The major difference is that a company given a letter (not a subpoena) has no incentive to not hand over the data. It's not like consumers have ever shown they care (enough, via the bottom line). Companies know this. That's why Amazon shut down WikiLeaks with only a phone call (no subpoena) and no one cared that the government could just silence a website they disagreed with without even making a legal argument. That's why scuba shops handed over their customer lists to the FBI when asked, without a subpoena. There are so many other cases of companies thinking "well, it's not like the customer cares, we can be nice to the government and not even piss anyone off".

In the case of the subpoena, yes you gain nothing by storing the data yourself. In the case of a letter or phone call asking nicely, you have far more control. You can ignore it. A company may or may not.

1. Meditate every day, even if only for five minutes.
2. Mindfully approach everything you do.
3. Profit.

Well, I don't know what you mean by "every single device", since not all updates are for every device. But, they do *offer* the update to every *eligible* device starting on one single day. If a customer wants the update, they touch a button. If a customer has automatic updates, they'll get it sometime "soon", where "soon" is indeed staggered and might be a day or so later. For people that want it, they get it day 1. For people that don't care or pay attention, they get it anytime from day 1 to day N (where N in my experience has been single digits. For people that don't want it, they never get it.

I don't use an Android device, so I have nothing to complain about. I was under the impression that Nexus devices did not have carrier-specific-bits, which is why I was trying to understand the reason for a delay. Network saturation makes no sense, since it's clear that other eco system can handle a release day over the same networks. Testing makes no sense, since Google tests their bits before giving it to carriers. If the carriers want to integrate other bits for other devices, fine, but why delay Nexus updates for that reason?

To be fair, his problem with DSL was caused by physics, not the government.

Which makes the Nexus experience no longer free from Carrier Crap, which is a shame.

And that's why you should be using HTTPS everywhere you browse.

From what I understand, Google hands over bits to the carriers, and the carriers then choose a timetable for automatic updates. The argument that saturating (really, how big are these updates and how many devices that this is a major concern?) networks makes sense here, but the number of models does not. The issues stemming from number of models will be caught by Google's testing before the release bits get sent to the carriers.

In my area, my options are Comcast and DSL. I opted DSL because I didn't want to directly fund Comcast's vision for our future. DSL is not as fast as Comcast, but it's fast enough to stream video, play games and download large files overnight. We get by.

I am not aware (though undoubltly there are some places) where there is cable yet no POTS. My POTS carries a 20Mbps downstream connection, which while not as fast as Comcast, means I don't have to deal with them.

I agree with you that writing fair and sensible tax regulation is difficult, but I feel like your example, being specifically contrived to make your point, weakens your argument. Your purchase of coffee from is one transaction. Starbucks UK buying beans from Starbucks Luxembourg is a different transaction. Starbucks Luxembourg buying beans from Jamaica is a different transaction. Starbucks Ireland providing HR services to Starbucks UK is a different transaction. One could write regulation on a per-transaction basis. By pointing out that a simple cup of coffee purchase can be broken down to a lot of supporting transactions, while true, you are adding complexity which hides the really insidious complexity of webs of corporate entity ownership.

Why? Because I've found Google to provide better search results than Bing. That's why. Do you believe that the only reason people use Google instead of Bing is that they have an anti-Microsoft bias?

Indeed. People cringe when you archive data on consumer DVD-Rs, for example.

Most people seem to have a definition of archival that's different than yours?

Sad, but true. Firefox calls the address bar the Awesome bar just so pedants don't confuse it with an address bar. https://support.mozilla.org/en...