Religious people can opt-out their children when it comes to evolution and sex-education. Seems only fair that parents get the option to opt their children out of this unabashed intrusion of the classroom by media corporations. From an economic educational standpoint, I don't want my kids learning that having the right political connections can be used to compensate for a broken business model.

This isn't cable news, strictly Ad Hominem attacks are generally not very convincing. If you have specific points about the Ars article in question, feel free to make them.

As an Android fan, and a general loather of the walled garden of iOS devices, I am concerned watching Google beginning to steer in the same direction. It is smells like bait-and-switch, especially as components that were once in the open AOSP stack are now closed source apps. There is probably fair debate about what is the "operating system" and what is "value add", but if you couple Google's move to apps along with some of the business arrangements described in the article, it's beginning to feel like old times again.

Remember the dominant operating system when this line came out?

"Platform" is a big word. While the Android OS is free, there are more and more components of the platform that are getting closed off by Google as they move from the AOSP stack to Google Play apps. See this Ars article for a rather scathing view of Android's "openess".

At a state level, Nevada, where I live, is ranked third by the Tax Foundation in "state business tax climate" for 2013, and conversely 47th in tax collected per person. We have no corporate income tax, no personal state income tax. We ranked 46th in federal aid in 2011 (same source), so it's not like Nevada is a "donor" state.

So, free of all of those taxes, Nevada's unemployment rates should be pretty good, because taxes are the worst thing for a regional economy, right? Except, in August, the state had the highest unemployment rate in the nation according to the BLS.

Yes, there are other factors besides taxation. There is regulation, of course, but it doesn't seem that much worse here than in California where I used to live. We have the double whammy of underfunded schools with a very strong teachers union, which pretty makes any improvement in education impossible. Our state legislature meets only every two years, and seems to function about on par with our federal legislature, so getting anything done from a legislative perspective is difficult. It gets really hot here about 1/3 of the year (although not much in the way of earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. - pick your poison I guess)

In my case, I was drawn to Nevada by the low taxation, but businesses are not crashing the boarders. Taxation is not everything. There is a balance to be had between taxes and other quality of life factors, some of which you need government actively involved with. Education, infrastructure, utility price stability also count.

Memories...

It will stream videos, play music, have Angry Birds and have a great newsreader; but won't excel at it's primary task which, in this case, is keeping decent time.

I wonder how many of the Facebook flames, that will inevitably make their way this discussion thread, are authored by people with Facebook accounts?

Per the article (and submitter, it's politico.com not "political.com"), there more than 10,000 petitions each for Texas and Louisiana secession. Is this even close to a flood by web standards? Just because something happens on the web, does that necessarily make it "news for nerds?" Perhaps it's the inflammatory "racist" link that got the editors' attention. There are plenty of blog sites for "everybody in the South is an idiot racist", why do we have to add Slashdot to the list?

This. For those running eBusiness Suite and also have to use sites with applets, companies are caught between the rock of having to update Java to keep your browsers happy and the hard place of incompatibility of applications with newer versions of Java. Yes, you can load multiple versions of Java, but keeping things automatically updated, and keeping each application/browser using the correct JVM? Ouch. The recent issues over the past few months with poorly executed changes in the security model (broken applets that leverage AJAX), Apple's insistence (now abandoned) on distributing its own, outdated Java, and the mediocre UI stack make Java on the desktop a nightmare. I love my glassfish servers, but Java needs to be abandoned on the desktop. I think most people have given up on "write once, run anywhere", they would settle for "write once, run consistently". The Java brand suffers because of the desktop nonsense, which is a shame because it is so powerful and useful on servers.

[citation not needed] "Stare decisis" - rulings by idiot judges can act as precedent to other idiot judges.

The DMCA will probably never be overturned in the US, there is too much industry money behind it, and we know what feeds the political machine in the US.

If some third-party copyright trollbot interferes with the legitimate viewing of a webcast event, there has to be a law firm somewhere that, for the notoriety alone, would be willing to file a class action suit alleging damages of inconvenience and anguish on the behalf of thousands of viewers. Moreover, the broadcaster could sue for the costs of their broadcast that was interfered with. It costs real money to do a good quality webcast, trolls should be on the hook for diluting the value of a broadcaster's investment.

For MacOS, Apple handles all Java releases directly. R19 had new security features which basically broke many applets which called a webservice. On Windows and Linux, when Sun released a fix, our users were able to patch. Unfortunately, our Mac users had to wait until Apple got around to packaging the fix/update, which took weeks longer. The Java model has degenerated to Write Once, Debug Everywhere and Wait...

Yes, that is why if you Google "Apple pays patent lawsuit" you will get no results. Unlike most of us on Slashdot who think that software patents have devolved into a corporate arms race that has created a minefield for independent developers; Apple considers it a civic, perhaps patriotic, duty to proactively find and pay for patents that apply to their product lines.
not.
duh.