You're never going to get a straight answer about why the position is vacant, waste of a question.

*Woosh* :)

Why?

I thought the ring of police stationed 24 hours a day around the Ecuadorian embassy in London was evidence enough of the UK government's intentions!

Where is the +1 (Hilariously Paranoid) button?

I don't like it when healthy competition between two companies in a capitalist system is described as a "bitter fight" or "war", "battle", etc. It's sensationalist journalism and it completely mischaracterizes the nature of the healthy competition which is necessary for innovation to occur.

I'd love to see the Robot as an option because of the hours of comedy genius "he" and Dr. Smith gave to us!

I dunno.. the Coast Guard?

Any company should be expected to do whatever it can legally do to avoid paying tax. As should we all. I'm for tax reform in the US, including a flat federal sales tax. But it's not going to happen, nor is Amazon going to end up collecting sales tax from Californians anytime soon.

Slashdot, you need to remove this article. The summary is incorrect, poorly written and does nothing but spread fear and confusion. It shouldn't pass even the most basic editorial checks. I find it pretty awful that it hasn't already been taken down given how many other people have pointed this out.

I hate the categorisation of companies providing competing products to consumers in a marketplace as "war". War is generally counter-productive and destructive, competition is necessary and healthy.

I think in the US airport security *can* demand that you disclose your login passwords and private key passphrases, ask you to decrypt encrypted data, etc, and you are legally required to comply. I think this is part of the PATRIOT act but I can't cite specific sections.

Accidentally posted this anonymously, actually wanted to spend some karma on this one.

You are completely missing the point. The point is that it is feasible for an application that *does* appear to legitimately need these permissions (e.g. an improved SMS application, of which there are many). There is no way for the user to specify that the only SMS messages that can be sent are those ones that they wish to send, or that the OWNER_DATA permission should only be used to read data required for the application to do its job. The fact that it's just a tic-tac-toe application is beside the point, a more complicated application could claim to need these permissions and all kinds of users are going to trust that the application is not doing the wrong thing.

This is not "fearmongering bullshit", this is a legitimate concern for smartphones these days. I'm really confused why your comments got moderated up.

Where the hell is the editorial review? The title and summary of the slashdot article have nothing to do with the linked article. Do you people not read the linked articles? What a waste of time.

Apparently one body was recovered from the sinkhole. http://www.guatemalasinkhole.org/ http://www.smh.com.au/world/hole-that-swallowed-a-threestorey-building-20100601-wvgg.html