Usurper? Seriously? Firstly, Android is by many people's definitions more free than regular desktop Linux because it's licensed under a more permissive license.

Secondly, Android is actually a "desktop" Linux done right, by people who know what they're doing. As a disclaimer, I worked on desktop Linux related projects for years, about a decade ago. I wrote patches for GNOME, for ALSA, for Wine, and I also built an entire packaging and installer framework that tried to abstract out the differences between distributions so people could distribute their own applications without getting stuck into the swamp of distributor packaging (which was and always will be a shit idea). Many other things that I've forgotten about.

It was all a waste of time. Fundamentally, desktop Linux was not designed or built, it evolved organically. Any attempt to bring people together who might have some skill in OS design resulted in endless stupid flamewars and politics (does anyone remember the ridiculous KDE vs freedesktop wars?). The moment the community needed to move beyond the design laid out by the original creators of UNIX it all fell apart and became a mess.

Android is the best of all worlds - it's Free as in Freedom, it's managed centrally by a highly experienced team of computer scientists and OS designers (some of whom came from working on BeOS), the basic design decisions in it are correct - there's no crap whereby every phone manufacturer has to package every end user application. Heck you can see how popular with users it is just to have them distributing the core OS, you can imagine the disaster zone that'd occur if they used the Debian model. There's one audio API, that works. There's one graphics API, that works. It's standardised on one reasonably modern language, which works. No "we have to rewrite this from C++ into C for political reasons" garbage there.

Frankly it's a breath of fresh air and if it eventually wipes out traditional desktop Linux distros, you won't see me shed a tear despite all the work I did.

In fairness, aren't these the guys who were warning about the secret interpretations for years? Not all politicians are cut from the same cloth. The problem here is that they knew the NSA was lying but knew if they blew the whistle (which is their fucking job, being representatives of the people) then they'd go to the slammer. A simple solution would seem to be to pass a law saying that any classified information can be revealed by elected representatives at any time, and doing so automatically declassifies it with no penalty.

Tabarrok is also known for his work on how to fund public goods via non-patent means, in particular his dominant assurance contract form which is a variant of what Kickstarter does.

That's a fair and very insightful point. And I see now by re-reading your original post it was actually the point you were making all along, I just didn't see it.

It's not, actually. There are already asymmetric crypto algorithms which are believed to be quantum-resistant. They are typically based on the hardness of vector problems in n-dimensional integer lattices, or problems that have been proven reducible to such problems such as learning with errors.

CC.

Sure, but that sounds like pretty much any business. The idea that one man in a garage can get millions of users overnight thanks to free advertising in an app store is awesome, but it was never going to last and it was never how 99% of businesses are built.

Wow. It's easy to forget that the entire industry of programmable computers is younger than a lot of ordinary people walking around today. It makes me wonder what entirely new industry I might see develop from nothing over my lifetime.

What you're missing is that quite a few APIs get backported to older OS releases. It's less efficient to have apps contain copies of the libraries like that, but it does work. The trend is in this direction e.g. with play services. Obviously you can't backport everything like that, but a lot of the important stuff is (like new map widgets, etc). The difference between ICS and jellybean, API wise, isn't that huge. The big leap was Gingerbread to ICS. So, you really only have to pick between those two. You can just pretend Gingerbread doesn't exist if you like, the market share will still be larger than iPhone.

Except that cheap Android device are still a million years better than the old JavaME feature phones were. If people who buy cheap phones aren't buying your apps, maybe the issue is nobody is selling them a useful enough app? There's certainly an untapped market there. People should see that as an opportunity, not some sign of "weakness".

Heck, I'm an advanced user with plenty of money and the fact is, all the apps I want or could need on Android are free anyway. I bought TuneIn Pro because I listen to net radio a lot and it was worth it. Otherwise the apps I use most frequently are gratis.

Yes, exactly. A lot of the reason Gingerbread sticks around is because it's not a bad OS at all and it is the last version that had non-OpenGL based graphics. So it can run on pretty meagre hardware compared to ICS+. Some manufacturers are using Android's openness to fix the OS version and push down the price rather than keep price stable and push up the OS. Both approaches are valid and both are needed - the fact that Apple is blind to this market reality says more about them than Android.

Anyway this ignores the fact that Apple routinely updates older devices to the 'latest' OS that is actually something claiming to be the latest version, but doesn't have most of the new features. It's easy to play games with version numbers if you simply strip out anything requiring the latest hardware and still call it the latest OS.

If you knew anything about how exchanges work John, you'd know that withdrawal limits are typically imposed by the banks themselves and/or AML rules. Not your entirely unfounded theories about them being fractional reserve. Mt Gox has made many references over the years to having to negotiate with banks to up the amount of money they're allowed to transfer per day. Just one more reason why the banking system sucks. There are typically no withdraw limits on the Bitcoin side once AML verification and good security are set up.

Even in prison you are actually allowed to go outside. Presumably he prefers an internet connection to being able to see the sun? What he's got now is hardly better than it he was extradited to the USA and thrown in jail, except he doesn't get to be a martyr or fight a decent trial this way.

Rethink that after informing yourself: http://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/YourDrivingCosts2013.pdf

CC.

Tech venture capitalists typically want to cash out fast by having their investments sell to {Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc} and those companies typically don't want to go outside the Valley because integrating a remote team is hard. Also, the VC's don't want to go outside the Valley because checking up on their investments if they're the other side of the world is hard. Result: if you can't be reached by driving down the US-101 for an hour then it suddenly gets much harder to get huge piles of venture capital and if you don't have that, there is a serious risk you will end up being out-spent or out-integrated by a company that does.