Personally, I would think that people would be happy to help the tax cops find the tax cheats. When rich people and corporations cheat on their taxes I have to pay more.

And yet I understand his surprise. For some reason, ordinary joes & janes (who get a salary and have little opportunity to cheat on their taxes) often seem to be against the idea of clamping down on high-end tax cheats. For some reason, their feeling that taxes are unpleasant (to put it mildly) translates into an aversion to the idea of them being properly enforced.

But they are selling it with stock Android!

From the reviews I read it sounds like it is easy to uninstall the Facebook from the First and make it a stock Android phone. (Though nothing I read addressed the issue of what would happen to your stock Android each time you update the firmware.)

I think we should cut Facebook some slack. Apparently Facebook Home is not as horrible as everyone expected, and more importantly, the built it on top of a perfectly stock Android and made that stock experience easily accessible to users' who tired of the Facebook Home experience. Plus, they picked HTC to design and build the phone for them.

Really, they did a lot right and I don't really think they deserved the massive failure that resulted.

Is it possible to fake a video well enough that 3 reporters (2 from the star, 1 from gawker), shown the video on a smartphone, would come to the conclusion that the video was real.

And I think we can assume that no intelligence agency or other other well financed organization was involved.

The press generally seems to be accepting that the video was legit, but that could be because of the way the Ford brothers' have responded.

Thanks for the warning, but the solution is very simple: stop linking to IBTimes.

To the best of my knowledge it is just IBTimes that does this (if you stop the video they wait a little bit and then resume it), and yet slashdot has recently become very fond of promoting IBTimes by linking them in their story summaries.

It's about choice. If the web does not have DRM then consumers can only use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an app (plug-ins are on their way out). That will generally be the few dominant platforms.

If DRM is a standardized part of the web then anyone with a standards compliant browser can access those services. This isn't guaranteed - there are various ways that Netflix (etc.) could still stop that from happening, but their support of this standard suggests that they actually want me to be able to use their service on my Playbook.

I want the choice to be able to stray beyond the dominant platforms and still use Netflix.

Yes, we all want our mobile apps to be efficient, but please don't lump Davlik in with javascript. I concede that Java/Davlik are not quite as efficient as native code, but running an Android app on your phone is not in the same league of inefficiency as using a web app.

While I admire Google's continued to push to improve and promote the web, their continued insistence that web apps are the future even for mobile - in spite of Android doing so well - seems crazy to me.

I agree with your general point, but the fine should also take into account that there is no evidence or indication that this was done on purpose, that they did anything with the data, or that they ever intended to do anything with the data.

So now they have been fined, sued (class action lawsuits), and pilloried in pretty much every jurisdiction of the world for this.

Do you really think that is not sufficient deterrent, and why do you even need deterrent there isn't really much of an upside?

Isn't IBTimes widely regarded as one of the slimiest sites around. Notice that, if you try to stop the auto play video it will wait a minute or two and then auto resume.

This idea that you can 'mine' for bitcoins is what makes me not take it seriously. It seems so arbitrary and ridiculous.

In the future, if they want to issue more bitcoin, I hope they will instead allow people to exchange other currencies for bitcoin, and setup a foundation (or something like that) which will use the currency that is raised to further the interests of the bitcoin ecosystem.

Actually, I think Google's Go language in the same terms as Rust.

NaCL and Dart do have some value in relation to Google's goal of moving the Web forward. If they really want the Web to compete with desktop OS's then javascript really is lacking.

Building a next-gen browser engine sounds like exactly what 'mozilla labs' should be doing.

On the other hand, creating a new language in order to do it, sounds like Engineers whacking off.

Comparing Google's Chromebooks to Reader is silly.

For one thing, Chrome and Chromebooks are central to Google's future.

And for all the fuss about Reader (i'm a heavy user myself) switching away from Reader has been dead simple since it is just a viewer based around a standard protocol. Google turfing it was annoying at most, and no indication that they will kill off their core initiatives.

I look forward to seeing Amazon and Google battle each other in providing Linux infrastructure. I know there are many excellent small providers, but no one has really come close to Amazon so far.

I can't believe anyone would mod your post up - the original was clearly sarcastic.

The thing that was wrong about that original post is the Eric Schmidt hasn't been the CEO of Google for a couple of years.

But most of those who wish to record you will be wearing invisible cameras - not Glass. Are you going to search everyone?