Android and iOS both have permissions and protections in place to prevent apps from accessing personal data such as Contacts and Location. Although there have been incidents of breaches, the protections work most of the time. Android also sandboxes the apps, and although I'm not 100% sure I believe that iOS does so as well.

What is it about the Windows Phone implementation specifically that is so different and presumably better?

If you magically make the voting machines 100% secure, attackers will target the infrastructure that transmits, stores, and counts the votes.

I believe Chromium also excludes Google's software update functionality.

Slightly off-topic, but am I the only one that thinks the word "cyber" is a silly 90's throwback?

Okay, so TimSort.rangeCheck() was allegedly copied from java.util.Arrays.

Aside from the obviousness issues, this fact would make it slightly more sensible to use rangeCheck() for a copyright infringement case, except for the fact that java.util.Arrays was provided by Sun under the GPL v2. The GPL was written to encourage copying and modification.

The worst I could say about Google allegedly copying this code is that they re-licensed the GPL rangeCheck() method to Apache 2.0, which you can't really do; the combination of GPL code and non-GPL code would be a GPL end product. Regardless, I still don't see a billion dollar damage claim.

Wow, you're right, that's completely insane. Look at the revision history of TimSort.

How can Oracle claim copyright damages on a file in Java's source code that is Copyrighted in 2009 by Google?
Why hasn't Google tried to nullify the copyright claim on this file on the grounds they they wrote the code and that they themselves own the copyright?
Why would Oracle make an issue of this file if the case for infringement is so weak?

None of this makes any sense to me whatsoever. I feel like I'm missing something; Oracle can't be this outrageous and Google's lawyers can't be this dumb. Can someone clarify?

What's amusing is that the 9 lines in question don't even implement the algorithm; they perform a quick sanity check before the real computation starts. Is this really the best they have? Couldn't they have found more creative lines of code to be infringing on a copyright?

Anyway I've been looking some stuff up. TimSort was originally written into Python by Tim Peters in 2002 (BSD-style license). If I'm not mistaken, that would mean that Sun wrote a trivial check as part their own re-implementation of someone else's work, and are claiming massive copyright damages on it. If Oracle wins that, that's one hell of a precedent.

I presume the 9 lines in question refer to TimSort.rangeCheck().

Have you ever looked at it? If I had to implement that method, I probably would have done it the exact same way.

Maybe it's not a right, but it's what AT&T agreed to sell these people.

Unlimited, def:
1. not limited; unrestricted; unconfined: unlimited trade.
2. boundless; infinite; vast: the unlimited skies.
3. without any qualification or exception; unconditional.

If it has a limit, tier, cap, or threshold, it's not unlimited. Unlimited is not newspeak for limited.

It's not a real fork. It's more like regular Android with a Amazon's home screen app and their other apps\services pre-installed. Same open OS, same API, just with some closed source apps facing the user.

If they went around changing the API and the OS behavior, breaking compatibility, then we'd be in fork territory. I don't see a good reason for them to do that; it's in their best interests to be compatible with existing and future Android apps. If they wanted to make such a fork they would have.

Well, if it's an Android tablet you could just create an app that acts as a replacement home screen. Just implement the appropriate intent and display a browser control to the user.

It's also a really thin book. Burn.

This is the link he meant to post.

If a developer decides to require Android 4.0 when all they really needed was 1.6, they're doing it wrong and it's their own fault that their market share suffers.

For apps where this would matter for performance, Android has an NDK for writing C\C++ that compiles to native code instead of Java (Dalvik) bytecode. It's usually used for games and heavy data processing but it's overkill for typical small apps that don't do much heavy lifting. You can mix and match Java and NDK code where needed, so a developer might code the processor intensive stuff in C\C++ while coding the rest in regular easy to use Java.