A far better analogy is snail mail. The judge has granted the right to enter an unlimited number of recipients houses and recover mail sent to them. The real question is who owns that mail, the senders, the receivers, the handlers or the, the ISP. That is the tricky question with regards to email versus snail mail and that technically email should be legally treated exactly the same as snail mail because by and large that is the public expectation.

That is a technical lie. If you had provided them with notebooks with hard disk drives, by far the majority of the information they required for the the whole school year could have been pre-installed on the notebook, with only minor update traffic required. Of course tablets lacking significant storage capability require a continuous flow of data, now add in class timing schedules, and the data flow has significant peaks which of course result in inevitable bandwidth problems. So not only poor input interfaces limiting creativity and foolish lock in but huge bandwidth problems.

Why doesn't NASA ignore the celebrity bullshit and name buildings after the people they did the real work of getting man into space and onto the moon, the Scientists and Engineers. NASA you want more scientists and engineers, than stop bloody giving them a back seat to the monkey in the cockpit, grrr ;).

Murdoch is also very unlikely to get Time Warner as long as he continues to try to buy it with junk bond status non-voting News Corporation stocks. News corporation just can not cut it on the internet which will make it a boat anchor for the Time Warner group. As News Corporations drops and Time Warner rises so the buyout will eventually be on the other boot. The MySpace was the death knell for News Corporation on the internet.

Made me think of the "Better Off Ted" episode, "Bioshuffle" (Season 1, Episode 9):

• Ted: So, what is it?
• Phil: We call it "The Voice of God."
• Ted: No, we don't.
• Phil: No, we don't.
• Linda: Field testing shows that the subject, or "victim," as I like to call people "helped" by Veridian Technology, can be hundreds of feet away and will hear the message as though it's being whispered only to them.
• Phil: It's highly persuasive. Advertising companies are very excited because it will allow them to burrow even deeper into the human brain.
• Phil: At full power, the sound wave is so intense it can cause vomiting.
• Ted: A machine that causes vomiting. Well, that could have all kinds of applications for the military... and fashion modeling.

All components have a cost, including the software. Let's say LG can include CrapKeyboard 1.0 for free, and GoodKeyboard 3.7 for $0.05/unit. Guess which one they're going to include?

Yes, phone pricing is broken down to that level. The cost of the supported software is a lot higher than the cost of the no-longer-supported software, because they're still paying the developers to support it. As long as CrapKeyboard used to work at least halfway decently (and it must have, because it was in the old production line), throw it in there.

It's a pretty simple explanation, actually.

Be cautious in what you claim. Dropping it in the toilet isn't a maneuver most of us would consider "smart".

No, but receiving a "free" phone and complaining that the free-market isn't forcing the vendor to fix its shortcomings is kind of disingenuous.

In the olden days, we'd have said he's "looking a gift horse in the mouth."

Wouldn't you expect someone who runs privacy organizations to have already rooted his phone?

It sounds like the bloatware is his biggest problem, and I just got a Moto X for the same price as an LG Optimus. Vanilla Android and no bloatware.

You are doing it wrong. If you type in pinyin for a common character, sure, you will get a hundred choices. But you should just ignore those choices, and keep typing. After you type the pinyin for a string of characters, there is usually only one valid interpretation. For instance, if you type "qing" you will get a hundred choices. But if you type "qinggeiwoyigepingguo" (meaning "Please give me an apple") you will get ONE choice, and it will be the correct one.

Which California? I hear there are 6 now.

I'm afraid to google "fat aggie".

I'm going back to my 1942 Corona typewriter with the "t" slightly raised.

Can't wait for an app that would allow anyone to be completely anonymous, even from the almighty Goog'lord.

The NSA's probably got them in stock.

Well of course that unemployed person ends up being employed when those around them with higher minimum wage buy stuff that needs to be made so that unemployed person now has a job. How much does an unemployed person make, likely the minimum wage once they become employed because the minimum wage jobs are the first to re-appear when the minimum wage is raised. As the flow on affect occurs so higher wage positions appear. The area of the market that loses is the slaver 'er' servant market, cheap maids, cheap gardeners etc. all paid for by cheap asses.