Its "niche," though, is people who are using feature phones and are thinking about buying their first smartphone. For these people, the main draw of a smartphone is being able to access the web. Firefox OS delivers that at a price point of $80, or even less with carrier subsidies. It won't ramp to a significant volume in rich countries, but there is a much larger "significant volume" of customers in places like China, India, Brazil, Latin America, etc. So you never know.

why waste the money on webOS?

Pretty good question. My understanding is they bought it for their Smart TVs.

This is actually a pretty good idea. I have one of their Smart TVs, and the UI is ugly, inconsistent, and a little buggy. LG might be a decent hardware company, but they lack Apple's knack for building decent UIs. It makes sense to me for them to pay for an OS where somebody has already done a lot of the thinking about how things ought to work.

As for why they can't use it for smartphones, too, I think the reasons are twofold: 1.) Although it was based on "the web," WebOS had more proprietary/nonstandard stuff in it than Firefox OS does, which makes it harder for it to gain momentum. That's not so much of a problem in the Smart TV world, where pretty much nothing has any momentum yet. 2.) The perception is that WebOS has already failed as a smartphone OS. For LG to put another smartphone product out now based on the same "failed OS" would be a pretty big gamble.

You are wrong. Some people do allege that.

There are Falun Gong members who hand out leaflets about this issue in Chinatown in San Francisco just about every day.

According to them, the Chinese doesn't just harvest organs from dead prisoners. They also harvest them from live prisoners, supposedly. As in, they are alive when the surgery takes place. After that, they are dead prisoners. Execution by organ harvesting.

I don't know how true all of that is, but then again, nobody does. There have been a few investigations by outside officials, some of whom have made some very damning statements. But other people refute those statements, and mostly China keeps information about executions and alleged organ harvesting very secret.

The brochure I have on my desk quotes Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Republican from Florida, as saying: "Falun Gong adherents have been systematically arrested, tortured, sent to forced labor camps for 're-education,' placed in mental institutions for brainwashing, and subjected to organ harvesting."

Again, I have done no actual investigation into any of this myself, I mention it only to suggest that it ain't so cut and dried as "they take the organs out of dead prisoners."

Haven't you heard? Gamifying a thing always makes it better.

I spoke to a YouTube employee about this.

He told me that, in effect, to give third parties access to the same APIs that Google's YouTube apps use would be akin to disclosing how Google's servers are set up, deep details of how its ad infrastructure works, and this kind of thing. Google doesn't give out that information to anybody.

All third party YouTube apps use the HTML5 API -- all but Microsoft's, which is why Microsoft's was blocked. BlackBerry's YouTube app uses the HTML5 API. very smart TV and every Blu-Ray player that ships with a YouTube streaming feature uses the HTML5 API. PlayStation, you name it. It's not like you can't build a commercial quality YouTube app using the HTML5 API, because everybody else is doing it.

Also, consider that the first version of Microsoft's native YouTube app had a download button that allowed you to save any video to your device. Anybody who's ever used YouTube knows that's one of the biggest no-nos, and that YouTube is intended to be a streaming service ONLY. So why did Microsoft build that feature into its app if it was trying to play by the rules?

Probable answer: This whole thing has been Microsoft spoiling for attention and trying cast negative aspersions on Google, from the very beginning.

Actually, it's not false reporting. It's just Slashdot pasting a misleading headline onto what was otherwise an accurately reported story.

Well, the OS itself is obviously native code, at least partially. But as far as add-on software goes, distributing mobile apps as binary executables is a surefire path to early obsolescence for phone hardware. Once all the developers drop support for older models in favor of newer ones running different chips, it's game over.

Such a system also makes it harder to introduce significant hardware changes. Say someone put out a smartphone with a new chip that used a different instruction set, for example. It's the old Itanium problem: out of the gate, none of the existing native binaries might work on it. So in terms of its value to consumers, the "latest and greatest" phone would actually be less useful than all of the older ones -- how does ZTE market that?

That's why Android apps aren't native code; they're Java/Dalvik. iOS apps might be native code, but that only works because Apple has total, iron-clad control over its entire hardware ecosystem. ZTE literally cannot make an $80 iOS device, even if it were financially feasible.

Where did this list come from? It seems highly unlikely that any phone would work on Sprint in the US but not on Verizon, and as far as I know the ZTE Open does not have a CDMA radio, which means it would work on AT&T and T-Mobile, but not Sprint.

Except not all members of the order Cetacea are whales. All cetaceans are marine mammals, but just like some cetaceans are whales, others are dolphins and porpoises. Similarly, humans are of the order Primates, but that doesn't make a human the same thing as a monkey, because while monkeys are primates they are not apes.

To sum up, scientists have invented a system by which to classify animals. Order is one level of it, but it gets much more specific than that, and that wasn't done for "marketing" or "branding" reasons. Furthermore, it seems silly to justify one's own ignorance by pointing the finger at the people who know what they're doing like they're purposefully trying to confuse everybody, when they're really trying to do the opposite.

"Rebranded"? Orcas belong to the family Delphinidae, the oceanic dolphins. They're commonly referred to as "whales" but that's not technically accurate. But hey, don't let science get in the way of your little speech about "marketing."

That's it, everybody! Last one out, get the lights.

I'm not sure I agree with this.

For starters, the film 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke called "The Sentinel." Clarke wrote the novel at the same time the movie was being made, and it was actually released after the movie, so it's essentially an adaptation of the film and by no means essential to appreciating or understanding the film.

What's more, Kubrick has a track record for taking the material he is bringing to the screen and adding to it or taking it in new directions not expressed in the written work -- see The Shining, for example, which diverges from Stephen King's book wildly.

Kubrick's film should be enjoyed as a film. All these comments saying you need to read the book to understand it just sound like people who couldn't understand the movie and feel guilty about it, so they went and got the book from the library. Don't feel guilty. The film is designed to be a bit inscrutable and to inspire thought and debate.

Well, you haven't met me, but if you're talking about everything between the ape men and Discovery then those happen to be my favorite parts of the film. My absolute favorite scene, in fact, is when Heywood Floyd runs into the Russian scientists at the Pan Am lounge on the space station. And if you want to see why these scenes are absolutely essential to 2001, look no further than the film 2010, which completely fails to understand anything about the earlier movie and portrays the Heywood Floyd character -- and everybody else, for that matter -- as a bumbling incompetent who couldn't survive an airline flight to Greece, let alone an interstellar voyage.

Well, what's ironic about it, really? Chromecast doesn't require Android -- and statistically, you're much more likely to own some flavor of iPad than an Android tablet. Google never promised you that you wouldn't need either one.