To me, the underlying story is that Google is no longer as well managed as it has been in the past. Projects aren't finished; maybe those working on them got bored and decided not to be adult.

I've thought about and studied the phenomenon of companies slowly degrading for decades. Hewlett-Packard was already going downhill in the 1970s; the company was making data acquisition hardware that had an obviously unfinished design.

Fairchild Semiconductor was, at one time, the best manufacturer of transistors. The company began selling power transistors with epoxy casing. The epoxy degraded the transistors. It seemed that Fairchild never recovered.

Tektronix was a great company at one time; everybody in the tech world was impressed with Tektronix oscilloscopes. I suppose the good managers decided to move to other efforts. One problem was that Tektronix was not prepared for lower-cost competitors.

More recently, Adobe seems to me to be on a long downhill slide; the PDF file formats were a gift to the world. Now Adobe seems to me to be becoming more and more aggressive toward its customers.

Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank seems to me to be becoming tired of being CEO and making huge management mistakes for which there have been multi-billion dollar fines.

Did you actually read that article? It clearly describes exactly what I said: they use resistors on the data pins to signal the available current. There is no bidirectional negotiation going on. There are no extra pins or wires. The charger just has 4 resistors to create two voltage dividers for the D- and D+ pins.

So, are we redefining autism as encompassing those other conditions etc, or did we mistake autism for all that other stuff?

Btw, most school systems in the U.S. spend 30-40% of their budget on 'special needs' students. Including boys that cannot settle down and learn.

This is incorrect. There is no bidirectional negotiation between chargers and devices, nor are there any magic extra pins (at least for pretty much all Android and Apple products - dunno about Zune).

What there is is one USB charging standard, that basically says one thing and one thing only (that matters): if the data pins are shorted together (but otherwise not connected to anything), then the port is a Dedicated Charging Port. A DCP must meet certain voltage/current curve ranges and may be engineered to supply anywhere from 500mA to 1.5A (or more), with the voltage dropping as the device exceeds the charger's maximum. Devices are simply supposed to regulate current draw upwards until the voltage drops below a threshold, indicating the charger's capability. No digital negotiation takes place. Devices are limited to 1.5A charging current, which is quite typical for modern devices (and significantly better than the 500mA of a non-charging port).

There is a newer USB Power Delivery specification that is much more recent, supports higher powers, probably uses more complex negotiation (I haven't read it), and nothing implements it yet.

Then there's what Apple does - they have an incompatible implementation that uses resistors on the data pins in the charger to signal its current capability. Different resulting voltages mean different current levels. This is completely incompatible with the USB charging standard. Recent Apple devices (since the iPhone 3G or so) do support DCP chargers (to some extent - some charge more slowly, and I don't know about larger iPads?), but non-Apple devices will only charge at 500mA or worse from Apple chargers.

That sounds heartless.

What causes are included in that statistic? Food poisoning ? Fires? Knife wounds? And how often do people cook at home vs be exposed to communicable diseases, since the population is largely immunized?

BTW, I am in favor of imunization. I'm not in favor of denying unimmunized children healthcare because their parents did not have them immunized.

Except 120v requires twice as much copper, and higher currents, causing more fires. You also have the worst mains power connector in the developed world and measure your cable in feet. Stupid yanks.