Microsoft: Pawn takes Pawn
Motorola: Hey that's illegal
Apple: it's called en passant...
Oracle: You sunk my battleship!

Not surprised, but did they aid in obtaining them? I got the impression they aided in publishing, but that Manning obtained them all on his own.

When all the major networks ban a TV product I would think an anti-competitive FTC investigation should be something worth looking into. Basically they banned a browser with a specific user agent string based on the company that provides the device. Can you imagine if all the networks decided to ban Dell computers but not HP?

Your hubris is epic. They haven't decided anything yet. You're basically saying that FCC setting out regulations (which are toothless) may possibly be bad in the future. So tell us, oh great predictor of future bad regulations, what's going to happen? I don't suppose you actually have the ability to lay out specifics of what you're even talking about, do you?

I wish I could tell you what I think you've actually earned the right to but I'm going to leave that part out for civility's sake.

What the current congress feels about the matter is a bit irrelevant since the powers the FCC have are derived from the Telecommunications act of 1996. The Federal Court said they didn't have the legal framework to regulate under Title I. However, seeing as they do have the legal framework to regulate telecommunications under title II, and other titles, it's still possible they do from a legal sense if they were to reclassify.

Basically the court didn't simply say "u dunt haz authority on internets." Rather, it was a legal technicality that was the inevitable result of reclassifying telcos and cable internet under title I as information services so as to "deregulate" them. This actually helped strengthen the monopolies of the telcos to be on par with cable monopolies.

And the court was wrong to decide the way it did. Did you know that Comcast had previously gotten it's way out of a class action lawsuit from its users by saying the FCC did have the authority? Then only to turn around and argue in that case the FCC didn't have the authority?

Regardless, if you honestly think it's unreasonable for the regulatory body for telcos and cable companies should not regulate internet services (which they bundle with video and phone) from those same companies, then I don't know what to tell you.

Of course it matters what representatives and courts say and do, but I feel the majority of them as so far in the wrong as to be mind boggling. This is clearly what the FCC was created for. You can argue that regulation isn't needed, and that's a valid opinion, but to say that the FCC has no business regulating communications services because of imprecise legal language is just sad diversionary bs.

I'm also an Android developer and I don't share those concerns. There have been some frustrations, yes, but there are usually decent workarounds for a lot of things. As an example: Bluetooth support wasn't really solid until 2.0, yet there are excellent backport open-source libraries that make it easy to provide that support to 1.5 and 1.6 devices.

I completely disagree about reflection as well. Using reflection you can degrade gracefully for platforms that dont support what you're doing. Reflection is not ugly at all, it actually quite an elegant deign pattern imho.

If you're ending up with 6 layouts for each screen you're doing something wrong and perhaps overreaching in your support for older devices or your layout is overly complicated. It's unreasonable to think the latest Mass Effect game would run on a tiny 320x240 screen. And while that's hyperbole, yes, the point is made.

Just to be clear though, I don't find you concerns invalid, However I don't think this is unique to Android.

Granted there is still much work Google and the manufacturers could do to streamline all of this. But any software development platform, any OS, has some level of variation for what is supported. OSX, Linux, iOS, WebOS, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7, Symbian, HTML5/JS/CSS, Blackberry OS. Really the only platforms that don't, are the video game consoles. But now even that's starting to happen there too with external storage and peripherals.

Yes why in the world would the Federal Communications Commission, that normally regulates Telcos and Cable companies, think it has authority to regulate a new communication and information service they provide over the same wires and spectrum with some of the same types of content as cable and telephones.

Golly gee, that's just crazy talk!

/s

Your sir are rude, and your circular logic is flawed. You don't want regulation and the FCC decided to let the market decide -- and you call that a failure, blaming people who are pro regulation? Seriously, what's wrong with you?

How is toothless regulation a problem for the anti-regulation crowd? Or were you just pining for a chance to call someone a statist?

Most of those who are pro Net Neutrality wanted real regulation, not toothless fluff to cater to the anti-regulation, pro-business crowd. If anything it's your pocliy positions that got us this. Toothless regulation is pretty much the same as no regulation in my mind.

No, it really just needs to be something in the middle. ISPs should not be able to discriminate based on endpoint or traffic type or protocol with the exception of E-911 and a few other specific and sensible exceptions. Spam and DDoS filtering, QoS for traffic types like VOIP that doesnt discriminate based on end point, or company. It's not really that hard. While a simple "everything should be equal based on X" rule wont work, it's equally absurd to think the law must be so complex as to impossible to craft. This fatalism from some ./ posters (not you) about the technical and legal wording being impossible is nonsense and not helpful. There is easily a middle ground here, and yes it requires some technical specifics, but it's NOT impossible

The problem is telcos are not producing content. Any plan that lets them set up as being able to charge based on the quality of content that they DONT produce, is tantamount to blessing rent seeking. They dont just hurt consumers, they hurt the whole ecosystem.

You mean regulate, right? There used to be a regulation the required telcos to sell their lines at wholesale to competitors but they removed that regulation so that telcos were as unregulated as cable companies (with regards to internet service).

The local monopolies these ISPs enjoy are not a regulation but rather a grant/partnership of various cities/towns/etc to the cable/telco operator as well as some natural monopolies due to the giants being the only ones with infrastructure. The kind of competition you are promoting is exactly what we need, but don't kid yourself that there are federal regulations that are creating these local monopolies.

Here's the difference: What are they investigating? They can't go trolling for wrong doing. They dont even imply what types of regulations or laws may have been broken.

It's "Don't be evil" and it's a tired tired joke at this point. Yes it's a silly corporate slogan and, yes, some of the stuff they do is considered evil by some people -- probably rightly so.

But I also don't believe that

-my world will be delivered by ATT
-Apple thinks differently
-UPS brown wants to know what they can do for me
-Diet Coke is just for the taste of it
-Verizon rules the air
-Mcdonalds will make me love it
-TBS is very funny
-Fox is fair and balanced
-Nike will make me just do it
-Or that Slashdot is only stuff that matters

We get it, time to move on.

Are you talking about Sarbanes -Oxley? Doesnt that apply more towards accounting records? Say Google wanted to delete its maps of the US, they wouldn't need permission for that. But if they wanted to delete expense reports they would.