Blanket bricking of cell phones, or selective bricking of those of "ringleaders", is an inevitable problem for the most peaceful and well behaved political rally with this kind of technology in government hands. Remember the "Arab Sping", and Tianenmen Square, and even the more recent and quite peaceful "Occupy Wall Street" protests.in the US, and understand exactly why and how law enforcement want this kind of power.

How much space would it take on the install disc to have full manuals for all included packages translated into all supported languages?

If you'll remember, Windows XP's default theme was considered "Fisher-Price" until people saw Windows 8's Start Screen.

Won't have the Google Play Store. The Android CDD requires that apps run in the full screen (or at least think that they're running in the full screen). This means the calculator app fills your entire 24" monitor, obscuring whatever else you're working on.

Are you aware of what permissions a .deb has to the user accounts on your box?

Perhaps "Linux on the multi-window desktop" or "Linux on the desktop in a focused activity setting" is a more precise of what some people mean. The Android ecosystem, from the CDD on up, is staunchly opposed to rich window management, instead preferring a paradigm of all maximized all the time that makes it hard to work on one document while referring to another document.

Without a substantial usage share, it's hard to find affordable hardware on which to run "a technically damn good kernel".

Other than the political limits of obtaining cooperation from hardware manufacturers and application developers.

They want to prevent people from using new communication technology to self-organize and make the existing government obsolete.

Or maybe it's that I want to use mobile as a platform to develop new communication technology that will let people self-organize and make existing government obsolete, but this renders the enterprise pointless.

Yeah, probably that second one.

Any chance to pin that on the content mafia or patent trolls? C'mon, at least ONCE such a story has to hit someone we can uniformly hate and not be controversial.

Can't be. Great Leader invented the Ozone Layer.

Can't we just do what we usually do? Kill them all and call the ones that don't deserve it "unfortunately unavoidable collateral damage"?

Can we just agree on greed being the culprit? Democrat, Republican, where's the difference? As long as there's money to be made by ignoring the law and as long as breaking a law and getting caught is cheaper than heeding it, greed trumps "doing the right thing" any time.

Really? The public demanded? Who? Where? When? All I remember is scaremongering from the press and politicians telling us that the sky is about to fall and how they need to protect us.

I honestly cannot remember a single instance where anyone demanded to trade his liberties for "safety".

(Note, I tried to make the subject line read, "Books>Kindle>Audiobooks", but for some reason, Slashdot removed the ">"s.)

I absorb least of all from audiobooks, only partly because I usually fall asleep in the first five minutes.

Ever since the Kindle app got rid of the little graphical representation of where you are in the book (like a timeline, at the bottom, where you saw whether you were 1/4 of the way through, halfway or close to the end), I've been a little uncomfortable with my ebooks.

Say what you will about those old paper-and-board book things, at least you knew exactly where you were, and could get some mental image of the progression of the narrative arc. So when you'd only got maybe 1/10th of the book read (based upon the fact that only a little bit of the book was on the left hand side) and you were reading a mystery, you could pretty much rest assured that there were some pretty big plot twists to come. Maybe that has something to do with any less absorption from ebooks (if there really is less, which I doubt this study proves).

Even so, I read mostly everything on a tablet, except sheet music. And when a really good sheet music e-book reader (and editor) comes out at less than $2000, I'm going to grab one. Musical manuscripts are just too small, even on a 10" tablet. I need to be able to see two pages of music at a time (at least).