Europe is not "forcing" Apple to do anything. Apple is not the victim of an Orwellian government shoving committee-formed standards and practices on a forign corporation. Soldiers aren't arriving at Apple manufacturing facilities with boxes of USB-C ports and shouting at workers in German to install these or else.

Europe is "requiring" every cell phone manufacturer to comply with a universal charging standard in order to sell phones in Europe. This is no different from Europe requiring Apple to comply with European radio transmission laws or to manufacture phones for ROHS compliance to prevent mercury from entering landfills.

Apple is not "forced" to do anything, they could shrug and withdraw from the European market. You're likely reading this and thinking, "why would they give up such a valuable market?" and you've come to the core of the issue. Apple profits from selling proprietary chargers and cables, and they continue to profit by changing those every couple years. Apple, almost single-handedly, created the need for this regulation.

This kind of ongoing inflammatory language is why Bloomberg isn't a respectable news agency.

This might just be the last straw. My family has been on Aetna for several years now, despite their dumpster fire of a website and the unmanaged mess they call member services, they're still often the best option we have available.

If they subsidized fitness trackers generally, or even offered an Android and iOS option, it would be great. However, partnering with Apple to exclusively subsidize Apple products is extremely offensive.

Thankfully they announced this just before open season, let the exodus begin.

Its worse than that - of all the software I can imagine warranty disclaimer to be useful for, this would be one of them.

The authors could be easily sued if this ever got used for medical purposes and a bug they introduced led to harm or death. Not to say they couldn't be sued anyway, but the license would at least provide a bit of protection.

Seriously, if they wanted a permissive license use Apache.

Very happy with my Radeon chipsets, don't have to worry about kernel version incompatibility or graphics lockups from some bug we can't even begin to fix. I've had both problems with nVidia hardware.

No PR move from nVidia is going to change my mind beside opening the specs.

Serious +1. Slashdot wins over few geeks by releasing new features using obsolete technology. I've been ignoring these videos because they're not available as HTML/5 Ogg or WebM.

Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?

There's a big difference between "source code available" and FOSS.

The only thing they've really allowed here is for volunteer developers to contribute to their proprietary product. Gee, thanks.

HTC and Samsung are having no trouble selling phones with unlocked bootloaders.

Of course carriers would prefer to have complete administrative access to your phones, control what you can do with them and bloat them with software you can't remove. Clearly market pressure is pushing in the direction of freedom.

If Android were GPLv3 licensed we wouldn't have a problem with companies locking down their bootloaders. We could use the energy we currently put into hacking root access on our own phones into improving the platform.

I obviously agree with the FSF.

Lets not forget that Facebook has been deactivating user accounts on the suspicion that they're using an alias for many years, they have a small dictionary of banned names to do this automatically. Have a unique first name like "Husky Smithson"? Too bad.

Only difference is Facebook accounts are not also used for email and other essential services.

They never claim that the board will be supported entirely through freely licensed software and drivers. Much of the hardware on the board is only supported through proprietary firmware/drivers. It would be great if Linaro could change that, but I doubt they have that kind of leverage (or interest). What we'll likely get is a board that requires an "evaluation SDK" filled with proprietary drivers compiled for the specific development environments they support while they parade their board around saying "isn't it great you can run Linux on this?"

Until they make a public announcement to the contrary we have no reason to believe otherwise.

This would be worth so much more if the board's chipsets supported freely licensed drivers. As it stands only proprietary drivers are available for most of the hardware which may or may not work with the kernel version/variant you want to use.

I currently own an HTC phone, and due to the bootloader being locked down I swore I'd never buy another. The recent announcement about future phones bootloaders being unlocked actually had me looking at the phones they'll have available in a few months. We're already paying roughly $10 a phone for all the media codec licenses; MP3, h.264, etc (none of which I actually use on my current phone), but paying Microsoft an extra $5 feels dirty.

The real question is whether it would have cost them $170 million to leave the OtherOS feature alone. Lets not forget Sony started the fight with the community by removing a feature originally provided on the hardware that was used heavily by researchers and programmers at home. Then the community found a way to root the PS3, then they patched it, then the root keys were found, then they started blocking rooted consoles from the network, then the network was taken down for everyone.

The community is big, Sony is small, and there are enough fringe elements in the community to make us dangerous as a whole. Hopefully they've learned their lesson and begin behaving in a more cooperative manner with the community, but I have a feeling they're just going to raise the stakes even further.