Audiobooks and podcasts are your friends

It's not just the Chinese you know.

Here in the UK it varies between unwise for commercial businesses to use US data storage through against internal rules for many government organisations to straight illegal for anything that has personal information like hospitals and police.

What I do as a private individual is my own business. It would not be rigt that people that had a legal care of duty over my details kept it somewhere that criminal(1) organisations like the NSA have free reign to do what they like.

(1)They may or may not be illegal but they are certainly criminally breaking laws and even your constitution,

So you agree then...

I'm not sure that it is even possible but is needed is a very simple app that clears off all the bloatware and apps that nobody wanted anyway.

It can't leave the phone unlocked as most users are not even aware of what root is and could cause even more awkwardness to themselves.
That would also cause some supposedly secure apps to stop working as the phone would now be "insecure.
It would also block business use as MDMs would block the devices.

I remember there used to be the Decrapifier for new Windows PCs and people who did not feel able to uninstall things themselves.
Somehow, I imagine that Google would not been keen and manufacturers would be even less enthusiastic. PhoneCos would be even more anti!

A while back, I read an article about this. Someone suggested "database poisoning".
It sounds illegal but I am not so sure. All that everyone needs to do is to tag other people as you and vice versa. If enough people did that, it would mess up such a system.

Your message is partially right. iPhones market share is heading down true but unit sales were still rising and have just taken a boost from China.

In the long term, your provocative heading may well turn out to be correct but that is years away. Businesses want their development done now on machines that are "out there" at present, not years away.

I would like it If Windows phones actually caught on but that one may be even further away. Their market share is so low that it could be hugely changed by a rounding error.

Businesses are shedding BlackBerrys at speed. There are two alternatives. Android for companies interested in cost, functionality and versatility or iPhones for appearance, coolness and keeping non-technical executives happy. Windows phones are somewhere in between but it is hard to tell as they are so rare.

I have just had my work BB replaced with an iPhone. Our department has provided support for them for years but now we are on them too. As I was aware, in comparison to good android phones it is limited and fiddly. Sending email is infuriating. I suppose the fashion conscious don't use email any more. I've got better things to do than look like a manager. I would have preferred a Note4. I could then leave the tablet behind. As it is, I read the email on the iShiny but if I need to reply, it's Android 7" tablet to the rescue!

Maybe iThings would fo the way of the Dodo if there was more than one alternative. At present, there is only Android and that is not favoured by the uninformable suit wearers.

but I comment a lot

The place is full of vertical groups - photographers, loads of technical (even iPhans), Political discussions from the US far right to the rest of the planets left, news about anything and everything from everywhere and no doubt stuff that I am not interested in and so have ignored...
So this is yet another posting from someone who has not really checked out the system.

Gates has made much more of a positive contribution to technology than Jobs. Having had to deal with the inrush of his products may have kept me busy (Yes I am not 25 anymore either) but he played a major part in the ubiquity of IT nowadays.

Also Gates comes from actually "doing" technology. He coded, Jobs did not. Steve Jobs, as has been said here, was a salesman. He was also a disigner of cool looking stuff. It was his attitudes that made Apple devices the thing that wannabe beautiful people lusted after. It was his preferences that put form ahead of function and so on...

Are you saying that people working for Jobs created BSD for example? Not True.

Again, he did not create anything other than ways to use things that other people had.

WTF would I want a laptop for?

I have a work PC, a home PC, a Work Android Tablet and my own Android Tablet. I think that covers every need. Android has a very nice Remote Desktop Connection app - from Microsoft. (It also exists for iThings.) This lets me remote to my work desktop the same as any laptop. I get Exchange based email on the work tablet and there are loads of apps that allow me access to network storage. I presume that iOS users will have a few as well.

What is the point of a laptop - other than to give me eye strain and RSI?

The battery on my work tablet lasts longer than a working day. My own tablet lasts from about 2.5 hours if playing certain games to over a week if charged and left on a shelf while I am away.

I am not from the USA and have never considered most of your countryfolk to be aware of where the world is far less what is happening in it. I have seem the occasional clip of one of your talking heads and the BBC sometimes has them on for insights into what is happening in your country. Perhaps we just get the amateurs talking to the foreign press.

The area around Chernobyl and Pripyat is fast becoming the best collection of natural history in Europe if not the world. The videos and pictures from there vary from the sombre to the absolutely fantastic. No multinational (read US corporation) is going to try and build factories, take wood or anything else from there. Animals killed there and sold elsewhere are easy to identify. Radioactivity is higher than normal all over it but very little of it now is unsafe for the next 100,000 years.

There is plenty on the web about it - my early favourite was http://www.kiddofspeed.com/ although there are occasional questions as to whether they are real.

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I need to be able to look up all information about someone. If I didn't, I wouldn't need the internet. I would just ask them to attach anything they felt I should know to their application.

So if they break Google, I will need another search engine. It may need to be run from somewhere outside the control of the EU, USA, NSA, FBI and so on..
Perhaps there is someone in Russia who knows about computers?

I'll stick to the EU over the USA though. Less militaristic and their silliest ideas are aimed for human beings and against corporates. At least they want us to think they are trying...

The problem sometimes is that the people from the location are all for it but NIMBYs are brought in specially.

I Come from further north than Aberdeen. In Orkney, we have had wind turbines for decades but various people would come from central or southern England and try to drum up opposition. I once had some on my (parents) doorstep. They told me about the harm that these things would do to me and how noisy they were. I declined and they moved on. I don't remember a single friend or relative who was interested in their stories.

That's a new one! I only knew about the pulse jet propelled V1s. The only WWII Von Braun rockets most of us had heard of were the V2s.

As far as is known, no rocket propelled V1s ever crashed into England, or anywhere else for that matter.
Perhaps they all went into space....