What do you mean "third party apps"? The summary and TFA claim that this one is in the official Google Play store.

Good point. Mind you, that kinda makes anyone who installs it even dumber than I would have thought.

Easy: Don't. Fucking. Install. It.

This is yet another piece of software which the user needs to download, enable installation of third-party apps, and install. Or the user might've installed it from a dodgy app store (in which case their device is likely already a teeming mess of malware).

Either way, the user needs to do something we've spent the last umpteen years trying to indoctrinate people against.

Wake me up when someone starts injecting this stuff through advertisements in web pages.

Perhaps if your PC runs on an ARM processor, it would be simple.

ARM emulation under x86 is feasible. Google "libhoudini". Whether it's simple is another question, but the pieces are there.

What if Google also opened a subsidiary in a country that banned garb like that required by Saudi Arabian law? How do they follow both laws at once across their entire organization?

Generally speaking, if the corporation can demonstrate that it's not possible to implement the law of all countries it operates in, and within any one country it *does* follow the laws of that country, that's good enough.

The problem is, if you actually read this particular ruling, Google didn't actually demonstrate that. Their argument was, in a nutshell, "we're a global operation, the database is hosted outside your country, so your order doesn't apply to anything except .ca".

Where the database is hosted doesn't matter because it's pretty much a given that google.ca and google.com and google.* are essentially the same place. If google.ca can have a result blocked, that same flag can be applied globally. So that argument doesn't really pass the giggle test.

The fact that Google (or Twitter, or Facebook, or...) normally only blocks certain content in the country that ordered the block is a corporate policy decision, not a technical or legal limitation. Child porn, for example, is something they can and will block globally. But corporate policy is not the law in any particular country.

So, that leaves the "we're a global operation" argument. And the judges response to that argument was, pretty much, "Good. Then you can block it globally, too."

In other words, someone made an assumption that all you have to do to stop a court ruling at the border is to point out that there's a border. The judge didn't buy it. Better luck in appeals court.

In other words, in this judge's opinion, since Google works on a global scale, they should be subject to the laws of all nations at once.

I think it's more that Google has a physical and legal presence in Canada (and many other countries to some degree or another), and hence a Canadian court order can apply to their entire business. The consequence of not following that order is that there are Google people in Canada who can be jailed for not following that order.

Companies who are only physically present in one country but have a web presence wouldn't be affected by court orders outside of their own country since that leverage doesn't exist, and many (if not most) foreign courts would likely toss a case due to lack of jurisdiction. In countries where a multi-national might have a small and/or expendable presence (i.e. a local shell company staffed by contractors), they could get away with ignoring a local court order with minimal risk (i.e. they might lose their .xx TLD).

No doubt Google Canada is set up as a separate subsidiary corporation and they think that there should be some sort of legal firewall at the political boundaries, but the funny thing about multi-national corporations is that these firewalls are always quite permeable when it comes to money flowing in a particular direction. So, why can't court orders follow the money?

And that do you really want to put your information into a service that may well go away, rather than trying to work out some way to use it locally.

I can live with the risk; I don't keep data online that I don't have local copies of or would be bothered if it went away.

I'd estimate that at least 50% of the services I use daily now won't be around in another 5-10 years, and 90% of the devices I use now won't be usable in another 5 years. That's the nature of modern technology, and it's not specific to Google.

Is there any way to retrieve my Google Health data from Google?

For approximately a 6 month period prior to the deletion date, people could download their data in a whole whack of formats. See the original announcement. Say what you will about Google, but they are good about giving lead time and tools to extract your information prior to a service shutdown.

That being said, being able to download your information and being able to do anything with it is a whole other thing. In the case of Google Reader, at least the output format was a standard format (OPML), so migrating elsewhere was relatively trivial (and Feedly pretty much turned it into a one-click experience). I'm not sure any competitors bothered to handle the Google Health formats.

Is this the kind of problem that cyanogenmod addresses?

With limits, yes.

CM's privacy guard allows you to block apps from getting at your address book or SMS and such. It also allows you to control things like camera/microphone access. And you can even disable background apps and notifications (for example, I have Facebook pretty much tuned so it can't do anything more than it can in a web browser).

One notable thing CM doesn't do is allow you to prevent Internet access for apps. I read that this is to prevent someone from downloading an add-supported app and then cutting it off from its ad networks. I order to do that sort of thing, you usually need to root and install a firewall or some other ad blocker.

Quite frankly, if you've got a phone that's out of warranty or no longer getting vendor updates, installing CM is worth looking into. It's a bit of a pain in the ass the first time (at least it was for my devices), but after that it's pretty smooth sailing.

If he had been working for them all along he:

(1) Would have gone directly to Russia
(2) Would not have given the information to reporters

Yes, but Congressman Mike Rogers said he was a Russian spy. Surely a US Congressman wouldn't lie about important stuff like that?

</sarcasm>

What's wrong with a few SuperHornets?

Nothing. At this point it's got nothing to do with the capabilities of the aircraft.

I'm guessing that the people who originally pushed for the F-35 still haven't retired/been voted out, and hence any choice except the F-35 would mean they'd look like idiots.

When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month.

It's an add-on to a pure-electric car to extend the range. The Nissan Leaf, for example, is rated at at least 120km/charge. So, in theory you'd never actually draw on this magic battery for your daily driving. It'd only be if you had longer trips or weren't able to plug in one night, etc.

The average commute in North America is well within the range of a plug-in electric vehicle, and this thing is just icing/insurance. There's going to be outliers, but if we routinely killed ideas because they didn't work for 100% of possible scenarios, we'd still be shivering naked in caves (fur being too darned hot for those in warmer climates...)

Usability my ass...

You see, you're assuming that your usabilty concerns matter. It makes far more sense when you realize that it was all designed for Steve Jobs.

just TRY connecting the damn thing to a projector or second display in a conference room and making it behave in a rational manner.

Steve didn't need to do that stuff. He had a technical team to handle projection and other A/V needs.

Or try taking a screenshot... what was that obnoxious key combo again? That's right... it makes no sense and can't be remembered by a mere mortal.

Don't be silly. Screenshots are handled by the marketing department.

Let's jump to the beginning of a line with the Home key, or the end of the line with the End key... oh wait, it doesn't have one. They conveniently replaced those with more key combinations that can't be remembered by us mortals. Apparently text entry isn't an important usability case for Apple.

Well, it turns out that the dead don't need to do much text entry...

There a word for that. It's called "previous". As in "the previous packet".

When you're talking about packet protocols, where things get lost, duplicated, or reordered, "previous" is an incredibly imprecise word.

The rule is, you have the contract done and signed before the previous one expires.

I expect that there's also a very applicable rule about how any contract negotiation after getting caught in anti-trust collusion against one of the largest retailers of your goods will probably involve you making more concessions that you might like.

Any wise old vets want to chime in about when to use "goto" and when not to?

Not claiming to be a wise old vet, but as a general rule of thumb, the ideal way to use it is to emulate control structures from even higher level languages. For example, if in C++ you'd write an error handling behavior in a function as an exception, in C you might goto a common area to cleanup transient memory and gracefully return an error code. Which is exactly what that snippet you've shown is doing.