I've been following this story for a the past week, and by far the scariest story I've read so far is from the Philadelphia Daily News: Students seem largely unfazed by spying case. Among the students quoted:

"A lot of people think this is being blown out of proportion," said senior David Freedman, 18. "I believe the school when they say they only used it to find lost or stolen laptops. People realize this is not a real threat."

"It an invasion of privacy, but I'm sure we signed stuff in waivers [when we got the computers]," said Senior Bonnie McFarland, 17.

How the hell much have we failed our children when they can't even be outraged about this? Are they seriously so used to living their lives in public on myspace and facebook that they don't even realize the value of the privacy that the school district stole from them here?

TFA posits that the proliferation of forked implementations and proprietary extensions will create a vast jungle of mutually incompatible Android phones. The problem with this argument is that, as Apple's "There's an app for that" campaign shows, it is increasingly not the features of the hardware that are selling mobile phones as much as it is the app ecosystem surrounding the platform. I'm inclined to think that handset manufacturers are going to be constrained in the amount of forking and proprietary extending they're going to be able to do without risking breaking compatibility with the mainstream app development. If it gets to a point where, for example, a large number of apps in the market have notes from the developer that say "won't work with HTC's super-Dream because of its proprietary SenseUI system," HTC will have effectively cut itself off from the major factor driving adoption of its product. Standardization is the handset manufacturer's problem, not the users' or the developers'. Developers will naturally build their apps for the most popular implementations, and other manufacturers will have to make sure their implementations compatible with those if they expect to compete.

Seems to me we've already developed a fusion reactor capable of solving the problems you mention with Saudia Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia...

Beneficial to many consumers? Healthy competition? Maybe in the short run, but what about the pending Book Search settlement? If that gets approved in its current form, Google gets exclusive access to scan and digitize millions of orphan works. Even if the settlement eventually gets cut back somewhat, Google has an enormous head start in its catalog from the books it's scanned already. Is there any doubt that the eBook format it chooses to market this huge selection of digital books will easily crush all other competitors? TFA seems to suggest that Google is planning on selling these eBooks only in cooperation with publishers and not from its settlement spoils at the moment, but given the potential to leverage the settlement monopoly to monopolize the market for eBooks and eReaders, I would be pretty surprised if this announcement doesn't pique the interest of the Justice Department.

Because there are different speed limits on different roads? They want to eliminate all speeding. Going 45 mph in a 25 mph residential zone where children are playing is probably more dangerous than going 85 on a 65 highway, yet it wouldn't be prevented if you simply set the speedometer to max out at 65. You need the GPS to figure out what road you're on and what the speed limit there is, so that the maximum can be changed accordingly.

Sounds like a one-way ticket to Guantanamo to me. Hell, half of Congress already thinks people use p2p to fund terrorists. A protocol that DOSes Our Noble Corporate Sponsors in their fight against piracy and terrorism? No thanks, not in this political climate.