Android has had a good permission manager for years: LBE.

You can do blanket bans, whitelists, etc or drill down into granular permissions for each app. It can also block abusive texts, etc. You do need root.

It's pretty incredible but sadly predictable that Apple can keep winning over juries in its home county of Santa Clara to award it damages mainly for a patent (pinch to zoom) already declared invalid twice by the USPTO. Thanks however to the US's weird system, Apple can go on appealing until 2017 or 2018 before it finally runs out of people to whine to. I'd like to think that sanity could prevail then, but as recent experience shows, the US President would have no qualms about vetoing any adverse judgement against Apple but would be okay letting it stand against Johnny Foreigner.

The research being conducted with the data collected in MOOCs is one of the most socially valuable results possible since it leads directly to better education for the world.

This scans like marketing newspeak. Astroturf?

Says the Republican

There's not enough space in the world for laughter sigils here.

Again with the labels. You're really into simplifying, aren't you.

everyone but Samsung and the Apple haters agree.

It must be nice to see the entire world split into these tidy categories that define behavior. Very soothing. Very simple.

Your argument seems to rest on drawing a complete comparison between the evils of Apple and the evils of Samsung. As such, given that the two companies are apparently, by your argument, about approximate, then the only quantitative, non-falsifiable difference between them within the parameters of argument is their relative donations to Obama. We then arrive back at our original premise, which is that politicians' behavior is correlated with their relative payment amounts from donors. Congratulations, thanks for backing me up.

Samsung obtained a ban using Standards Essential, FRAND patents

The substance of the original ITC ban on Apple notes that Samsung offered Apple FRAND access via a standard percentage licence fee for the FRAND patents. What is unusual is that Apple refused to pay that licence fee but then did not return with a counter-offer. Apple basically refused to negotiate and continued importing products using the patents but without paying anything. Given Apple's refusal to even begin negotiating that seems evident bad faith, the ITC had no option but to decide against them

Of course, now that Obama vetoed that decision, now you have the absurd position where a hold of patents essential for the operation of a technology is not getting paid for them by a major patent abuser, and now has limited recourse. Whereas the holder of some minor design and questionable methods patents has a new import ban still standing. So thanks to Obama's protectionism, we've entered topsy turvy patent land, where essential patents become worthless, and design patents become coin.

You actually believe Obama made that decision himself?

Well, not entirely. There's also the bipartisan lobbying by Obama's fellow USians. Despite the fact that Apple dodges most of its US tax via the Double Irish, and indirectly Apple employs 700,000 Chinese to make its gadgets (vs 43,000 in the US), it's still marketed as a "United States" corporation. So it plays on the sympathies of its "local" politicians.

But you know, a couple of hundred grand goes a long way. If Samsung had been paying as much, maybe it would have got more consideration.

Obama got $308,081 from Apple in 2012
Obama got $1,000 from Samsung in 2012 (as $250 and $750)

Even disallowing the home team advantage, I really would be surprised if Obama does Samsung the same favour he extended to Apple last week and overturns this ban.

Google spend more than 7 times as much in the same timeframe.

Well, the issue is Obama overturning an ITC ruling favouring not Google but Samsung over Apple. So dragging Google into it is a kind of distraction.

Apple paid Obama $308,081 in 2012
Samsung paid Obama $1,000 in 2012 ( as $250 and $750).

How likely is it, do you think, that Obama will turn around and veto the recent Apple-requested ITC ban on Samsung products?

Apple doesn't actually donate much to politicians at all

Apple paid Obama $308,081 in 2012.

Apple spent $1,410,000 in lobbying in 2013.
Apple spent $1,970,000 in lobbying in 2012.
etc etc

These are just the above-board, reported amounts. Thanks to recent SCOTUS decisions, corporate slush funds are becoming effectively cryptic. The declared amounts are more like a formality.

Nerds opining on psychiatric diagnosis...

This should go about as well as psychiatrists opining on monads...

it's due to hardware-level support of DRM

No, it's not. Because when the Netflix app was being released to a select group of Android phones and tablets, some minor build.prop hacking of the extracted APK enabled it to play on a whole other bunch of machines. This is still true for some machines where Netflix thinks it won't work... but it does.

Tyranny starts with Brownshirts

One kind of tyranny does (if you are defining tyranny as an aggregate gross reduction in the availability of positive and negative freedoms throughout a society). But here's the kink. Brownshirts came from Freikorps-like gangs made up mainly of disaffected, militarised men, many of them ex-army, often independently armed, organised on a local or neighbourhood level, and with a deep antipathy to what they perceived as "leftist" Statism.

You're going to need some bigger power cords:

The Sun Fire V1280 system is supplied with four detachable power cords:
Voltage: 200 to 240 VAC
Circuit breakers - North America (4): 15A to 20A
Inrush Current: 18A after 100 microseconds
Surge Current: After 5ms brown-out short term surge is higher at 75A
Power Consumption: 3300W max