Only the real answer is "sometimes."

The PCB swap works if the PCB is what's damaged. I've seen it happen several times in my 16 years of IT. I've also recommended the trick to non-techie friends, and had a nonzero success rate. So it can be done, if the failure scenario is just right and the person can follow directions.

Indeed. I've often wondered where that started.

The whole "DoD Wipe" thing is also a myth.

There's also a pretty high convenience factor. I have an old friend from college who used to pirate mp3s. Once Amazon started making available mp3s of nearly every album, he started buying them. It was easier to do that than to find them on various file-sharing networks, especially considering the fake files that are out there, slow uploaders, etc.

Same kind of thing with movies and TV shows, only this time with iTunes. One click and he has the media. No mussing with torrents, no gnutella, no corrupted rar files, and no going to the store.

This doesn't mean that the piracy was okay. However, piracy is a fact of life. Some content makers have figured this out and adapted, and they're probably doing better than they would have had they failed to adapt. Right versus pragmatic is a pretty good explanation of it.

True, but then Google doesn't make the majority of Android phones. Some Android phones have come without the ability to sideload.

Android is a platform to build a phone on--it's well out of Google's hands now, and while they've been trying to rein it in, I don't think it's clear yet whether or not they will be successful.

Insert obligatory "First they came for..." post here.

Except that books and alcohol aren't in the same class, and therefore a mark registered for one class wouldn't be enforceable in another, unless registered in both (I don't know if that is the case here, but usually it isn't.)

Absolutely. The problem is that people like John Gruber talk about Android fragmentation like iOS isn't fragmented. It is. As you correctly point out, Android has a fragmentation problem that iOS doesn't have.

I still run into applications which assume a minimum screen size, and which are outright unusable when run on something smaller. And applications which don't work well if the resolution changes (somewhat analogous to rotating a phone.) I think that mostly, though, that's a solved problem. Unfortunately, it's solved by adding on frameworks and other abstractions which tend to use up more CPU and RAM. This has the obvious side effects of running hotter, needing more resources, and using more battery (in the case of laptops.) Time will tell whether or not the mobile analogues will be solved in the same way.

What input differences exist between iOS implementations?

I'd say they do better than decent. Their third phone, released over three years ago, will be getting their latest OS shortly. Some of the Apple features will be missing, but the developer features (the APIs) are all there, which reduces the magnitude of iOS fragmentation significantly.

The problem with Android is in the marketing and the carriers. Marketing, in that "Android Phone" is a meaningless term--you know nothing about the phone from those two words, but a staggering number of people (online, offline, reviewers, marketers) want to equate the term to "iPhone." Carriers, in that they want to act as gatekeepers for updates, and the manufacturers making Android phones don't have enough individual influence to override them quite like Apple does.

I usually tell people that if they see a page on the internet telling them that they're infected, that it's malware trying to sneak onto their system.

Can you explain how that fits in with the libertarian philosophy?

Because budgets are yearly, and it always costs less to throw up the crappy poles. They probably budget for it, in fact. Next year's hurricane will be the next guy's problem.

Americans have a chronic problem with planning. We continually prefer small, short-term gains over long-term stability and profit. It will be one part of our downfall.

Yeah, but ChromeOS is as dead as BSD. The PS3 browser is used more than the ChromeOS browser. http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/15/report-googles-chromebooks-account-for-less-than-02-of-all-desktop-traffic/

That would be the logical way to do things. Then again, the US is trying to extradite a UK citizen for doing something over the Internet which is criminal in the US but legal in the UK. So who knows?

The same reason Congress can enact nearly any law--interstate commerce.

I think it's obvious that the grandparent was referring to hardware, portable mp3 players. Winamp is utterly irrelevant in this context. And he's not saying that Apple invented the mp3 player--just that they innovated within that (fairly small) market and then with those innovations, practically dominated it. Other mp3 players still existed and continued to be created, but interface-wise, they were poor in comparison.

I'm not sure what he means by master/slave music management. Maybe he means a separate app to manage music irrespective of files. Not knowing the history of iTunes, I'm not sure if it always abstracted files and folders away in favor of songs and albums, but that's also a feature that consumers have generally favored.

The Diamond Rio doesn't have a click-wheel. It has something closer to the older scroll-wheel. The click-wheel (using Apple's terminology for a capacitive scrolling wheel which also had 5 buttons built into the wheel) didn't show up until 2004. I can't find anything that comes very close to it in other portable mp3 players.

The click-wheel was really a turning point for usability, but it probably helped that the iPod had a screen capable of showing multiple menu options/songs. I mean, on that Rio you linked to, how much text even fits on that LCD?

Yeah, it was quite an exaggeration. There are still non-Apple mp3 players sold. But they don't get any press to speak of and I can find no indication that they sell particularly well. I've owned several (a Sansa being my favorite) but I tend to fall back to using my iPhone because I always have it with me anyway.