It doesn't help that paid wi-fi has a tendency to just cause people to switch to tethering now - which potentially causes performance problems for the paid users.

Yeah. HSPA+ is no slouch.

People's desires for LTE in the US stem from the fact that CDMA2000 1x data service (aka CDMA 3G) was poo.

In the US, AT&T never deployed DC-HSPA+ (42 Mbps support) and I think may never have even deployed 21 megabit HSPA+ - while I believe DC-HSPA+ is fairly common in Europe.

That's the biggest problem with 3D - the lack of content.

It's shocking how many movies were filmed in 2D and 3D was added in postproc - kind of like the oldschool colorization of B&W films. Most of these looked like crap when viewed in 3D.

3D would have been more popular if there were more GOOD 3D content.

The marketing seems to be dependent on the fact that many cinema screens are curved, and thus a curved TV is more "cinema-like"

There's a reason for this - anamorphic projection lenses used for extreme widescreen (2.35:1 for example) have distortion that is corrected by a curved screen.

Curved 16:9 is pointless. Even curved 2.35:1 LCD is likely pointless since you're not correcting for an anamorphic projection lens.

In addition, in many cases, even if the vaccine is not fully effective, a vaccinated individual is likely to have a less severe infection and stay contagious for a shorter period of time.

Yup. Remember the IFR design?

I think one of the statistics was that it could meet all of our electrical needs for a century - using only waste from existing reactors. (and that statistic was two decades ago.)

In addition to extracting much more energy from the fuel, the waste was much easier to manage. While it was EXTREMELY radioactive initially, the volume of the waste was very low, and more importantly, within 200 years it would decay to the point where it was safe (radiologically speaking, at least. Some of those metals are nasty even when a stable isotope.)

Yeah. At some point, no one is going to want to be CEO/CFO.

Massive CEO/CFO churn is a sign of a company in deep, serious trouble. Companies can handle occasional sudden losses of key personnel, but if it happens on a regular basis - that company is fucked.

It's also going to be bad for morale if the CEO/CFO keep getting whacked. Now, in the short term the company might have enough succession/disaster recovery plans to keep continuity going, but if the CEO/CFO in a company keep dying (as do the CEOs/CFOs of all other companies in the same industry), the employees are eventually going to say, "Fuck this, time for a career change."

In short, Play Store is NOT included with AOSP.

CM received a pretty nasty cease-and-desist letter from Google regarding gapps a few years ago. The "workaround" was that users could exctract the gapps suite from their device and reinstall it.

And yes, the current approach doesn't quite meet that legal definition, but what is protecting CM (and other projects) is that *they are not hosting gapps* - have you noticed that for any project, when you're instructed to get gapps, you're routed *elsewhere*?

Kinda screams "not included" to me.

(Note: CyanogenMod 10.2 on the Oppo N1 and CM 11S on the OnePlus One are special cases. These are the ONLY devices where CM has gone through the full GMS certification/approval process.)

Except that basically all phones on the market have been dual-constellation (or more, some support Galileo too) since early 2012 or so.

Russia put MASSIVE import taxes on navigation devices that didn't support GLONASS, so all phone manufacturers switched to dual-constellation chips as it was FAR cheaper than the tax penalty.

Yup. Really, critical thinking/troubleshooting skills and organizational skills are far more important than your familiarity with any given language. Ability to adapt/learn on your own is next.

In the OP's case, he's probably in very good shape due to his experience with hardware engineering and embedded development. Software guys who understand what the underlying hardware means for them are RARE. The OP might want to look into platform/BSP maintenance jobs for embedded devices - the smartphone software industry is especially hot right now. Lots of companies are having trouble hiring enough competent software engineers.

I think the FAA has jurisdiction over anything that flies.

They just say, "Keep within these limits and we won't care what you do." So the question is whether this guy's recklessnes exceeded those limits.

Kind of similar to how the FCC has jurisdiction over the ISM bands - they just say "stay below this power level and and a few other limits and you can do anything you want in that band"

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.