Yup, which only had standing because Apple started to include sound support as part of the OS in the Mac. There's a reason that Apple named one of their sounds SOSUMI after all.

They're also incurring a shit-ton of liability in storing magstripe copies - something that's a PCI violation however you interpret the standards. That means that in the case of fraud the cardholder (phoneholder?) will be considered liable instead of the bank or merchant, and as soon as that happens the inevitable class-action lawsuit against Samsung (far more lucrative than going after LoopPay would have been) will be a doozy.

Google also insisted on getting in the middle of the transaction with their Wallet, and if my understanding is correct the results basically ended up providing an inferior experience to merchants since the cards ultimately got recognized as card-not-present. Apple on the other hand worked closely with everyone in the chain rather than trying to muscle their way in. If you're a merchant, the difference between paying card-present and card-not-present is often around 1% (because CNP has a lot more fraud associated with it). Apple's use of tokenization adds more security as well - its just a better thought out system.

Having said all that your point about the launch country was also completely valid. Again, Google tried (IMO) to be far too arrogant for their own good.

In a lot of ways its similar to the 3G issues. Many dinged the original iPhone for launching without 3G at a time when that was cutting edge and not very well supported. Once the iPhone 3G came out, all the issues had been resolved and it was a very smooth experience for users (and had been done in close partnership with AT&T). Some other phones had loudly claimed 3G before then and often had frustratingly poor network connectivity, sometimes amusingly slower than the iPhone's 2G had at the same time.

System integration: its important in all sorts of areas.

Its really aggravating too that US banks will refuse to offer chip-and-pin even though they could. Chip-and-signature is better than magstripe but its still a royal PITA whenever you travel in Europe.

Their PCI wording on the website is intentionally deceptive, I feel. When asked about PCI they talk specifically only about the fact that their datacenter is compliant in the storage of card numbers.

Its strictly against PCI requirements to store trackdata in any way, with the single exception of reading it in-memory and relaying it upstream to another PCI compliant service provider. Since this is exactly what their product does, I fail to see how they can claim its compliant (and, as I mentioned, they very carefully don't ever actually say that it is).

That still bites me every now and then after all these years, and continues to introduce discussions as to at what point in backend code the typo should be fixed.

I think you're confusing HTTP with HTML.

Because its the wrong "they" to be making that decision. The working group for HTTP/2 should never be dictating how they feel its use should be restricted. There's plenty of other opportunities for people at the appropriate levels of the chain to make that recommendation. This is a big part of the point of a layered technology.

You're kidding, right? The number 4 billion can be represented in 32 bits, or the same total space as 4 ASCII characters.

Considering that the most commented on article today has 44 comments (not uniqued by user), I'd say that "a lot" is stretching the truth. Besides, if it was really all that, you wouldn't be here trying to talk about it.

I'd like to see that. Bear in mind that the user in question is likely to be an expert in things that you know nothing about, yet has never even been exposed to the idea of a distributed versioning system. Just explaining why even when they go through the process of committing it nobody else can see it is likely to take up quite a bit of your time.

Shame on Google for including a pre-checked checkbox to download Chrome as part of the package. That's download.com level shady.

Good or bad, your products need to stand alone when there's nothing whatsoever tying them together other than the downloader.

There are also a LOT of people who do live in cities. They don't have anything like European-normal broadband value either.

Well, that explains why all of our large cities are so well-connected with gigabit fiber for $50/mo, at least.

Oh, wait, they're not are they? The simple fact that Montana exists shouldn't be used to excuse terrible service and pricing in NYC, Houston, Seattle, or any other major US city.

That'd be similar to trying to privately build the portion of the road system to get to your front door, then driving a subsidized car over them to help defray the costs.

Infrastructure is one of those things that actually does work better when left to the society as a whole. Service providers, on the other hand, work far better privately in competition with one another over government-secured infrastructure.