This is flamebait but the parent isn't? Give me a break.

The above post made a legitimate point-- Apple is ALONE among the handset manufacturers in putting this crapware on their phone. We know this for many reasons, not least because Apple explicitly says they don't allow carriers to mitigate the Apple experience. It's possible some of the other manufacturers have done this, but since the carriers have the ability to do this themselves on the other platforms, it makes a lot of sense that they put this on when they put all their other junk on.

On the flip side, CIQ appears less nefarious on iOS and is certainly easier to disable. I can't believe I've got to root and mod my Samsung Vibrant to get this crapware off it.

I don't get why you're complaining. It's clear that the users were holding their iTunes accounts wrong.

>Apple and Microsoft pundits worry about this deal more than Google analytics. I'm not
>saying that Google did it with ease in heart, but more or less they outplayed Billy and Jobs.

Billy is semi-retired. Google outplayed The Steves.

> For a tiny fraction of what they spent to buy MM they could have designed a new
> mobile OS from the ground up and gotten some great press.

And what would have stopped AppleSoft from suing this NEW phone OS into oblivion using the same BS patents? Anyone? Buehler?

You can't engineer around patents that cover obvious functions. Apple has made it, uhm, patently clear they were going to destroy Android with BS patent litigation. Now that Google has tons of mobile patents-- some of the earliest and most basic in the business-- destroying Android via litigation just went from foregone conclusion to longshot.

Was it worth 12.5 billion to save a whole ecosystem? Now that's a reasonable debate. With so many enemies teaming up against Google to beat them by any means necessary, I say yes. Google needed weapons in the patent war. Badly. Now they've got them.

Amen. Even this Google fanboy is having a hard time seeing this as anything but evil.

This is pretty pathetic.

I do know that by Constitutional mandate, the Senate cannot create legislation, they can only amend it. However, the Constitution places no limit on how thoroughly they can amend it.

Frequently, the Senate will just strike the entire contents of a bill, fill it with something entirely different, which the gets sent to the House. This is something the House is understands and accepts, and frequently encourages, particularly in times when the Senate is the big hurdle to clear.

Obviously, they should at least name the friggin' bill.

I heard that right before the Senate recessed, the Senate passed the bill to get money to the states. Could this be it?

Hey, it's just coincidence that the Tea Party happens to be 89% Republican (or voters that voted Republican) in the last 5 elections.

And who weren't against ridiculous spending and waste 3 years ago.

Dictionary.com defines zero-day as an unpatched bug. When I went to OneLook, half the sites that had definitions listed zero-day as unknown-to-provider bugs, half as unpatched.

Seems there's some ambiguity in the term.

Excellent point. Somebody mod parent up, please.

I don't think Apple/iPhone qualifies for monopoly status, but you can see how their mindshare is squeezing competitors out. Competitors aren't allowed to hook up to those built-in docks and other connections are unavailable, or second-class. The supposedly teeny-tiny Apple share of the smartphone market is going to ultimately break Flash as most sites will want to support iPhone and won't want to have to develop the site twice. (I actually like this because Flash is the Typhoid Mary of plugins, but I'm not thrilled with the cause)

Apple doesn't technically have a monopoly, but wow do their anti-competitive practices have the same effect.

Satan was an investment banker, not a lawyer. Lawyers have their limits.

Enjoy the silence. I don't think you're going to get an answer here, for obvious reasons.

So much of this whole post is simply not true.

Look, a few proponents of AGW sceintists have falsified some data, that's true. Many opponents of AGW have falsified data as well-- I don't see you screaming about them.

The bottom line is that the Earth's temperature is going up every year, give or take, while its CO2 content goes up-- and CO2 is well known to retain heat within the atmosphere.

This isn't "innocent until proven guilty," folks. The anti-AGW folks have to make their case, too. They haven't. All they've done is try to muddy the water and nitpick. There's a good reason they haven't made a case-- the evidence that AGW exists is overwhelming. The specifics-- whether it will cause more hurricaines or snow, more precipitation or less, these things are being hotly contested, just like with any young scientific theory. But the overwhelming arc is that iAGW exists and that it ain't going anywhere.

Saw this a few days ago, never can tell what to believe.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10434099-17.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

I don't think you've read the article thoroughly. His first complaint is about the developer model and how it clashes with every other model out there, and how it makes porting really painful. He also complains about variable hardware. He complains about the weak enforcement of resource management. He complains about hardware variability.

These are all real complaints. He does throw in a couple tongue-in-cheek "complaints," but it's generally critical.

The touchscreen test was done by MOTO labs, not Motorola. Not affiliated with Motorola in anyway.

They don't seem to be crypto Apple-fanbois, though. For what it's worth, in the real world, I have a G1, easily the crappiest Android device out there. I have no detectable issues with the touchscreen. Doesn't shock me that Apple's tracks better, but as a fairly aggressive user of the G1, I just haven't come across a need for whatever accuracy is supposedly missing.