And what if by then there is no decent choice.

So you aren't familiar with how stack ranking works?

That is the awesome thing about Office. It isn't compatible with anything.

HP and Dell can give up any hope of a nice Santa Rally in sales this holiday season - for the third year in a row. A shame they took so long to get invested in Android. Samsung and LG are going to clean up this year.

That was one billion unique users accessing the Play store. Some people have multiple devices. Some people's Android devices don't access the Play store - notably Amazon devices and devices sold in China, and much of India. Two years is a long time. That would include the SGS 3 as well. It turns out that about one billion Android devices were sold just in 2013.

But what of it?. Does it offend you that some people prefer a more economical device? That not everyone feels spending $700 a year on a phone is a priority?

Makers are coming up with all kinds of choices. Over the top specs, great value entry levelop devices, long life phones, dual and triple SIM, special purpose devices. It is amazing. Let us not complain that at a billion units a year there are too many choices, and they all work together.

This was my first thought. Would be way better with Nexus 7.

This is why we can't have nice things.

So when you drive your car, you should have to pay for every toll road in the country, not just the toll roads you use?

Here is the difference between Aero and Cable, and the reason the so called loop hole is valid. Cable collects all the broadcasts signals and retransmitts all those signals along to all subscribers. The fee is the right to collect and retransmit en masse.

There is also and issue of the broadcasters use of the public airwaves. In exchange for this use, it is assumed that the tax payers of this country have access to free programing. Aero is a service that allows us to access that free content. Cable is a service where you buy access to content. Aero is a service where you specify a program to watch, or to record, and that one program is transmitted to you and only you. Cable is a service where all the programs are transmitted to you to be selected in immediate real time, even switch between channels, or channel in channel.

Here is an example, and everyone can decide if this is illegal. Tivo allows a broad range of remote capabilities. Suppose I opened a service in which I filled a warehouse with Tivos and antennas. End users would enter a contract where they would rent a Tivo and antenna. They would use the TIvo interface to control the content. I would have no control over what was being transmitted. Would that be illegal? What if I built a custom DVR and a custom interface? Would that be illegal? What if I used a Tivo and 'shared' each one so that six different users?

This is why the ruling is so bad. It reduces our rights to do as we wish with the content that we have given up bandwidth to receive. In excange for use of the the public airwaves, we have the right to free over the air content. That means content that we collect using an antenna and then consumer for personal use. We can record it to VCR, take that tape with us on a trip, and watch it elsewhere.

The only appropriate thing for the broadcasters to do in response to Aero, it they did not want aero to add a convince for users, is to stop using the public airwaves. Go 100% cable or stream over the internet. This is second major problem with the SCOTUS decision. If broadcasters cannot deal with Aero retransmitted a single show to a single user, and if they have become so dependent on cable, then clearly they are wasting bandwidth that could be used for other purposes. The best thing that could have happened to US, if the broadcasters are as inefficient as it seems, is that Aero put them out of business and then we would have all this bandwidth that can be sold to firms that can use it efficiently. All the SCOTUS has done is save the buggy whip industry.

Fraudulent Copyright takedowns should result in fines and jail.

The skills argument is the traditional method used to segregate the workplace, college, whatever. When the pentagon said that women had to be allowed in combat, one thing that was stressed is they had to pass the tests. There was no admission that the tests were somewhat arbitrary, developed not on some absolute basis, but on a subjective set of requirements. It is like the old SAT. If the inner city kids were getting a question correct more than the northern prep school kids, then it probably was not a valid question, because who has the better education?

Really, what this boils down to is if diversity is, in itself, a benefit. Because of the way I was raised and educated, in a very diverse schools where actual skills, talent, and discipline were the primary method of selection, I think that diversity is a benefit. I understand that others do not. I understand that a private firm should be able to select the best workforce for it's situation, diverse or not.

But I also understand that for a long time, and sometimes even today, the white male is considered the bast choice if available. It is assumed that he will command respect, be at work everyday, and not get emotional or get in a fit because of 'oppression'. It could that this is best way to proceed. Or it could be that firms, if they had a employees with wider points of view, different experiences, they might be more successful.

One thing we have seen specifically with major firms like Google and MS is they tend to recruit from very specific schools. This is more a problem for me because this will invariable create an echo chamber and lead to problems we have seen at these firms in which consumer perception is often not considered because a distinct lack of diversity.

Apple promotes Dropcam on it's website, the exact company that Google is going to buy. I don't know what homekit is going to be. Dropcam pretty much requires you to send your personal life to what soon will be Google. The lights require an hardware interface. Presumable Homekit will presumably intergrate the products, if the companies rewrite the software to Apple interfaces. Not to be cynical, but recall the number of Apple ideas that really have not panned out. For instance, I have almost no Apple ebooks.

The problem with google is that it makes most of it's money from advertising. It really has no hardware that is priced to sell, i.e. $1500 google glasses. Therefore one has to assume that at some point your personal home videos will be up for sale in some way. I am looking at y-cam and figuring out what their business model is. The only way to keep your private stuff private is to pay for it. Which is why dropcam was a good choice prior to the google purchase.

So 25 years ago or so one of the researches in the lab I worked in was really into this. I think he came from ATT. Anyway, he wanted to put vacuum tubes on a substrate. He wanted to make microlevers and the like, the predecessor to what we now know as nano machines. The microlevers have happened, and we are getting some very tiny machines. The vacuum tubes are another story. From what I have seen recently, the Terahetz problem is solved or is pretty much solved. Labs across the country are working in the Terahertz range, and developing some interesting applications. Which is to say that vacuum tubes on a chip are possible, but it seems that it might a solution looking for a problem. As I said, researchers have been looking into this for a very long time. This could be the problem that it solves. The question is does it solve problems better than what is now conventional technology.

You may find this paper interesting. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...