1 Samsung
2 Apple
3 LG
4 Lenovo
5 Huawei
6 ZTE
7 Sony
8 Coolpad/Yulong
9 Nokia
10 HTC
11 Blackberry

After that then you have a dozen other Asian brands selling Android phones. Samsung and Apple control 50% of the market.

Google bought Motorola for the patents. Microsoft bought Nokia because everyone else had almost abandoned Windows phones and Nokia was about to abandon them as well.

Only Samsung and Apple make money from phones. Nokia, HTC, Blackberry, and Motorola all make a loss. Btw, Nokia and HTC are 9th and 10th on the top smartphone list. Blackberry and Motorola aren't in the top ten.

At this point the phone business has turned into the PC business. Phones are a commodity. They all have 300-400 ppi screens. Anything higher than that is silly. The screens are all as large as you can hold comfortably. They all have the same CPU and and the same RAM and the same battery life. It's easy to design a high end phone.

For some reason it's harder to make money with smartphones than with PCs. You have to first become one of the few subsidized phones. I think the phone companies know you have to go through them so they don't pay very well?

Snowden's insurance file probably contains actual backdoor information, SSL keys, and millions of collected passwords. The internet would have to shut down for weeks... I think even staunch Snowden supporters would be annoyed.

But Snowden would be dead at that point so he wouldn't care.

You seem to forget that the Constitution grants powers from the people to the government, not the other way around.

Even a pretty anarchic libertarian is going to think that the Interstate Commerce clause, has some kind of non-abused non-perverted legitimate meaning, where The People really did intend to grant some sort of power over something. No?

How broadly those words were meant, is something worth fighting about, sure. But if someone buys a ticket to use a commercial airplane, where the airplane crosses state lines it's not totally crazy that the federal government has the power to regulate that commerce. Maybe it's wrong (probably not, though), but it's not on-the-face-of-it totally stupid, is it?

We shouldn't be outraged if the feds happen to think they're allowed to be involved in this.

The part I don't get, is why the federal government thinks that its regulatory power is best used, by turning the transaction into some kind of broken fraud thing. It's like there's some regulator dude, and he gets the bright idea, "I know how we can best regulate this trade! Let's make it randomly break sometimes, where people buy tickets and make plans, and then at the last moment they get surprised by not being allowed to get their money's worth for the ticket, and their other plans are disrupted and their hotel bill is for nothing, and we don't even tell them ahead of time or why." To that guy, I just wanna give a big FUCK YOU, and I wanna tell who ever opposed the plaintiffs in this case, to fucking drop it and concede that the government screwed those people with its evil and incompetence.

But evil and incompetence aside, the power just might have been granted. Just like if, for example, Congress decided that to mail a letter, you have to pee in a cup. It would be stupid, but running the post is one of the their powers, to fuck up however they may. But fucking things up with evil, stupidity, shortsighted incompetence with malice toward the American people, and exceeding Constitutional authority are two different things.

if a state says "it's legal", it's legal. Period.

If 99% of the voters say "the Republicrats say it's Interstate Commerce and I'm going to keep voting Republicrat" then it's within federal powers.

(Not their constitution-granted powers, just their legitimate-by-might powers. But don't we all pretty much agree, that Might is all we care about? If not, please cite.)

Amazing that in 2013, HTML still cannot perform even half the functions a PDF can do. This includes, for example, non-flow oriented precise layout.

Amazing that in 2013, anyone could still see non-flow oriented precise layout as a feature, rather than as a bug.

You don't know the type of device I'm reading on, you don't know what size or shape its screen is, you don't know what size or shape the window within the screen is, you don't know my personal preference for fonts and their sizes. And you want to try to have the server lay out text?

I know what happened. We all pretend it's just innocent joking and no one is ever really harmed by it, but I think this is proof that sometimes real damage is done. It has gone on long enough, beyond what's necessary and beyond the limits of respecting human dignity. Enough. I'm going to end it.

Attention, people who think servers should be laying out text. You have been tricked by an unethical news media, and mocked by the cruel bastards of the tech world. Here's the deal: many years ago, you started hearing about the increasing popularity of "tablets." You made a common-sense and reasonable assumption about what that meant, and no one corrected you (the bastards!!!). Initially, you thought "this changes everything!" and came to the conclusion that pre-rendered text would be a reasonable lowest-common-denom that everyone could live with. But it was all based on an erroneous, if well-meaning, assumption.

The tablets are NOT made out of stone or clay or even plastic. They are NOT the output of those "3D printers" that you keep hearing about, where you assumed people download and "print" your stuff, so that they can read the tablet later on the subway, and you wanted to help with the rendering. The tablets are just touchscreen computers, and can run web browsers, pretty much just like desktop computers. There are some minor differences, but the overall quality of the HTML rendering engine,s on even the worst of them, is actually excellent and flowing text works great. That means your desktop users can go back to flowing text too. Hope this helps.

