Even if they aren't familiar with exactly how far a mile is, they know that it's a unit of distance used in similar situations to kilometers. It's reasonable to expect that the meaning of the saying wouldn't be lost on them.

Because most people really don't give a flip about whether a system is open or not. A small percentage of a small percentage is worth ignoring for large companies.

Any phone that matches the iPod Touch's specs will be in a similar (or lower) price range at this point. Its lower screen resolution and size, non-expandable memory, single camera, and aging CPU point to a budget phone. Something like a 2nd-generation Motorola Moto G kills it in every spec besides on-device storage, and it has a MicroSD slot to help take care of that. It's available new for $180, directly from Moto. Do you have more requirements that you haven't mentioned? Or are you just trying to be difficult?

It's apparently part of the bluetooth module in a lot of phones, rather than the cellular radio..

This is generally accomplished by using headphone wires as antennae.

Hardware-level support for FM is apparently present for some fairly popular devices, but not activated in software. I don't think that the difficulties (power requirements, technical difficulty of implementation, etc) are as serious as you're making them out to be.

AC, Americans don't say "representative to" (or at least they don't in any part of the country I've ever lived in). It sounds unnatural. I would assume that the previous AC either made a typo or isn't a native speaker of English.

What does "deserve" have to do with business decisions? Someone who isn't willing to pay for a product+service that's available doesn't necessarily deserve to have an alternative that fits there need better. If there's no workable business case for it, it won't happen.

And what does paying for a cellular plan have to do with buying a smartphone, anyhow? There's plenty of capable hardware available off-contract. My last two smartphones see some limited use as PDA-like devices, and my current phone. Sometimes you make some good points. This doesn't look like one of those times.

I think that there are a few problems that people have with your statements, and it doesn't have anything to do with whether they're true or not.

First, that bit that I quoted is a logical fallacy usually called Argument from Authority.

Second, you are making a lot of claims without providing evidence. Since you are making the claims, the burden of proof falls on you; you don't get to dismiss the counterarguments that others have posted (often with backing evidence, like links to studies and papers) since you haven't provided anything to counter them aside from unsupported assertions.

I think we do. Part of the point is that it's wonderfully easy to link to information, since you seem to have it available in abundance. Personally, I'm completely ignorant of the Seattle area. I'm sure that I could find some kind of information about the situation up there, since I'm fairly handy with a search engine; I don't know if it would reflect reality though, or if I'd just find the mouthpiece of someone with an agenda besides truth.

Just for the sake of being clear though: I don't think you're trying to persuade anyone of anything. I think you're just trying to make a lot of noise and see how many people you can hook with a troll line. Congrats; you seem to have a good catch.

I saw something similar happen at my employer. A newer employee was sent on a mostly solo project to rewrite some of the core of our product, to make it easier to make some planned enhancements. Things didn't immediately work perfectly, and some of the founding employees fought the changes. Since they were necessary for the next release, and there wasn't another option for the features that we were required to make available, we ended up with two parallel sections of code that did basically the same thing but in very different ways. That was what we put up with for 4 or 5 *years* before the politics of the situation allowed us to integrate the changes back into a single codepath.
Before that, if you didn't touch that code constantly, it was usually unclear which path was being actively used and which was bitrotted to uselessness.

True enough. A Raspberry Pi, ODroid, or any other super-cheap computer is "just a computer". Except that it's also a computer that a kid could tinker around on without making a more serious computer unusable, and it's easier to use it to talk to other electronics, sensors, etc than a PC-style computer. It works well as a kind of compromise between a more expensive computer and a microcontroller. It doesn't do either job as well, but it's more flexible.

Ah, a "No True Scotsman" argument. From personal experience, I always skipped past the "program an elevator" section of the book and went straight to the chapters on graphics and sound. When I ran into something I didn't understand, I'd read the relevant section earlier in the book, but the "behind the scenes" stuff isn't what drew me in at first.

I'll agree that eventually, someone who actually enjoys coding will take joy in writing whatever they can. An algorithm with a slightly better runtime complexity will be fascinating...but that's not necessarily what sparks the initial interest.

But we *have* open software to run on those. That just leaves the hardware that you could be talking about.

Well, and the entire rest of the OS, if you don't count some of the drivers and firmware (which require either reverse engineering or published hardware specs from the manufacturers to implement openly).

Well, again, aside from BIOS/firmware and some drivers if I want all my hardware's features to work, it's here. We don't just have a kernel, we have full general-purpose OSes.

...And if the closed/proprietary software were to be open, then FOSS *would* have all the answers. As far as I can tell, that's the end goal of "the movement".

So did I. I see GPL-like licenses as being more protective than restrictive. They protect my access to code derived from the projects that are licensed that way. It's just a matter of perspective. I don't *want* to take someone else's open source code and make a closed-source derivative product. Until we have non-eternal copyright terms, I wouldn't really want to see someone *else* doing that either.

I can see the benefit of a system where proprietary software is closed for a period of time, in order to encourage development of new technology, and then made open to enrich the public as a whole. I don't see that happening, so out of practicality, I'll accept closed/proprietary software and hardware as a stopgap. It does the job right now, and I'll just buy the next-available closed system when my current one doesn't have the functionality that I need.

Wait. Are you talking about software or hardware? A laptop, tablet, smartphone, activity tracker, or smartwatch is a piece of hardware. All of those things can, and often *do* have a core of open-source software that they're built around. Hardware is much more difficult to manufacture than software is. If someone sends me the appropriate source code, I can get a working product by typing a few things in on my keyboard. If someone sends me hardware design files, I suppose that I'd either have to buy a FPGA of the appropriate size and speed for the hardware or I'd have to start talking to chipfabs about the 1-device manufacture run that I'd like them to undertake.

Hardware and software are apples and oranges. Although it would be convenient if open hardware were as easy to make as open software, it's not.

I've never felt restricted by open-source software. The problem has always been closed systems, for me. Although, I suppose that the licensing issues go to the back of your mind anyhow when you've got a system that won't do what you want, and there is no way for you or anyone else but the vendor to fix it.

Is a useless "feature" that goes through review and testing, but is more for amusement of the coders and/or customers than for any practical purpose, not an Easter egg just because it was known by the developers who wrote and tested it?

Oh, get the stick out of your ass. A little immaturity never hurt anyone (as long as that's all it is). Put the egg through review and testing like any other feature, or write it as something impossibly simple (undocumented program flag that prints out the programmer's name or something).

Done correctly, it's no more harmful than adding any other bit of code that wasn't explicitly asked for, like extra options/modes that were useful during development and don't hurt the function of the end product.

There are "real" easter eggs in Android related to this: http://www.askvg.com/hidden-secret-easter-eggs-and-daydreams-in-google-android-devices/

Duverger's Law. Due to a (presumably) unforeseen tendency of the US voting system, there's a strong tendency toward a two-party system. In the past, there were other prominent political parties. The tendency is that a party makes a major misstep, and a new party gains popularity, replacing it. Occasionally there are groups that split off into their own movements, but most of the time they fade away or re-absorb back into one of the major parties.