Well once someone owns nearly everything as Mr. Ellison does on the island of Lanai, is the distinction between government and the one super wealthy individual in question really that distinct anymore?

Well once someone owns nearly everything as Mr. Ellison does on the island of Lunai, is the distinction between government and this one super wealthy individual really that distinct anymore?

At least at the grocery store you can get beef, beer, and potato chips. Now try getting that from the NSA.

Tina Fey is an excellent actress and her "I can see Alaska from my house!" joke wasn't too far from Palin's actual words.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXL86v8NoGk

That's fine with me. They can have their ABC Family and Christian Broadcasting with their family friendly TV and I'll take my HBO with its Game of Thrones.

If you really want to be precise about it then that old lady did not claim that Obama is a Muslim, she claimed that he is an Arab.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QhJJBfwJME

People who keep their small, pretty phone in a bulky, ugly case.

Posting from my Nexus 4 for the irony.

I tend to agree with the notion that Google would prefer to see SD cards go away. I upgraded from an EVO 3D with all kinds of bugs related to its micro-SD card. It was constantly running "out of storage space" despite the fact that it's 32GB card was only half full. The problem would crop up constantly when updating apps. Some apps would update happily, including games of more than 1GB in size. But other apps, including newer apps designed specifically to run on Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), would throw up the out of storage space error. (Facebook for example had to be uninstalled and reinstalled with every update once I'd installed more than a few dozen apps.)

Then I upgraded to Google’s own Nexus 4 and all those bugs went away. I now have half the storage of my old phone but none of the headaches. I have a installed a hundred or more apps and my new phone has never once complained about being low on storage. I can't store my entire music collection on my phone but I can stream it with Google Music. And it's so much faster than my old phone! I've yet to experience a moment of lag despite having loaded up my phone with apps. Would I like to have have the option to install extra storage space via an SD or micro-SD slot? Of course! But I'd rather not return to the headaches of my old phone's highly flawed expansion card support.

An older phone like the EVO 4G; rooted, with Cyanogen Mod installed in Airplane Mode? Seriously, I'm not aware of any wifi-only 4' Android tablets. (Although I'll bet Archos probably has one that no one buys.)

I'd rather have an F-22. At least that's a real plane now. Or better yet, an SR-71. Or while we're fantasizing, a YF-12, the missile armed variant of the SR-71. There's nothing cooler than a hypersonic dogfighter.

...instead of thinking "they spent $60,000 of our tax dollars on this?" You think, "Why are they using Next Generation uniforms on an Original Series set?"

It's hardly FUD when people who've used Google products for years, rightly or wrongly, complain when Google discontinues them. And it's also not FUD when these same people wonder how long the latest Google product lasts.

But I didn't use iGoogle, so I didn't speak up....

That was a bit overly dramatic but that's the bottom line, when we're happy with a product, we'll continue to use it and ignore the warning signs about its parent company. It's probably not a good idea but it's the nature of the beast.

It's not just at the developer level. I was referring to the OS itself. Android has changed more over the years than iOS has and this is the case on every level: hardware, software, UI. Look at a T-Mobile G1 (the first Android device ever) and compare it to Nexus 4 or any other Android phone today. The former looks much more primitive compared to its descendant than the original iPhone looks next to an iPhone 5. Similarly, screenshots from Android 1.0 look far more primitive than those from 4.0. The transition from iOS 1 to 5 by comparison is far more gradual. And this is without bringing up the tremendous variation (both good and bad) that comes from the different Android handset makers customizing their individual versions of Android.

While the consistency that iOS has maintained over the years does have its charms it can also be stifling. Don't like how your Android phone looks? There are a million and one different options for reskinning it (and that's without rooting it and installing alternative ROMs) and you can bet that your next Android phone will look wildly different. Don't like how your iPhone looks? There aren't a whole lot of customization options unless you Jailbreak it and your next iPhone will probably look a lot like the current one.

My Nexus 4 doesn't have any hardware buttons. Well, it does have volume buttons and a power button. But the four software "buttons" at the bottom of my screen right now are a down arrow which collapses the keyboard and turns into into a back button when the keyboard is not in use. Moving on there is also a house button (does that count presented "real object") which brings up the launcher. And there's Window button which brings up my list programs which now appear pear as thumbnails instead of icons as they appeared in previous versions of android.

Finally, there is indeed a menu icon but it no longer looks like the old Android menu button. I always thought that Android menus were pretty weird or rather that the old Android menu button was pretty incongruous. The old Android menu button resembles a traditional menu; a cascading set of lines of text hanging off the menubar. But Android menus are actually little blocks at the bottom of the screen. Worse, sometimes the Android menu button won't open a menu, will open a settings page. So there was a disconnect between the onscreen representation and the results presented to the user. The new Android menu is an ellipses (a set of three dots...). I find that change interesting because it subtly changes the expectations of the user. Instead of a specific type of menu which never really existed in Android, the new button merely suggests that there is more to see or do with your app.

I think a better way to describe what Android's developers are doing is by saying that they're constantly rethinking and refining the UI to make it more logical and accessible to the user. This is in stark contrast to iOS which has largely remained unchanged since the original iPhone. In some ways that is because iOS got a lot more right on its first try than Android did but there also seems to be a genuinely geeky love of experimentation to Android which rightly or wrongly seems missing from iOS.