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Google

Honeycomb To Require Dual-Core Processor 177

adeelarshad82 writes "According to managing director of Korean consumer electronics firm Enspert, Google's new Android Honeycomb tablet OS will require a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 processor to run properly. That means that many existing Android tablets will not be upgradeable to Honeycomb, as they lack the processor necessary to meet the spec. Currently, Nvidia's Tegra 2 platform is the only chipset in products on the market to include a Cortex-A9, although other manufacturers have said they're moving to the new processor architecture for 2011 products."
Democrats

Democrats Crowdsourcing To Vote Palin In Primaries 1128

SharpieMarker writes "In what could be the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing project ever, Democrats are beginning to organize to purposely vote for Palin in the 2012 Republican primaries. Their theory is by having Palin as an opponent, Obama will have the best odds at winning reelection. Recent polls have shown that Obama comfortably leads Palin by 10-20 points, but Obama is statistically tied with Romney and barely ahead of Huckabee. They even have a state-by-state primary voting guide to help Democrats navigate various states' rules for voting Palin in Republican primaries."
The Internet

The Right's War On Net Neutrality 945

jamie writes "To understand the debate being waged in the United States over Net Neutrality, it's important to understand just how drastically one side has been misled. The leaders of the American Right are spreading the lie that Net Neutrality is a government takeover of the internet, with the intention of silencing conservative voices. (Limbaugh: "All you really have to know about Net Neutrality is that its biggest promoters are George Soros and Google.") This may be hard to believe to those of us who actually know what it's about — reinstating pre-2005 law that ensured internet providers could discriminate on the basis of volume but not content. Since the opposing side is so badly misinformed, those of us who want the internet to remain open to innovation and freedom of expression have to help educate them before the debate can really be held."
Toys

Apple Forces Steve Jobs Action Figure Off eBay 233

Hugh Pickens writes "Kevin Parrish writes in Tom's Guide that last month, just in time for Christmas holiday gift-giving, M.I.C. Gadget began the manufacture and sale of a Steve Jobs action figure featuring an oversized head, Steve's trademark black shirt/blue jeans outfit, and a new iPhone 4 like a magical world-saving talisman in Jobs' left hand. The action figure, selling for $79.90, came with an Apple logo stand and cartoon balloons for writing custom messages. Soon a warning letter from Apple stated that the figurine violated a California statute prohibiting the use of a person's likeness in a product without prior authorization and sales ceased. But shortly after production stopped, the figurines began to appear on eBay selling for up to $2,500. Now Apple's lawyers have raided the online marketplace, zeroing in on one Canadian eBay seller who had already sold the figurine for $1,125 and eBay has removed other listings, telling sellers that the object for sale 'violates a celebrity's right of publicity.'"
Bug

Problems With Truncation On the Common Application 135

jaroslav writes "A combination of rigid caps on space and poor documentation of the space limits is adding stress on students applying for college using the Common Application, the New York Times reports. The story explains that the application lists word limits for questions, but actually enforces space limits. As a result, an answer with wide characters, such as 'w' or 'm,' may run over space even without reaching the stated word limit. It is not explained why an electronic submission must have such strictly enforced limits."

Comment Re:Geeky devices (Score 1) 202

When all the major networks ban a TV product I would think an anti-competitive FTC investigation should be something worth looking into. Basically they banned a browser with a specific user agent string based on the company that provides the device. Can you imagine if all the networks decided to ban Dell computers but not HP?

Comment Re:I earned it (Score 1) 853

Your hubris is epic. They haven't decided anything yet. You're basically saying that FCC setting out regulations (which are toothless) may possibly be bad in the future. So tell us, oh great predictor of future bad regulations, what's going to happen? I don't suppose you actually have the ability to lay out specifics of what you're even talking about, do you?

I wish I could tell you what I think you've actually earned the right to but I'm going to leave that part out for civility's sake.

Comment Re:What a suprise (Score 1) 853

What the current congress feels about the matter is a bit irrelevant since the powers the FCC have are derived from the Telecommunications act of 1996. The Federal Court said they didn't have the legal framework to regulate under Title I. However, seeing as they do have the legal framework to regulate telecommunications under title II, and other titles, it's still possible they do from a legal sense if they were to reclassify.

Basically the court didn't simply say "u dunt haz authority on internets." Rather, it was a legal technicality that was the inevitable result of reclassifying telcos and cable internet under title I as information services so as to "deregulate" them. This actually helped strengthen the monopolies of the telcos to be on par with cable monopolies.

And the court was wrong to decide the way it did. Did you know that Comcast had previously gotten it's way out of a class action lawsuit from its users by saying the FCC did have the authority? Then only to turn around and argue in that case the FCC didn't have the authority?

Regardless, if you honestly think it's unreasonable for the regulatory body for telcos and cable companies should not regulate internet services (which they bundle with video and phone) from those same companies, then I don't know what to tell you.

Of course it matters what representatives and courts say and do, but I feel the majority of them as so far in the wrong as to be mind boggling. This is clearly what the FCC was created for. You can argue that regulation isn't needed, and that's a valid opinion, but to say that the FCC has no business regulating communications services because of imprecise legal language is just sad diversionary bs.

Comment I'm also an Android developer and I don't (Score 3, Informative) 424

I'm also an Android developer and I don't share those concerns. There have been some frustrations, yes, but there are usually decent workarounds for a lot of things. As an example: Bluetooth support wasn't really solid until 2.0, yet there are excellent backport open-source libraries that make it easy to provide that support to 1.5 and 1.6 devices.

I completely disagree about reflection as well. Using reflection you can degrade gracefully for platforms that dont support what you're doing. Reflection is not ugly at all, it actually quite an elegant deign pattern imho.

If you're ending up with 6 layouts for each screen you're doing something wrong and perhaps overreaching in your support for older devices or your layout is overly complicated. It's unreasonable to think the latest Mass Effect game would run on a tiny 320x240 screen. And while that's hyperbole, yes, the point is made.

Just to be clear though, I don't find you concerns invalid, However I don't think this is unique to Android.

Granted there is still much work Google and the manufacturers could do to streamline all of this. But any software development platform, any OS, has some level of variation for what is supported. OSX, Linux, iOS, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, HTML5/JS/CSS, Blackberry OS. Really the only platforms that don't, are the video game consoles. But now even that's starting to happen there too with external storage and peripherals.

Comment Re:What a suprise (Score 1) 853

Yes why in the world would the Federal Communications Commission, that normally regulates Telcos and Cable companies, think it has authority to regulate a new communication and information service they provide over the same wires and spectrum with some of the same types of content as cable and telephones.

Golly gee, that's just crazy talk!

/s

Comment Re:What a suprise (Score 1) 853

How is toothless regulation a problem for the anti-regulation crowd? Or were you just pining for a chance to call someone a statist?

Most of those who are pro Net Neutrality wanted real regulation, not toothless fluff to cater to the anti-regulation, pro-business crowd. If anything it's your pocliy positions that got us this. Toothless regulation is pretty much the same as no regulation in my mind.

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