+1 Informative

You say that as if a complete absence of hipster brats and other mall rats is a bad thing.

Making Facebook, Twitr apps and the like deletable can hardly be said to be going to extreme lengths, it's not like it involves any extra work to accomplish that goal, if anything it would mean less work, and there can be Facebook and other bloat pre-installed for those that want it and those of us that do not can remove it without having to void the warranty by rooting/jailbreaking. This benefits a larger amount of owners than the current prevalent model and might possibly have a minor negative effect on the telcos.

I believe that the estate of author Harry Harrison will have a good case against Rhinehart over the use of the name Soylent. For those not in the know, Harrison was the author of the book which Soylent Green is loosely based on, Make Room! Make Room! Whether there should be grounds for such a case based on a work that's 48 years old is of course highly debatable.

1. Own rights to Make Room! Make Room!
2. Wait for Soylent to become a huge commercial success.
3. Call in army of Lawyers.
4. Profit!

Hmm... is control the default "stroke" key in Japanese adult games?

Indeed the situation in Europe can be quite horrific, some years ago I would often find myself working on Swiss (qwertz), UK (qwerty), Belgian (azerty) and Scandinavian (qwerty) keyboards during my average day. To make matters worse I were working on the machines remotely so glancing down on the keys to find that "misplaced" comma, period, forward slash, parenthesis and so forth were not an option. My favorite layout to hate is the Belgian/French azerty where digits and period require use of shift as the keyboard design work from the assumption that semi colon is more frequently used than period and section sign () more than the digit six and so on. Seriously! What insane person came up with this?

"A government-approved mobile operating system, especially in China of all places, reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying"
As opposed to the reek of the daily NSA exploits published by Bruce Schneier?
In difference from for example the RSA back door this is open source , so the code is there to review for potential back doors for anyone with the necessary knowledge. I can imagine quite a few will do so only to be able and point fingers and say "see, see! they do it too!" and would be little surprised if there is a government sponsored team doing just that as I write with the hope there will be findings to detract attention from scandals closer to home.

Seriously?! Are you trying to insinuate that they wouldn't if such leaks were available to them? If so, then maybe you should actually read the actual article alternatively work on your reading comprehension before commenting again as there is a paragraph clearly indicating that they would.

As far as I know it's neither. Langley, Virginia is where the CIA HQ are located while NSA have their HQ in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Isn't a lot of the US cultural institutions subsidized via donations and fund raisers so that rich folks to mingle and be seen with other of their ilk also pretending to be socially/culturally concerned by donating a tiny fraction of their wealth and then write off the donations on their taxes? The difference is that in socialist Europe we cut out the middle man by taxing directly and then distribute to directly to theaters, museums, art projects, movies and so forth.

Culture being subsidized is hardly anything new, be it via donations, taxes or a patron.

By your criteria Beethoven's compositions would fail to qualify as art as he were dependent on Archduke Rudolph's patronage to such a degree that he dedicated more than 10 of his compositions to Rudolph.

Maybe so, then again that might not be necessary as NSA are on very good terms with their Swedish equivalent FRA as revealed by a Snowden leak published in Sweden a couple of days ago which reported how FRA assisted NSA in the hacking of target machines in operation Winterlight. I can easily see how Sweden would bend over backwards to help USA gaining physical access to the cables just like with the extraordinary rendition of two asylum seekers in December 2001.
I long ago ceased being proud of the (imaginary) neutrality and foreign politics of my native Sweden, and sadly find it easier and easier to explain why over a decade ago I decided to leave Sweden and its great health care, education, welfare, beautiful nature and so forth.

The type of tracking in question have nothing to do with what OS you use as it is done via those little social media links that are present all over on nearly every damn website of a reasonably large size.

Use CyanogenMod. Stop being the product or a tool.

Covert Operation Collecting Knowledge, or COCK for short? Which clearly would not be the same as spying.