While none of the post-paid providers sell 2.3 any more, plenty of pre-paid providers still do. Boost, Straight Talk, TracFone, Page Plus, etc. If you are a pre-paid operator, many of your customers don't have good enough credit for payment plan on a nice phone, don't have enough money to buy a nice phone out-right, and said customers aren't forced to stay with your company long enough for you to risk much of a subsidy in the monthly fees. That leaves you being forced to sell the cheapest phones you can for the customers that want them.

We are talking $30-40, out the door, here... If you are spending that little on a phone, you have to trim cost anywhere you can, which means the thing won't even run stuff much more recent, even if the carrier wanted to put forth the effort to do so. (Which, given their generally low margins, they won't even think of doing.)

Yes, for not much more money, you can get a MUCH nicer phone ($65 will get you a Moto G on Boost, for instance), but at the very bottom end, every dollar counts when specing out phones.

(Personally, I use a Boost Moto G flashed to PagePlus/VzW... an excellent example as to why the phones can't be subsidized much. Sprint/Boost totally has taken it in the shorts here, as outside of the phone itself (which is still subsidized somewhat), they've haven't gotten a dime from me, as they inexplicably didn't request Moto lock the bootloader, making it fairly trivial to convert it over to working with Verizon.)

Frankly, if someone can't be arsed to vote in person, via mail in ballot, or via early voting, I'm not sure they really care enough about the process to put any real thought into their vote at all.

You can still buy fresh-from-the-factory phones that run nothing better than Gingerbread. (2.3) Halting updates on anything but KitKat and above is incredibly blinkered.

That said, Google really needs a better way of deploying updates other than patching the main tree and depending on their device vendors/carriers to eventually issue an update.

What, precisely, is wrong with it?

"Because Google." Is not an answer.

No, clothing, ropes, and handcuffs are not a "medical device"... none is "intended to affect the structure or function of the body" (unless chosen to be marketed that way)

Clothing that purported to explicitly raise or lower core temperature might, I suppose, in a similar sense that compression socks advertised as improving circulation are. (Although it would not be closely regulated.) Clothing that merely says "keeps you warm", or handcuffs that "lock you tight"? No.

A pair of electrodes that strap to the side of your head, explicitly advertised as changing your mood by directly and actively altering brain function? Clearly a medical device.

Those that are big consumers of high-cost channels like ESPN aren't going to like unbundling at all. Those whose TV watching needs tend towards the lower-cost stations will be pleased.

Unlike airlines, a channel list is pretty transparent. With airlines the amount of fees you need to pay is often a little hard to figure out.

I'm fairly certain that devices that glue to the side of your head and run electrical current through your cranium qualify as "Medical Devices". The whole bit about "not intended to diagnose or treat a health condition" is the sort of loophole that applies to natural supplements, not FDA device regulations.

From the FDA website:
(Among other things) A medical device is "intended to affect the structure or any function of the body of man or other animals, and which does not achieve any of its primary intended purposes through chemical action within or on the body of man or other animals and which is not dependent upon being metabolized for the achievement of any of its primary intended purposes."

The purpose of basic training is to turn civilians into soldiers (not warriors, soldiers.) Prior to the modern army (as deployed by the Romans), battles were fought by a combination of highly-trained elite units (cavalry, well-trained melee combatants, etc.) and cowed peasants forced into battle at sword point. (As you might imagine, other than as a meat-shield vs. other peasants, this was not particularly useful.)

Starting with the Romans, Western Armies took conscripts (or volunteers) and trained them, first and foremost, to follow orders as a unit without question (as in, not prod them in the back with a spear all the time). At the same time, they were taught basic combat skills. Such soldiers were certainly more effective than cowed peasants, and in many situations more effective than independently trained elite warriors, since they could function as a cohesive team.

Nothing hackers do requires orders to be followed in seconds. Their orders do not involve putting themselves in the way of personal harm, so they don't need indoctrination/brainwashing to work against their natural survival instincts.

Certainly you DO need them to follow orders, and a cohesive unit can be good for morale (this doesn't just apply to the military), but there have to be better ways to do it vs. basic training, and you'll needlessly exclude those with perfectly usable skills unsuited for traditional basic. (I will note that Army Basic, while tough, is not actually that hard to pass, physically. You need to be in decent shape by the end, yes, but not an athlete. It's the mental demands that causes the most flunk-outs.)

I'm sorry, but I don't see a problem here... Amazon has made participation in KU completely optional. If Amazon, say, made KU mandatory in order to have your book available on Kindle at all, there might be something to complain about.

But since there IS no such requirement, if you, Author or Publisher, feel you'll make less money via KU vs. only offering stand-alone copies, then don't participate.

The movie industry hardly seems to be dying despite the fact most movies aren't available on NetFlix streaming.

I totally agree that the Fed's ability to CREATE drug laws is legally tenuous. But that's really irrelevant here. A state has no right of action to force another state to conform their laws to this or that federal law. If the feds have a problem with it, it'll be between the feds and that state. It's simply not a matter for one state to go after another.

While the prosecution will probably have to cough up the goods after a hearing ordering them to do so, I'm pretty sure not dotting the proverbial i's during pre-trial briefing doesn't qualify as "blatantly criminal".

Attn Border States:

The Interstate Commerce Clause. Read up on it, and how it means you can't do jack about what a neighboring state does or does not legalize. The feds certainly can, and do, have anti-drug laws, but states have no jurisdiction over federal law enforcement priorities.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay The Same.

It's my general impression that the cost of any given IT resource has gone down at roughly the same rate the consumption of said resource has risen. This means that IT capabilities rise at the same rate as advances in storage/programming/processing power/etc., but the total complexity (and amount of IT resource to manage that complexity) has stayed roughly level.

I remember fifteen years ago, the "rule of thumb" for managing Enterprise Storage was approx. two administrators per Terabyte. (This was when a terabyte storage array was about the size of a pair of commercial refrigerators and took 4 3-phase power feeds.) Nowadays, the company still has two administrators, but they now have a Petabyte to manage, and their company makes productive use of every last scrap of that Petabyte.

Very true, and that didn't change as a result of judicial action, it took legislative action to fix that.

The major legal concept that makes a corporation different from a jointly-owned partnership is the idea that the corporation exists as a separate entity from the shareholders. This confers benefits, such as insulating shareholders from liability for things an "arms-length" corporation they happen to own shares of might do. But if corps want to retain that benefit, they should not expect to be treated as having the same rights as their shareholders. If they are truly "arms length" then the rights their shareholders do or don't have should be irrelevant when determining the rights of the corporation itself. Certainly the constitution has nothing to do with it, as corporations are not citizens (nor residents) and therefore cannot have constitutional rights in and of themselves. They have only the rights we choose to grant them.