> And the reality of life is, if you don't have the Play Store, you don't have crap.

And if you want to sell an Android phone without access to Google's services, good fucking luck. Any manufacturer who wants to sell a non-google Android phone cannot sell an Android phone with Google Play access. Amazon had to find a manufacturer who could build their phone without having to worry about losing their Google Play access.

It's not that difficult. You click, install another app, and your friends that have installed it are right there. It's not like you have to create a new profile, verify information, etc. This is why it was so easy for whatsapp to propagate.

It's easier to install another similar app instead of typing in your credit card number to make a 1$ payment.

Then the question becomes, why didn't they reference the LG Prada when designing their phone and make design decisions based on Apple's iPhone? This makes it look worse for Samsung in this lawsuit.

Not just the card model, but the 'swipe' ui is fantastic. Swipe up to go to the settings/apps/etc, swipe left and right to access other programs. It's the only UI/OS I've seen that can work without a single physical button.

Android looks to be transitioning away - they've went from 4 physical buttons to 3 software buttons but they're still buttons.

My car is relatively newer and I *hate* when gas stations are forced to use E10 (10% ethanol, ie. Winter fuel). My mpg drops by 10% - 15%. I wish I was exaggerating but I'm pretty meticulous in checking this when I fill up every couple weeks. This has occurred each year since I've owned my car and I've made nearly the same drive when comparing my winter and summer driving habits. They say E10 is cleaner but how much cleaner when you add the extra 15% in fuel I'm burning up to do the same work?

It's how much is funneled back into the DOD.
I worked at a government research center and ~40% of all our funding that was awarded to us for research went back to the DoD in the form of non-lab associated salaries and renting space.

How? Extremely high facilities payments (you wouldn't believe how much it costs for space in an 80 year old research facility), administration (you pay for secretaries, their supervisors, anyone within a mile of your lab, it doesn't matter if you need them or not), soldiers (you can request not to have a solider, but then you might not get all your funding - and while a soldier gets 22k a year, the government takes ~80k for their 22k)

Sorry. But in Korea, Firefox 7.0 is already only for old people...

No, I think OPK did that with years of mismanagement.

Ericsson and Sony formed a 50/50 partnership: Sony-Ericsson. That's in regards to cell phones. Ericsson still manufactures hardware for cell phone companies (just as Nokia does).
SE did pretty good for a while but 2006-2009-ish were pretty bad years for them. Although, they've seemed to turn it around this past year. They're introducing several more Android handsets and it's rumored that they have a WP7 phone in the works.

Have any fixes been backported and have any of those fixes been released from the manufacturer?

The Xperia X10 *just* received 2.1. There's a pretty common bug in 2.1 where it can't connect to Cisco routers with a self-signed security certificate on their enterprise hardware. You wouldn't believe the number of hospitals, research institutions, and hotels have this same setup. The problem is that you cannot connect to any of these wifi networks.

From what I've read online on google's forums is that the fix was in 2.2 but supposedly backported to 2.1 several months ago. Yet, the latest entry utilizing the 2.1 OS still doesn't work.

I can see why major developers are frustrated at Android. They have to deal with phones that range from 1.6 to 2.3 (by next week) and then deal with all the variations between all the major versions. If Google is serious about a mobile platform, they need to pressure the manufacturers into updating their dev cycle and get them *all* on 2.3. It's a shame that you have dumbphone manufacturers trying to pass off their terrible OS update cycle to smartphone customers.

They're hacked quickly because of 2 reasons. They're really popular (ego) and have capabilities suppressed on purpose (do more with them). It doesn't bother me that they're so quickly hacked - it's more of an annoyance to the people who fall into 1 of those 2 reasons and doesn't really effect those who don't.
So yeah, I agree with you.

But look at it on the flipside. SE's X10 is looking damn near impossible to hack and the need is there. To paraphrase your question; Does it bother anyone else that SE's X10 is so hard to crack? That bothers me more than Apple making it easy to hack.

Has Apple been unsuccessful in marketing their products lately? Did the next iphone need more hype?
As far as I know, Apple is one of the best companies when it comes to creating demand for their next products.

The iphone 2g, 3g, 3gs all weren't leaked like this a couple months in advance to create hype. They were immensely popular just because of Apple's fanbase. So with everyone anticipating the next iphone, why would Apple need to hype up the 4g like this?

I'll usually check out what Apple brings to the phone arena (I'm an SE fan) but now that I know what it is, I won't really make any effort to see what goes on at their expo.

I think they were Mike & Ike's strawberries and cream. They don't make that flavor anymore :(

LOL!
Oh man... Back in high school, I routinely grabbed a box of mike & ike (pink and white flavor/version) from a vending machine and kept it in my backpack to snack on. One day in class, a kid that sat next to me in the row over saw that I kept putting my hand in my backpack and eating something. So he asked what I was eating.
Being a jackass, I replied secretly ... "I'm popping steroids"
Big white and pink pills... huge effin steroids!
He started yelling in class "Steroids! Steroids! He's popping steroids!!!!" Everyone looks over and I didn't expect that kind of reaction from something pretty comical. Luckily nothing came of it, I just replied really quickly that they're just Mike and Ikes... a few laughs later - everything was fine.

I would expect a high school student to do something like this. However, a principle of a high school should know better and this mess reeks of incompetence on his part.

This is just my idea why more children exhibit issues with anxiety and other mental issues.
I believe it's because of the overparenting kids have had in the last 20-30 years. Kids don't learn disappointment, they don't learn failure. We tell them that they are all special. These kids are growing up so afraid to fail and take risks that when they inevitably fail; their ego, psyche, whatever just crashes. Their just so overloaded with these emotions that would have been dealt with if they had failed before. They've grown up with their parents/government/teachers/anyone elder caring for them to the point where they can't do anything for themselves. There are lucky ones who reject this over coddling but they are the exception.