It's a difficult question.

Can you side-load on an iPhone? Yes, you can. There are three ways:

(1) Jailbreak the device; some people are willing to do this. The preeminent reason is to work around carrier limitations on tethering/hotspotting to get around the fact that the carrier has unlimited data on some phone plans, but either does not permit, or has capped charges for, tethering/hotspotting through the phone, or through mobile hotspots. Other than a few applications to work around Apple/carrier agreements, or add functionality Apple doesn't/won't approve, this is not so big these days.

(2) Enroll the device as a developer device using a developer certificate. This allows you a limited number of devices, however, and isn't useful for wide scale distribution. It's a dead end.

(3) Enroll the device as an enterprise device. There are already Chinese "app stores" which do this; you enroll voluntarily, or the phone comes already enrolled when you purchase it from the vendor, and they install an enterprise cert, signed by Apple, which allows them to run their own distribution system. Typically, they pirate U.S. Apps, rewrap them, resign them, and then sell them on the cheap, giving no money back to the authors. In addition, there's often malware included with the applications sold this way. Apple hates it, and I have no doubt, there's active work on enterprise support to prevent this, going forward.

So side-loading isn't the biggest issue, since if there's a will, there's a way, and Android would also end up with methods similar to these thre to increase the difficult of, but not eliminate, side-loading.

The flip side of this is that, unless they do something, the pure *volume* of malware for Android will almost certainly kill their viability as an app platform eventually, even if it's not going to happen today or tomorrow.

The biggest problem with Android, with regard to apps, is that there are are too many targets.

Apple is in the process of screwing themselves over this way, for short term monetary gains that will likely not have long term value for them. At a minimum, a developer has to target 7 iOS platforms at this point in time - even if that ends up being wrapped up in a single distribution package, so it looks like a single thing in the App store. In addition, video content is split between 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios. Apple eats the transcoding costs and the duplicate CDN costs for these, but the decision to change the device means twice as much content has to be carried around.

But 7 is manageable, if you are targeting the same OS version, or an earlier but forward compatible OS version for all devices.

The Android ecosystem is the wild west, in comparison. And automatic updating of Android versions on older devices won't gloss over hardware differences in input methods, sensors, and so on.

So...

(1) Yes, there's room. If Samsung wanted to own this, they probably could, just by standardizing minimal feature set on their entire product line, and then forcing version updates on the carrier, or making sufficiently compelling new devices that the carrier doesn't think the version updates will impact their 18 month subscriber contractual lock-in model for doing business.

(2) The side-loading thing is not that big an issue. The Android App market isn't that big these days, and it's balkanized enough through device specifications and other capabilities that, everything else being equal, it's possible to create an 800lb Gorilla in the App store space, and have it stick. If Samsung wanted to do this themselves, they surely could do that too.

The problem with Samsung doing this, however, is that their laptop, tablet, and mobile phone divisions are -- in fact -- separate but affiliated companies, all with their own engineering teams, design teams, supplier contracts, and so on. So Samsung would have to change *themselves* to do this.

OK... the Amazon problem...

It's not a problem. Although they've certainly go a more or less portal-play going with their application and content for their Android devices -- all they had to do was default it to pointing at their servers, and most people don't change defaults, as we've seen by the search engine lawsuits against device vendors and against Chrome.

I think that this could be handled by having a master store signing signing certificate, and Google - or come consortium, including Samsung -- controlling the signing certificate. That may end up with, say, 5 "trusted stores", and the members of the consortium would all agree on some minimal feature set on the devices so developers could target a single base model, and they could agree to lockstep their version updates, etc., etc..

Or Google could do it for them, and swallow the bitter medicine on their behalf. Part of that would be the fact that the Google Android App store takes a 30% transaction fee, and they'd have to let the vendors whose certs were signed for them by Google, take all or most of that percentage. And that would lead to competition, which would have to happen in the consortium, for fees. Which could lead to RICO violations, unless they legally structured their price fixing agreement to be an emergent property, rather than an explicit agreement (i.e. it's a "natural" saddle point for the rules under which anyone can agree to operate, rather than an explicit agreement to price fix).

To get back to the original question now...

If all that were done -- and it'd cost Google considerably to do it -- then no, there's not a room for a third party.

If, on the other hand, the question really was...

"Does Microsoft have any hope in hell of breaking into this market at any point in the next 3-5 years, or are they going to be stuck at a 5% market share for Windows Phones?"

Microsoft could break into the market. And they could wield the App Store model that Apple currently wields, rather effectively.

