From what I've seen of the reviews, WP is a pretty good OS, and the Lumia phones are being sold at pretty competitive prices with lots of marketing behind them. So, now MS and Nokia are fishing around for explanations for why they aren't selling to consumers.

The answer is the MS brand. After years of pushing crap on users, using nasty and anti-consumer tactics to fight their competitors, and trying to harm the Internet, MS is a tarnished consumer brand - surprise, surprise.

Obviously, I think this is fair, but I also think it is fair that consumers and the industry re-evaulate brands. MS has been much better behaved in recent years (e.g. they are trying to win the browser wars by making their browser better) so maybe they deserve a second chance?

A brief read of the news recently makes it clear that the patent situation is completely out of control.

The hope was that Google buying Motorola would create enough balance between the portfolio's of Google, MS, and Apple that it would be in all of their interests to return to some form of truce.

RIM has an enormous stockpile of patents - if MS gets them, all bets are off.

"The future of mobile open source is pretty much dead at the moment."

Generally, I find that the open-source absolutists who won't even admit the existence of an open-source option unless it is perfect are the ones who end as the biggest Apple fans (Stallman excluded, of course).

Like you, perhaps, I was rooting for Maemo/meego/whatever - I had the 770, 800, and the 810, and I wrote software for them. But face it, Nokia messed up, and there is another open-source mobile OS.

Sure, the google apps that ship on top of Android aren't open-source, but do you really think that Nokia would have kept every piece of Maemo open if it had taken off?

I agree that Google is just another big evil corp and should be watched closely - I'm a fan of much of what they have done, but I still try to remain critical.

But this is nothing like what MS tried to do to the web. I'll repeat some of what I posted above: with NaCl, Dart, WebM, and SPDY, Google is not replacing web technologies with proprietary technologies - they are optimizing pieces of web technologies.

Even when you use these technologies you are still writing a standard web app and it still runs on all browsers - just without the Chrome optimizations. For NaCl for example, the primary use case (according to Google) is that you take your bundle of HTML/CSS/Javascript and replace pieces of the javascript with native code. When deployed to other browsers your app uses the original javascript instead of the optimized NaCl alternative.

More importantly, these technologies are all open source and restriction and royalty free. So, for example, Amazon is now using Google's SPDY technology in their browser without any royalties or advantage to Google.

To me these seem like reasonable ways to move the web forward without subverting it.

So, if you want to be pissed at Google then note that a couple of weeks ago they cancelled their project to make Green technologies competitive with coal. That didn't get nearly enough press. But when it comes to the web they (for now) still appear to be behaving themselves.

I'm guessing they mean that you are more secure now that you can run apps in your browser which you previously had to install into your OS. The privileges enjoyed by an NaCl browser app are really minimal compared to the same app installed with admin on Windows (which is how most users do it).

Regarding web standardization, note that NaCl is nothing like Flash or Silverlight: rather then replacing standard web technologies with proprietary technologies, it is primarily a way to optimize pieces of web technology. You take your bundle of HTML/CSS/Javascript and replace pieces of the javascript with native code. And you don't do it with some proprietary google language - you do it (eventually) with whatever language you want.

To me it seems like a reasonable way to move the web forward without subverting it (or even altering it much).

"Otherwise, what's the difference if one still has to install software on both systems to make it feasible?"

Well, given that TeamViewer starts at $700 for commercial use, I would say there is rather a large difference.

On the plus side, you can't accuse RIM of being ignorant of this problem, or of not taking it seriously.

RIM's decision to support Android apps on their new QNX-based OS must have been very painful and probably resulted in a backlash from partners who had invested a lot in their existing app platform.

The upside is that the Playbook and the next gen of BB phones will have access to the vast store of apps that consumers want these days in spite of the lack of developer support described in TFA.

Seriously, half of the stories that get posted on /. now are from trolls, particularly the ones about Android. It's gotten so bad that I really feel guilty that I'm continuing to read slashdot - I think it is wrong of me to continue to give my attention to such a low quality source of news and discussion when surely there are higher quality outlets available and more deserving of our attention.

So, what are those other sites? Has some other site picked up where /. left off? A site where they (or their system) somehow weeds out the lowest quality items before accepting them?

You forgot:

        Apple will remove any app that makes fun of friendly politicians or mentions the name of any competitor (until your content wins a Pulitzer).

Seriously, a guy had to win a Pulitzer to get Apple to re-admit his political satire.

It's not the same kind of information at all. The android file (only available if you have root) is a temporary cache. That is totally difference then the Apple file which holds the data about your location since you bought the phone.

The fact that he considers them the same, and the rest of his article, make it clear that he is merely some obscure, inaccurate, apologist.

With this story being reported all over the Internet, by media and blogs both respectable and ridiculous, why did /. choose to use this ridiculous one. /. seems to have turned into a sort-of FOX news of tech discussion - without even a pretense of objectivity.

Speaking of which, here's one of my favorites pieces so far. A Forces columnist asks whether this discovery (of the Apple location history file) is cool or creepy and concludes that it is cool. She decides that it is actually a great feature and pushes Google to get to it and see if they can come up with a similar feature:
http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/2011/04/20/cool-or-creepy-your-iphone-and-ipad-are-keeping-track-of-everywhere-you-go-and-you-can-see-it/

So maybe the blog post that /. choose for this whole saga is not actually the worst piece written on the topic.