With Samsung throwing masses of cash at it, it should get a decent enough market share. There'll be a fair few people going into these new Samsung physical stores wanting 'a Samsung phone' and they'll be pushed to these over Android.

Totally. He can lean back and use this for sooo much PR. "See? the west is corrupt! you have it good, in Russia, da?" And use it for bargaining later for stuff. This was an easy choice for him to make to offer, and the US still keeps making themselves look daft everytime they talk about Snowden.

Yeah, this is exactly what I think they're doing. Covering themselves to say 'we don't really want to, but if you force us to, we're in a position to take away every bit of business you've currently got, and we will, so what was that about you wanting us to pay to give your (soon to be ours) customers content? At the moment, I think they're a bit limited as to FCC/laws on owning everything, but with the telcos wanting to be more than just dumb pipes, they're setting themselves up to confronted about their tactics. In my ideal world, every Google router sold had a mini-hotspot/mini-cell tower attached to the outside of the house, to provide cell phone coverage around the city at these ludicrous speeds. For 99% of the time, that'd do me just fine.

Biometrics is your username, you still need a password.

So, the AC unit can be the master, with wifi, that also connects to the smoke alarms around the house with wifi, with speakers... I'm sensing the chance for streaming music wherever you go in the house. Notifications, warnings where you left the phone. More of the chromecast model of a fairly basic module that's controlled through the phone's UI and just streams. To have these neat devices ONLY used for fire/ac, when they could have so much more running? Lots of potential. Tied in with your phone, and it's location, so as you're returning from work, crank up the heat/AC as needed. Maybe tie it into Google Glass so you can wander around the house and SEE the temp and control it with a few blinks? Very very cool, hopefully Google won't dump it but really go all out to make it the base of an Aware House.

But what if it was the NSA posting this, just to get the Syrians blamed?

Was a later version that allowed you to turn off that metadata sent at the beginning of everyline, and it still did a decent job of figuring out stuff and showing expressive characters. Was a neat and fun toy.

The first thing noticed with all the other Snowden releases was how pathetic the gov worded things 'We aren't spying right now, and won't be in the future'. ok... but... that extra tense you missed....


I'm sure there's legal coverage for all of these people to flat out lie, and as shown, most of them have been, but the gov has their back, and I'm sure the wording of things signed meant they were compelled to lie.
So they hit up Google/Microsoft/Cisco, and Apple is the only one who didn't turn over their information when forced to and doesn't even know what all this is about? Yeah, right. Need to do better to earn our trust, as I'm sure the next leak will show that Apple not only knew, but probably gave them the docs to allow this to occur.

"That's a nice video streaming business you have there, you should speak to my cousin, he runs a french language film production company, sure he can help you..."

Was my first thought as well. When there's /this/ much data collected, surely they've dug up something juicy on just enough judges/politicians to let them continue to do what they want to do.

I sooo miss Groklaw. There's so many things happening I want the better view of it instead of the usual Florian copy/paste hack job.

More likely to be abused by authorities/criminals. Surely what'd be better is when you see your phone's gone missing, log in to itunes/google and track it. Get a key to hand other to law enforcement to let them track it and have permission to do what's needed. They track it, find out who's currently got the phone, and arrest them or find out who they bought it from and arrest them.

Person who got phone stolen gets their phone back.
Person who stole it gets arrested, and often with other stolen items.
Thieves learn it's not worth stealing these phones as they'll get caught
People won't buy suspected stolen phones as they know they won't get to keep them
Longer term solution to fix the problem than kill switching them.

Think that's morel likely. Next Occupy confrontation, suddenly everyone's phone stops working.

Why on earth pay back 10B to the tax payers when that could buy a whole load of politicians to lend(give away) more money?

In this case though, no money was exchanged between the parties, so... no contract. But that's civil, is this criminal law then? Something for the lawyers.