Pre-installed apps are only a value-add to the phone maker. It allows them to sell space to third parties that are willing to pay to get mass distribution of their apps.

Honestly, I'd buy a phone that comes with an empty slate, but only to a certain extent. For example, it probably should come with Google Play Store (and that's about it.)

As an aside: can you imagine if Windows doesn't come with Internet Explorer? How would you download Firefox or Chrome? :-D

Kudos to Google to be able to release so many different products. But bummer that they all eventually die. I guess these are likely the successful personal 20% time projects from their software engineers. And when those engineers move on, no one is left to maintain them...

Back in high school, around 1996, I discovered FreeBSD and Slackware while scouring the USENET.

Installed both in turn on my Packard Bell 486DX2 to check it out. Didn't really know how to use it and didn't know anyone to talk to for questions. But was still excited on the idea of a completely free OS.

A year+ later I was in college and learning about it again, first in intro CS classes, this time using Red Hat and with many knowledgeable peers to learn from. Then I started building and configuring the kernel for my PC (Pentium 233MHz MMX). If I remember, the first kenel I compiled was 2.2.10 or so. Then moved on to Mandrake, Debian, and Ubuntu and Linux Mint.

the difference is, you're mostly anonymous here

It was Compaq that bought DEC.

But HP did bought Compaq a few years later.

Exactly. Engineering is not about finding the biggest hammer and applying it on everything. Even though that will work, but there are other restrictions you must satisfy. Asking what type of file is relevant because those types may already offer its own way to do what you asked.

If all I need is to send an excel file that I want to keep from prying eyes, then putting a password on it would be good enough. I don't want to tell the end user to install PGP or GPG, generate their own key pair, then sending the public key to the recipient, and 10 other steps to get everything set up.

A quick and easy solution is generally better than a general, optimized, but slow to implement solution. Of course there are exceptions to this. If you're building a file sharing service, then using a PKI would be a better solution than depending on Acrobat or Excel's mechanism. But you didn't specify that in your question.

Everyone has their Achille's heel, but that doesn't mean they're bad developers.

There's quite a bit of rounded edges on that ship. Watch out, Apple might sue.

Stross seems to take Hachette's side of the fight with Amazon. Some other authors see it differently:
  One author/publisher's take, and another's view.

I don't think American business elites' desire to make fuller use of kids' intellectual capacity is authoritarian. It mostly likely flows from their own experiences as gifted kids, wasting years of their childhood in schools that were, to put it charitably, not designed to maximize anyone's potential.

Childhood is a rare time when you're primed for learning, have enormous amounts of free time, and few competing responsibilities. We should be leveraging that as best we can, not just for the gifted, but for every student.

It's more important than ever, given the increasing automation away of many jobs, and the increased competition globally for work. We're not just talking about helping people who will get PhDs. We're also talking about helping ensure kids who will never get PhDs make full use of their talents. This helps not only on the job, but when transitioning careers as your old job becomes obsolete, as well as performing better in basic duties of citizenship.

It's also a better time than ever to reform. The Internet makes it possible for the best lecturers to deliver to kids everywhere, and for kids to follow their interests and stay engaged in a way never before possible. Classroom technology will increasingly enable teachers to get real-time feedback on what each individual in their class is struggling with, enabling far more individualized feedback and tutoring. It can allow teachers to learn from a far larger set of their own peers about what works.

We have the potential to maximize the potential of EVERY student - not just the "average" student, but special-needs and gifted kids too. Better yet, it's not a zero-sum game pitting gifted kids against special-needs kids. It's the ability to deliver individually-tailored instruction to every child at affordable cost, unlocking a vast amount of human potential that today is simply wasted.

It'll take experimentation and innovation to evolve the right tools and practices, which is why if we get behind it I think we'll do better than the authoritarian regimes you mention. I just hope we don't allow bureaucratic inertia and fears over inequality to thwart progress. Inequality can be addressed through methods other than keeping kids ignorant, and it's far from clear that inequality would actually incease. While the gifted would benefit, I suspect the less-gifted and disadvantaged will benefit even more, simply because the current schooling approach offers such unequal opportunities for development.

First, a brief correction: the author of the op-ed is not an economist. He's a journalist and former financial analyst who writes on economics topics for the NY Times.

Second, the op-ed makes a number of errors:

1. He asserts without evidence that non-government currency is inherently inferior to government currency, without defining the purposes for which it is supposedly inferior and in what ways. Medium of exchange? Unit of account? Store of value?

2. His argument relies upon his unsubstantiated belief that "no bank or bitcoin-emitter can be as public-minded as a government", and that "no private power can raise taxes or pass laws to unwind monetary excesses". This ignores the signficant body of research on the not-so-public-mindedness of public officials. It ignores the fact that the "monetary excesses" he needs to unwind are frequently caused by government monetary policy, rather than being inherent to currency. It also ignores the fact that Bitcoin's cap on supply was designed precisely to avoid such monetary excesses. Perhaps Bitcoin's design in this regard is deficient, but the author apparently could not be troubled to make any argument detailing how.