But, as they do not build their own hardware, as Apple does, they'd need to do something similar to what I've described above. And for them, it'd be even more galling. But probably not as galling as it would end up being if either they or Google attaced the problem full wold (long term) be fore the carriers. 8-)

You mean change these things?

Carrier business model:

(1) Contractually obligate you for 2 years
(2) Entice you with "upgraded phone" every 18 months
(3) Prevent them upgrading their own phone and escaping carrier lock-in after 2 years
(4) Benefit from customer lock in
(5) Goto 2

Cell phone vendor business model:

(1) Bring a new phone to market
(2) Contract with a carrier/seller who considers it enough of an upgrade to entice an early re-up on a customer contract
(3) Start work on the next phone to sell more hardware
(4) Goto 1

Phone OS vendor business model:

(1) Continuously work on the OS
(2) Convince cell phone vendor to use OS
(3) Cell phone vendor takes snapshot of tree
(3)(a) Cell phone vendor productizes snapshot, because OS vendor could not produce a finished product to save their mother
(4) Goto 1

Admittedly, Google would *like* to change things, but at this point, it's really kind of too late; they should have started with lock-in to their own App store.

Apple doesn't have this problem because the next iPhone only has to compete with the previous iPhone, and Apple *actually* tends to improve the iPhone hardware in a less-than 18 month cycle (which keeps the carriers happy), and it doesn't have to fight with all the other cell phone vendors for mind share because, hey, where else are you going to run all those apps/listen to all that music/watch all those movies, that you've already paid for.

Apple has App-based lock-in, and 18 month upgrade cycle carrier satisfaction, and they sell both the hardware and the software, so there's no hardware company to push-back on software updates, and there's no PITA continuous development cycle that prevents software updates from being polished products to push back the other direction.

Google could *probably*, *eventually* fix things, if they were willing to swallow some incredibly bitter pills, and if they were to do profit-sharing of App revenue with the hardware vendors so that the hardware vendors for Android device were willing to be commoditized, but ... it would be an incredibly bitter pill, to have to change their development model away from waterfall, and it would be an incredibly bitter pill to lock down Apps and side-loading.

Personally, I object to Fedex's position because they're citing concerns about the law, when the law says nothing about gun-smithing tools.

And yes, a lot of guns get shipped despite their policy marked as 'machine parts'.

If they just said 'we don't want to ship this because we don't support gun-rights', then we could boycott them with a clear heart.

(Note: More libertarian than conservative).

Actually, it can. Beware of state rules, it has to have a maker's mark and serial #, and you definitely can't be 'in the business' without a FFL, But if you make a firearm, the decide to sell it(and it's the only one you sell) in a used condition 4 years later, having fed 1k rounds through it, then you're good to go. Selling a non-used individually manufactured firearm is an indication that you 'might' be in the business, so don't do that. Try to not make a profit on your hobby. Definitely don't make a business so you can deduct your tools & supplies.

But I still recommend on reading up on the rules first.

You've been able to get '80%' finished receivers for decades that didn't need much more than a drill press to finish. This does lower the bar, but not by much.

If I got something like this, I'd

Personally, I'm in support of 'all of the above'. The internet today fills the place that phones did back then. I also think that the 1st applies to more than hand operated printing presses and the 2nd to more than muskets.

If a law doesn't make sense anymore, it's time to amend or repeal it.

Excessively small control of waterways results in more economic harm because you get gridlock, so 'nobody' gets 'anything'.

For the pinkertons - I suggest studying history. It was bad, they were used more to enforce virtual slavery than libertarian freedom. It's part of the reason I'm a moderate - I keep the lessons of history in mind. That's actually conservative. ;)

An HOA is a form of government, if a limited and unofficial one. You have elected representatives, and it can pass 'laws', IE rules and regulations, that affect you in the future, and your only option is to campaign against them, summon help from a higher government power, or leave the community.

Also, leaving said community is only marginally easier than leaving the country. I've left the country multiple times, so I know just how hard it is. Fact is, once you have your bags packed, it's only marginally harder to leave the country than it is to move to another house in the same city.

And you keep flipping the goal posts. First you attack me for 'micromanaging', then you attack me for NOT micro-managing by dividing the country into arbitrarily small chunks for special treatment on the pollution front.

I've already outright acknowledged that it's not perfect, but that I consider the gain in efficiency and freedom to be worth it.

Please provide citations for the societies that have pursued my solution, and how they destroyed themselves. Heck, please provide a citation for a society that tried 'simply' charging for pollution, as opposed to issuing 'permits' and charging 'fines', often waiving them, and finding it a disaster.

