It was impossible to do this until the past 2-3 years.

Straight Talk's MVNO plans were the first time anyone could get GSM service that was BYOD-friendly, and ST's SIMs disappeared in early 2012 or so for over a year. Also, you could only get their SIMs online so few people knew about them.

T-Mo was the first provider to offer plans without a subsidy penalty, but they're not an option for many people because their network is so small. Although their 200MB/month "promotional free data" plan is one of the smartest marketing ideas in history. 200MB/mo leads to very little load on their network, but allows people in rural areas to monitor the reality of T-Mobile's services. (e.g. I'll know thanks to my Chromebook once they start offering more than just EDGE service in my area.)

Sprint and Verizon aren't feasible for BYOD due to being CDMA2000-based. That's starting to change slowly (the Nexus 5 was groundbreaking in this regard) but still they have a stranglehold on device compatibility.

AT&T does give any reasonable BYOD discounts unless you're on a family plan with lots of lines. (Their BYOD discount combined with an applicable plan is more expensive than their individual plans)

So contract-subsidized phones are taking forever to go away thanks to the carrier monopoly and a bit due to culture. People are stupid, and seeing a $1 phone throws them into a frenzy even if you show them the math that shows that they're paying so much more for service that the phone will cost them $200-300 more over 2 years than a cheaper no-subsidy plan and buying a device outright.

It was interesting, that also in BSG they claimed that the fleet did have much newer starships - the Galactica was being decommissioned due to being obsolete.

All those other starships in the fleet perished quickly due to network infiltration by the Cylons. The only remaining operational hardware was the non-networked stuff.

The Nexus 5 is subsidized by Google so that it's sold nearly at cost or possibly even below it.

Google's business model here is that it gets people into the Play Store ecosystem, which is where Google really makes their money on Android.

OnePlus has no such business model, which is why they're limiting access to the device via their invite system.

One additional worry bead about this price point is that it means they're likely not funneling much money to Cyngn (Cyanogen, Inc) to support this device. For various reasons (mainly, the Cyngn guys being notoriously difficult to work with), Cyngn-backed devices get little to no community input on CyanogenMod builds.

As an example of what happens when you don't pay Cyngn much for a device, see the Oppo N1. Once Cyngn got what they wanted (experience with taking a device through the GMS certification process), they deallocated most engineering resources for the N1, which has since then received minimal level of support effort from Cyngn. The end result is stuff like location services being broken for 2 months straight in CM11 nightlies. Nearly everyone who bought the CM edition of the N1 switched to Omni, which is maintained on that particular device by three guys (disclaimer: I'm one of them) in their spare time. That's how badly Cyngn deprioritized the device - three guys in their spare time are investing more into suppporting the device than cyngn is. (Admittedly, we're making better use of our time too - see below.)

I expect users of the OnePlus One will see the same with the next Android version beyond 4.4 on the OnePlus - the team at Cyngn take the "no bug reports against nightlies" rule VERY seriously, and the results of that show in the quality of nightly builds that are maintained by them. (Many of the community-supported devices are supported by maintainers who have a thread on XDA, where they'll hear if a device has a major issue. The end result is that most people have a high expectation of quality even from nightlies due to the "community maintainer pays attention to what's going on" workaround, but you won't see that from Cyngn-backed devices.)

It is.

That's why they have their ridiculous invite system to deal with the lack of availability.

Probably even better-correlated than this:
Jobs which require college degrees are almost always salaried, which provides no reward for working extra hours (but it's expected of you)
Jobs which do not require college degrees are almost always hourly - which provides significant reward for working extra hours (but it's discouraged because it costs the company money)

There are hourly non-degree jobs that can pay quite well nowadays. (Construction can actually be quite lucrative...)

In the case of Android Wear, if a developer targets that platform, they won't be limited to *just* Samsung.

This doesn't surprise me. While Android Wear likely won't compete much with the "mostly dumb" smartwatches that consist of only a display and UI for the phone they're tethered to (Sony Smartwatch, Pebble - both of these are able to achieve hardware cost reductions and battery life that Android Wear will never be able to match, putting AW consistently in a different price/functionality market segment than SW and Pebble), Android Wear was a DIRECT competitor for Galaxy Gear - both are in the "High standalone functionality" category. At least by hardware design, that is - a watch running Android should be able to operate almost entirely standalone, using a phone only as a data connection in a manner similar to Google Glass. Unfortunately Samsung totally fucked up Gear and while its hardware capabilities should have made it MORE capable of standalone operation than any other smartwatch out there, Gear wound up the LEAST capable of standalone operation instead - being the ONLY smartwatch which required one of a few specific models of phone as opposed to "any Android phone" (Sony) or "any Android phone or iOS" (Pebble)

By virtue of being in direct competition with Gear (e.g. identical market segment) AND the fact that it's superior, Wear is going to *crush* Gear. (Wear won't likely crush Pebble or Sony Smartwatch since they have the capability to play in a much lower-cost market segment than Wear will be able to due to having significantly lower hardware requirements.)

Actually there are valid reasons for an electric vehicle to shift gears - just because many electric vehicles only have one gear doesn't mean there aren't valid reasons for having multiple gear ratios.

Although in the case of EVs, shifting tends to be more speed-dependent than load-dependent. While EV motors are typically constant-power, there ARE torque limits at low speeds due to current limits. Although this usually means that an EV that has more than one gear ratio needs far fewer than an internal combustion vehicle. (as in, even two gear ratios is usually enough in the rare cases where only one gear ratio wasn't.)

