The amazing part here is there doesn't seem to be much basic 'offline' intelligence built into them so that if control signals are scrambled or lost it can fly straight and level until conditions improve.

I completely agree. As a person who has nothing but contempt for most lawyers, Michael Geist is one I have a vast amount of respect for. He's one of the few people that actually has the interests of Canadians (now and in the future) in mind with his writings and opinions. I wish our 'leaders' and policy makers would take his opinions to heart.

As a solution to the 'barely managed marketplace', you could use another marketplace, like Amazon, or F-Droid mentrioned above. I wonder if anyone is working on a more tightly curated market for Android. I would think that there's money to be made from the more security-conscious.

Many of us don't need FaceBook or NetFlix. F-Droid is great, and there's actually a lot of stuff that's actually on both. Wonder if some of the Play versions are included in some of the adware-added nstuff they're talking about ...

Anyway, it's damn nice to have options. I realize Google bashing is the funded topic these days, but I wonder if anyone's done an analysys of the Amazon app store for the same sort of thing.

Up until this point a lot of our copyright policy seems to have been dictated by the US. In the last couple of years, I think the US copyright lobby was actually found to be sending the exact text of what they wanted included to the people in Canada responsible for it.

It sounds to me like they intentionally used a browser's weaknesses to run something against the users wishes, or more accurately, without asking them. A definite 'evil' in either case, and a criminal act of some sort in at least one of them.

You do understand that you can use Android with any ties to Google whatsoever? Many of the same things you're avoiding with Google search are also there in Bing. As someone else mentioned, if you're not paying for the service with money, you're paying for it with something else.

Sadly, I think you're right, although in this case I think in this case the fine against Google was to small. This really was 'Evil' of the sort that they normally avoid.

Ctrl-Alt-Del has named it the "Pulsing Blue Dick-punch of Sadness". I think that's way too good a name not to be generally adopted for the condition.

The Pixel has a _really_ nice screen. The resolution of this one is what I'd consider a bare minimum for a developers machine.

I'm not sure what you require for high specs, but System76 has some decent 'gaming class' laptops that might fit the bill. Their Bonobo 17" maxed out a pretty decent machine, though quite heavy for a laptop.

Our their poor grasp of security, or attacks against hackers, or penchant for proprietary connectors and accessories, or fake reviews, or ...

A decent company would have outed the requests (if allowed, or ideally even if not). The problem is, I would guess that they're promised government contracts, etc, in exchange for their 'patriotism'. Global companies should think globally and not let local greed endanger their business.

It is typical of their behaviour though. Basically it shows that you can't trust any feature they advertise to remain.

Perhaps, but I can't help thinking that making assumptions will lead to unpredictable and inconsistent behaviour. Convention over configuration and type inference is one thing, but assumptions are completely another. It's like the dangers in lower level languages where a programmer assumes memory will be zeroed ... and _usually_ it is. It leads to obscure errors. There's a lot to be said for beiong explicit where possible.