'Groups of people' = groups of individuals. Do not mistake my referring to 'groups' as anything more than shorthand, and my admittedly flawed grasp of the english language. I also don't claim to be a fundamentalist libertarian. You're trying to shove me into a different pigeonhole, but if we got into topics where you weren't looking at something that causes wide amounts of generalized harm, you'd quickly get into where I'd be giving the progressives even more heart burn.

Especially given that pollution tends to affect LOTS of individuals, if not the country as a whole.

Though I guess you have convinced me - there needs to be something in the system where if the pollution is somehow concentrated enough to affect individuals specifically enough to separate out the harm, then said individuals should have the right to seek compensation from the polluter.

I'd only have the EPA charging for the 'generalized' harm, that is too diffuse for proper compensation.

You're forgetting the principle of non-aggression. Where I differ from fundie libertarianism is that I believe that there needs to be a recourse other than the expensive court system to try to manage and prevent the harm up front, rather than trying to bankrupt the company after the fact, leaving many harmed with no recourse from a bankrupt company.

Better they 'make their money' through the form of taxes, which is a heck of a lot more efficient than trying to do it through fines and such.

Especially when a DUI conviction often carries work disruption that 'earns' nobody money, being a form of 'broken window'.

When Google originally offered the code, they offered to host it on Google's hosted infrastructure service for a year, at no charge, until the project got up on its feet. There were no takers.

This will probably be moderated down as well... however, yes, "providing the service" is *exactly* the problem, and it's *exactly* why Google cancelled the thing when the back end hosting infrastructure APIs changed out from under the (unmaintained) Reader codebase. The maintainers had moved onto other projects.

And while Google could have either brought them back (the ones who wanted to revisit their old code), or they could have put new hires on the porting problem, and gotten Reader back on its feet on the new hosting infrastructure, it wouldn't have solved the basic problem.

The basic problem is that there was no sustainable revenue model for the service. Google's Reader service allowed the use of any client that someone cared to write, and a heck of a lot of people wanted to write clients that excluded advertising as a means of supporting the costs of running the service. Which would be fine, if there were any way to charge for it, *other* than advertising, which didn't break the client/back-end-service model, which is what people *liked most* about Reader in the first place.

So Google didn't throw good money after bad, and no one else stepped up to throw good money after bad, and (possibly) figure out some other way to monetize the service, such as changing the over the wire representation such that advertising was indistinguishable from content. Which wouldn't have worked, since that would just trigger an arms race for clever advertising exclusionary filtering in the display services, instead of at the protocol level.

So you're right: "it is a problem of providing the service", and the specific problem is "no one wanted to pay to do that".

Perhaps this is fixable...

Could you maybe write:

"'Articles': What It Takes To Write an Article Not Light On Details"

?

Those aren't "new devices", those are "old devices, still being manufactured by vendors who are unable to come up with new devices in a timely fashion", or they are "old devices that used to live in a warehouse, and which are now being sold at a discount, because no one would buy them otherwise".

Too bad you didn't step up to the plate and become the maintainer, when Google offered to give the source code away to anyone who wanted to run their own "Google Reader" service.

I guess you maybe couldn't figure out a revenue model for the damn thing, either?

You have the Part 15 and ISM services for that. You really can buy a microwave link that's metropolitan-distance and legal to use.

We lost much of our 440 capability to PAVE PAWS in California. Remember, Amateur Radio is not the primary service on many bands. The military is on 440.

If you want that nearly infinite microwave spectrum, you have the Part 15 and ISM services. Absolutely nothing is stopping you. Power is not the issue with those frequencies, it's line of sight and Fresnel zones.

No, I absolutely do not have to prefix my words with anything. You do that by posting as an anonymous coward. I use my real name to indicate that I stand behind my words.

Yes. The usual mechanism here would be WiFi security, with HTTPS or SSL inside of it.

This.

And Mr. "There is no winnable war" needs to re-examine even some recent history. Does he really think that reborn, modern economies like Germany's represent the outcome of a war not won by those who reacted to that country's earlier aggression? Does he really think that the communists now running Vietnam didn't win their conflict? Does he really think that the rebels in the American colonies didn't win their war with the British crown?

Gaseous platitudes about such things made in an attempt to wish away groups like ISIS (if we just say that wars can't be won, they'll stop lopping off people's heads, right?) are ridiculous. War is horrible, but they can and have been won. Ask the Imperial Japanese Navy.