See Charles Guan's burnoutchibi project as one example.

Now, they likely do have some valid complaints here.

But bitching about a slow transition away from magnetic stripe cards when *you are one of the last retailers to install NFC payment terminals* and more importantly *knowingly skipped the start of migration during your last payment terminal upgrade cycle* is bullshit.

Now, I can understand if maybe Walmart were just at the wrong point in the upgrade cycle and hadn't upgraded their terminals in years, but I know for a fact that nearly every Walmart I've been to in the last year has upgraded their terminals in that time period and, despite many of their competitors having NFC payment terminals for a few years, Walmart did *not* upgrade to terminals that were capable of anything but magswipe.

Target appears to have deployed terminals that look NFC-ish but aren't, and did so before the NFC rollout started and hasn't done another deployment since then, so they do have an excuse.

One question: Is Waze v2 a derivative work under the GPL, or an original work that they happened to release under the GPL?

If the latter, then as the original copyright holder they are allowed to also release the code under an alternate license (assuming that all external contributions were either removed, had copyright assigned to Waze via a CLA, or had additional rights granted to the contribution via a CLA similar to Canonical's Harmony CLA...)

Also, as you've indicated, the only person with an actual legitimate claim in such a lawsuit is a copyright holder. For example, if you or I don't have any code in the Linux kernel that we retain copyright to, we can't sue someone for GPL infringement of the Linux kernel. (This is why kernel GPL violations rarely reach a lawsuit, most companies solve the issue well before a lawsuit or are located in China outside of the reach of most jurisdictions that someone could sue in, plus most kernel copyright holders would rather keep coding than spend time on a suit. The busybox team, on the other hand, frequently goes after busybox GPL violators.)

Yup. I suspect Canonical is going to continue down a path towards irrelevancy. They've got a solid userbase and a pretty good lead for now, which means it's not going to happen soon, but I can't see anything but a decline in the future for them.

I'm seeing a lot of parallels with Cyanogen Inc, the company that was formed by some of the CyanogenMod leads. They're delusionally self-important and consistently speaking things in direct conflict with their actions ("Everything you see now will remain open-source" at the same time they're trying to force a contributor to dual-license a major GPL work so they could have commercial rights to it. Fortunately their CLA wasn't as powerful as Canonical's). I suspect they're going to wind up going down the same road as Canonical.

Cyngn is doing EVERYTHING in nearly the exact same way Canonical has - and seems oblivious to the fact that Canonical has been doing a good job of alienating all of their potential partners and many of their contributors. Canonical should serve as a shining example of how NOT to monetize open source software in a sustainable fashion (especially by coopting existing projects), yet certain people feel that Canonical's example is the best one to follow.

You have obviously never worked closely with software written by Samsung before.

You know, the company that shipped millions of chips that would be damaged permanently if you send them a secure erase command. (Remember http://www.anandtech.com/show/... - What they don't tell you in that article is that Samsung shipped eMMC chips with the SAME EXACT BUG in every single international Galaxy S2 and Galaxy Note sold for many months.)

This is also the company that had a device file that was chmodded 666 or 777 that allowed you read/write access to the entirety of system memory. (Google exynos-abuse)

Yeah. Most importantly, no one ever proved that shipped (released builds as opposed to leaks or test builds) basebands ever used those functions. In fact, no one even found a leaked/test baseband firmware image that ever used those functions.

It wasn't really a "backdoor", it was Samsung being their typical careless selves and leaving debug code compiled in to a release build. That "backdoor" has nothing on exynos-abuse for example...

Keep in mind that Qualcomm has almost total dominance of the LTE modem market and they want to keep it that way.

Even massive pressure from Google won't work here... Maintaining their lead in baseband chipsets (which is heavily dependent on their modem firmware being as difficult to RE as possible) is EXTREMELY important to Qualcomm. Losing dominance of the LTE market will hurt their cash flow there, and also their ability to keep using it to sell complete SoCs. (It's only recently with Krait that Qualcomm's SoCs were able to stand on their own and obtain design wins without pairing to a Qualcomm modem. The old Scorpion cores in the Snapdragon S3 family kind of sucked.)

I grew up in central New Jersey.

Deer are a MAJOR pest there:
1) No natural predators. The closest thing to a "natural predator" they have any more are cars.
2) No firearms hunting. The area is so built up that I believe even bow hunting needed exceptions from the normal rules (regarding proximity to residences) be made. Doesn't help that residences are where most of the food supply (landscaping) is, so it's hard to find deer that aren't too close to a house to shoot.
3) People dropping rocks out of windows probably wouldn't be effective enough for population control. (Although the deer are so docile and adjusted to human presence that this, in theory, would be a possible method for hunting deer.)

Yeah. There are third-party lens covers like GlassKap, but there are two problems:
1) They don't match Glass in color. So it keeps the tinfoilhatters (an honestly small but vocal and whiny part of the crowd) happier but to everyone else you look really silly. (Yes, there are some that will say you'll always look silly with Glass - but it looks far sillier with a GlassKap on due to the color mismatch.)
2) Google put the light sensor for the device in the camera hole. So with GlassKap, Glass thinks you're always in a dark room and dims the display. :( (I wish I could get a version of http://www.shapeways.com/model... that didn't have the display shield component - I'd put a translucent cover over the camera hole.)