And to all of you heartless sadists that resent me letting the cat out of the bag, ending your prank: fuck you. It had gone on long enough, and the consequences were starting to get really irritating.

I'm a US citizen that's strongly opposed to all of this bullshit. I've lost my own patience for my government.
What should people like me do to show people like you that we're just as fed up as you are, if not more?

Fuck it. It's not true, but if it helps, think of it like this: the president ordered the NSA to order Snowden to "leak" what they've been up to, as a sort of Public Service Announcement to America and the rest of the world, to make us think about privacy issues.

Your own federal government is just one of a hundred potential adversaries. The fact that they intercept network traffic is not merely a statement from your government that they have malicious intent. It's also a proof-of-concept that there are technical problems with the network; that parties with malicious intent are able to do damage. And that means that even if your government didn't have malicious intent, you would still have the problem and adversaries would still be spying on you.

You can't solve that second half of the problem by running for Congress or persuading your government to become benevolent. You solve it by working on key exchange. That is what everyone needs, because we have had some great tech for decades now, but there's some kind of difficulty that is keeping people from using it. Solve it, for everyone from grandma to teenager, and you're the hero of the century.

If you want to work on the civics problem in parallel with the technical+techsocial problems, ok. But don't for a moment ever lie to yourself and think it will make one iota of difference as to how much privacy anyone has. The AC you replied to, doesn't get it. The US government isn't his real problem either; he just thinks it is. He hopes his bitching will shame one of the adversaries on his hundred-long list, to shape up and behave civilized, leaving him with a mere 99 to go. That is a doomed strategy.

Normal Person: I don't know, don't care and don't think it's possible to prove a damned thing

Exactly. And an atheist is a normal person, who has learned how to learn. When faced with an "I don't know" situation where there is no shred of evidence to make them even suspect that a very strange possibility even might be true, he uses Occam's Razor. This is how people figured out there aren't any unicorns, for example, instead of going around, hilariously saying, "I don't know if there are unicorns." Indeed, it's how we know there exists gravity and light, instead of thinking "I don't know for sure that I'm not in The Matrix, where those phenomena are simulated." The atheist thinks in terms of evidence, rather than mathematical proofs.

It's "Unmaintainability Through Obscurity." There never was any (even falsely-justified) security component to it. Nobody is going to say this has somehow made Dropbox less safe.

DMCA will need to be changed, for it to ever be able to prohibit cracking things like dropbox. Dropbox is too-general purpose for you to ever be able to guarantee in advance, that the copyright holder (the person whose authorization matters) will join a block in denying permission to the public. If I hold the copyright on a file, and a dropbox user uses dropbox to apply a technological measure that limits access to that file, I can give myself (and everyone else) permission to bypass that technological measure.

HDCP has the same issue.

My dad had some "Best of" Analog and Astounding collections dating back to the mid-'50s. Those omnibus editions got me hooked on sci-fi at a very young age.

I remember reading more than one story out of those where using pulsars to determine a ship's current position was a key plot point. According to Wikipedia, the first pulsar was discovered in 1967. Given the intense interest that most sci-fi writers and readers had in astronomy, I would be very surprised if that information wasn't common knowledge within the community almost immediately.

And all those new buildings and stadiums going up at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (each!) has nothing to do with rising costs. Nope, not at all.

Government-issue id already is compulsory for lots of things. The time to rebel against this kind of thing, was about a century ago. For whatever reason, we didn't.

I work in kernel security and I would say we have improved. You can't just tell people "don't make mistakes" and expect security to improve the only way you can improve is by improving the process.

1) We've added a few exploit prevention techniques like hiding kernel pointers.
2) Our fuzz testers have improved.
3) Our static checkers have improved.

But we're not perfect.

For example, we earlier this year we merged user namespaces. Obviously this is tricky code which deals with security. People had been working on it since 2007, but even after five years we all knew there were going to be some security bugs which we had missed. Code has bugs. That's life. But user namespace is a valuable feature and we had done everything we knew how to do.

Actually, in some ways, user namespaces will improve security overall because we can use it to remove a setuid binary from the Chrome browser.

Btw, you can't just look at CVE count. If could be that the bug is old but it was only found recently because of the improved tools. Also two years ago we probably wouldn't have issued a CVE for info leaks like CVE-2013-2148.

I'm not angry with Snowden. He's like a kid. He doesn't know any better. I'm not angry that the NSA collects information on everyone. They are spies. It's their nature to spy.

I'm angry because the CIA collected the SSL keys to the internet. How on earth did they think it wouldn't be stolen??? As if they hadn't watched the news or looked in out prisons which are full of thieves.

If they had used software bugs to read people's encrypted email that would be ok. That's the vendors fault. But putting a backdoor in is not OK. That's the government actively making life worse for everyone. Some of these systems will be very hard to fix.

What I'm trying to say is that there is a fine line between using existing exploits and deliberately introducing bugs. I would prefer if the government helped fix bugs. I am fine if they use bugs. I get very very angry if they introduce bugs.