-Rated movies are a niche (and not one that overlaps well). It just happens that a niche-of-a-niche is not enough of a market to justify the $100M+ budgets that fantasy movies are carrying these days

Windows Explorer (and maybe other file browsers) can actually have problems opening folders that have too many items in them, since the time it takes to display the items seems to increase non-linearly. That bleeds over to the file-save dialog when you try to save new items into the folder too

I've thought of putting together something that will encode tags into the folder heirarchy, so that something with the tags "programming" and "Python" will end up in /programming/Python/ and something tagged "programming" and "Ruby" would end up in /programming/Ruby/ (the tags are ordered alphabetically so that the files don't get split between this and /Python/programming/). That would make the list of tags and their assignments easily discoverable from walking the directory tree in the event that you lost your tag database, but saved the actual tree of items. And it should also do a good job of splitting things up, so that hopefully no single folder is packed with items. The biggest problem would be the need for a custom navigator, so that when you search on "Perl" it is able to look in multiple places like /examples/Perl/ and /programming/Perl/ and if you search on "programming" it can list the contents of /programming/Python/ and /programming/Ruby/ and any other subdirectory of programming.

This is about new routers. It's right in the summary

He says right in that post that she was using Lithium and stopped, though he doesn't say if she stopped before or after he filed for divorce

All we have to do is add a fake entry into the database describing how killing all humans wouldn't work, and they'll assume that lesson was already learned

The refund period is now 15 minutes though which is sometimes barely enough time to download and try it. I understand that they don't want someone to download an app for one-time use and then take a refund, but I've had apps that failed to download the first try and the second try would have been outside the 15-minute window

Netflix is the obvious first example of a missing app on Android, but honestly the gap in quality in just simple games is the most frustrating thing to me (iPhone owner for 3 years, Samsung Tab owner for 2 months, Nexus S owner for 1 week). I wish developers like Pop Cap would bring their games to Android, but they're taking their sweet time. I'm not even talking about fantastically powerful games like Infinity Blade or the latest ID whatchamacalit, just simple puzzle/tower-defense/match-3 type games on Android can be pretty rough.

I think the real problem with Android might be that the users are not as likely to open their wallets, and so developers don't see as much reason to make Android apps. If nothing else Apple is really good at making it easy and seductive to throw down a couple bucks on an app. Ultimately it seems like the strongest voices in the Apple community are marketers (including Apple themselves), and the strongest forces in Android are do-it-yourselfers and modders who would rather write their own unpolished game than pay someone else for a polished one.

Two things that I think would be huge would be support for gifting apps and gift cards, because they both make it easy for people to buy apps for friends and they just build the market in general. The fact that they were missing those two items during the most recent Christmas season seems like a huge oversight to me.