Serious +1. Slashdot wins over few geeks by releasing new features using obsolete technology. I've been ignoring these videos because they're not available as HTML/5 Ogg or WebM.

Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?

There's a big difference between "source code available" and FOSS.

The only thing they've really allowed here is for volunteer developers to contribute to their proprietary product. Gee, thanks.

HTC and Samsung are having no trouble selling phones with unlocked bootloaders.

Of course carriers would prefer to have complete administrative access to your phones, control what you can do with them and bloat them with software you can't remove. Clearly market pressure is pushing in the direction of freedom.

If Android were GPLv3 licensed we wouldn't have a problem with companies locking down their bootloaders. We could use the energy we currently put into hacking root access on our own phones into improving the platform.

I obviously agree with the FSF.

Lets not forget that Facebook has been deactivating user accounts on the suspicion that they're using an alias for many years, they have a small dictionary of banned names to do this automatically. Have a unique first name like "Husky Smithson"? Too bad.

Only difference is Facebook accounts are not also used for email and other essential services.

They never claim that the board will be supported entirely through freely licensed software and drivers. Much of the hardware on the board is only supported through proprietary firmware/drivers. It would be great if Linaro could change that, but I doubt they have that kind of leverage (or interest). What we'll likely get is a board that requires an "evaluation SDK" filled with proprietary drivers compiled for the specific development environments they support while they parade their board around saying "isn't it great you can run Linux on this?"

Until they make a public announcement to the contrary we have no reason to believe otherwise.

This would be worth so much more if the board's chipsets supported freely licensed drivers. As it stands only proprietary drivers are available for most of the hardware which may or may not work with the kernel version/variant you want to use.

I currently own an HTC phone, and due to the bootloader being locked down I swore I'd never buy another. The recent announcement about future phones bootloaders being unlocked actually had me looking at the phones they'll have available in a few months. We're already paying roughly $10 a phone for all the media codec licenses; MP3, h.264, etc (none of which I actually use on my current phone), but paying Microsoft an extra $5 feels dirty.