3. He criticizes "private money" such as Bitcoin for having uncertain value, and for its potential to lose value if users lose faith, despite these problems applying to state-backed currencies as well. It's not as if we've never seen runs on banks, unexpected inflation or even hyperinflation with government fiat currency.

4. He further criticizes Bitcoin for its alleged anonymity and thus a potential for tax evasion, neglecting the fact that Bitcoin is less anonymous than the goverment paper currency known as "cash".

5. He repeatedly makes the argument that because we've had state-backed currencies for a long time, they must be superior. This neglects the possibility that effective non-government currencies were not feasible at scale in the past simply due to a lack of technology (crypto and global instant communications). And it neglects the possibility that the future of currency is not either-or, but both.

This is what happens when the poltical-media establishment tries to shoehorn a story about technology and economics into the same tired left-vs-right, government-as-perfection vs. government-as-catastrophe narratives. You get an incoherent, poorly researched, poorly argued mess. The author may end up being right that Bitcoin won't last, but he's not given us any sound argument to support his claim.

It seems to me that if mining gold is worth something (for whatever reasons people value that particular commodity - electronics, jewelry, or just as a collector's item), then by burying it that value is destroyed. Mining and burying are opposites, if one has positive value the other must have negative value.

Also, paying people to do useless things means they have less time (and perhaps incentive) to look for real work, and less time to retrain for the jobs that are available. By prolonging the mismatch between the skills workers have with the skills jobs require, we could prolong the recession.

Now did that happen in this case? I don't know. But I do think quality is a relevant and neglected consideration in stimulus discussion, mostly because nobody bothers to plan for it until we're in a crisis.

That's a fair point. Causation has not been proven (and in fact R&R are careful to state as much).

It's true that sub-inflation interest rates means the lender is paying you to take the loan. But exploiting that without screwing yourself means more than just taking the loan.

Most importantly you need to find someplace to save or invest the received loan money so that it doesn't disappear before you need to pay the loan back. Ideally something that gives you a positive return. Yes, you can roll over the debts to new lenders as the bonds mature, for quite a long time. Perhaps even indefinitely if you have a stable level of debt to income.

The problem of course is that many Western countries do not have stable debt levels, they keep taking on more. That works until your ability to repay gets called into question. At some point lenders see the risk as too high, and won't lend except at high interest rates. Then your repayments or new interest burdens give you a nasty shock to your standard of living, which could have been avoided by either investing the loan prudently (human capital or infrastructure gaps, for example) or by avoiding the loan altogether. Sadly politicians do not seem particularly adept at this task.

The first sentence is the subject of considerable debate by professional economists. There are lots of studies in both directions ("multipliers" less than, or greater than, 1).

I think your second sentence is getting at the right idea - the effect you get is a function of the quality of the spending. Stimulus that gives a well-connected person the ability to buy a house on a tropical island somewhere is unlikely to help your local economy, and indeed will hurt because the tax money to fund it came at the expense of some other (probably more useful) function. On the other hand, stimulus that helped displaced workers retrain in more in-demand fields would likely help.

Consider revising your assumption that the 2010 paper's data was "cooked" and not simply that mistakes were made (which the authors have acknowledged), given that:

1. A more recent (2012) study published by Reinhart & Rogoff, using data going all the way back to 1800, shows results that look almost identical to the latest Herndon, Ash, and Pollin data. There's no use "cooking" the data in 2010 just to uncook it yourself in 2012, well before the HAP results.

2. Even HAP's supposed debunking of the 2010 R&R paper shows largely the same conclusions, which is that high debt loads lead to lower economic growth. The dispute is over the magnitudes, particularly for countries over the 90% debt/GDP ratio.

Debt/GDP Mean Growth Rate (1945-2009)
0-30 R&R=4.1, HAP=4.2
30-60 R&R=2.8, HAP=3.1
60-90 R&R=2.8, HAP=2.9
90+ R&R=-0.1, HAP=2.2

Historically the US has had about 3% annual growth. If our debt loads drops GDP growth to 2%, that's a HUGE loss in job prospects as well as in public tax revenues.

Source data is here (free registration required I think):
http://blogs.ft.com/ftdata/2013/04/17/the-reinhart-rogoff-response-i/

Times do change, and we have an amendment process by which the Constitution can too. In practice we also have a system of judicial interpretation that often has the same practical effect as amendments (for better or worse, perhaps both).

But just as some ignorant people refuse to adapt to new circumstances, other ignorant people insist on repeating their ancestors' mistakes. The Constitution has lasted a long time (unlike its predecessors and some contemporary constitutions in other nations) because it was designed around fundamental insights into human nature. Insights that in most cases remain true today.

It no doubt has flaws (some of which have been addressed through amendments). But its success means we ought to at least understand where it's worked. where's it's not, and WHY before we casually dismiss one of the great accomplishments of practical politics as merely a few rules from the 1780s.