Your reaction is strange to me. Apple has no guaranteed support period as far as I am aware. And again, my Nexus 4 (3 years old by now) is still receiving updates. This is on top of the fact that Google does not even manufacture their own hardware.

And it's not like the OS updates you are talking about are exactly Apples to Apples. What features does Android drop to ensure compatibility with older devices? And Apple? Anyway, I think I understand what your response was about. Take care.

Oh, no one knows either way about Android M support right now. I've seen lots of speculation and people talking about device strings but none of it seems concrete to me. I just meant that so far my Nexus 4 is on the same version of Android as my Nexus 6, and with some luck it will continue to be supported through M. (It's already long past Google's 18-month or so support window)

Are you seriously blaming Libertarians for "Free Trade" legislation like this? So I guess you would blame them for the USA "Freedom" Act too right? Since they are always talking about freedom... what liars...

My Nexus 4 is still getting the latest OS updates even though it is several years old, and the Nexus 5 is as well. The main reason the Galaxy Nexus isn't getting further support is likely because the chipset manufacturer has exited the market entirely.

Don't forget that Google does not make the hardware themselves, unlike Apple.

Hey thanks for the well written and insightful reply! I can see the value of an idealized model as a way of looking at the effects of extreme variations. (like your absence of friction example) I misinterpreted your post to mean an achievable ideal rather than a model used for analytic purposes. (and subsequently assumed your response to be a form of mockery :))

Price information is vital, no doubt, but why would it have to be 'perfect'? Surely the market is 'free' if you are voluntarily choosing to purchase something that someone else is voluntarily offering; regardless of whether you get an absolute 'best price' or not. Otherwise, you could say that a 'freedom to choose' doesn't exist in reality because we don't have perfect knowledge of anything. Is that a fair standard, or a ludicrous one?

How could that be, unless you are suggesting that the idealized form of free market behavior is an impossibility? In which case, why even mention it? This 'perfect information' meme doesn't make any sense if the thing you are describing is supposed to be a representation of actual human behavior...

Ubuntu's click packages take advantage of dpkg and are basically simplified deb packages, so I wouldn't call them foreign.

The read-only nature of the default file system is there for a good reason: It allows them to ensure the integrity of the image, resulting in simple updates without file conflicts. If user A is on update 189, then user B with update 189 has the exact same files on his system partition. Other advantages include: clean rollbacks in case of an error (no failed partial upgrades with files strewn about) , and much simpler troubleshooting because there are fewer variables involved, meaning less buggy software in the long run.

I hope the desktop is also moved to an image-based update system in the future. Fewer headaches all around.

Scarcity is a fact of reality. I don't understand what you mean when you say it is an "enemy" of the free market, but if you would care to explain, I would read it. Your second statement is puzzling too. What do you mean when you say it removes choice? It increases cost, certainly, but nearly everything is scarce and yet we still have lots of choice.

If resources were infinite then why would we need markets, or money? These exist precisely to manage scarcity, so that we know how best to allocate our limited resources in the most efficient way possible. If everything were as plentiful and accessible as the oxygen that I breathe, how would I be able to charge for it?

A free market is simply one where people are allowed to make their own choices rather than having the choices of others imposed on them. There are no other requirements. (though I would love to hear the logic you use to arrive at your conclusions) At least you are right in saying that purely free markets exist nowhere in the world...

I wouldn't say it was a significant compromise.

• 
  Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 and later never had any problems because it could detect which blocks were invalid.
• Bitcoin Core 0.9.4 and earlier will never provide as much security as later versions of Bitcoin Core because it doesn't know about the additional BIP66 consensus rules. Upgrade is recommended to return to full node security.
  
• Lightweight (SPV) wallets are not safe for less than 30 confirmations until all the major pools switch to full validation.
  
• Web wallets are very diverse in what infrastructure they run and how they handle double spends, so unless you know for sure that they use Bitcoin Core 0.9.5 or later for full validation, you should assume they have the same security as the lightweight wallets described above.

In other words, it is a complete non-issue for people who update their software more often than once a month. Think about it this way, 95% of miners accomplished this.

The problem with enforcing the "spirit" of the law is that it changes depending on personal interpretation. Ambiguity is a license to arbitrarily punish your enemies in the legal sphere.

To scare people into thinking that the FBI is necessary for stability? It's not that weird. After all, we have evidence that this very same department encouraged unstable individuals to carry out terror plots so that they could stop them, presumably to confirm that terrorism is a persistent threat in the US and thereby justify their own jobs.

I'm not saying that's the case here, just that I wouldn't be surprised if it's discovered that undercover FBI agents are helping root out these "domestic terrorists" who are "threatening critical national infrastructure"....

It's a bug with the swap partition and/or the scheduler that's been there for years somehow. Disable swap and there is no responsiveness problem under heavy IO. Some people also say changing their scheduler to deadline solves the issue but I haven't tried it myself.

You are contradicting yourself here. First you say it is the goods that people value, not the money, but then if the value of money increased, people would just sit on it and not buy anything, presumably because they could buy even more goods if they waited. Why would someone who prefers things to money deliberately withold his purchases? If I wanted a house, or to get married, or literally anything else that is important to me as a human being, I'm not going to postpone that just due to the increasing value of money. Logically, if that were my strategy and money continuously increased in value, then surely I would save my money until right before my death and then spend it to get the most value. You realize how insane that sounds, don't you? Yet your entire argument for the necessity of inflation hinges on this delusion. That people would not want to part with money for things because they would miss out on the increasing value of money. Let's assume that we even accept your argument on its face for a moment, and say that devaluing currency to encourage spending over saving is a sensible thing to do at times. Surely there would be a limit to that right? You wouldn't want to keep people from saving at all, since savings is where investment capital comes from. It's the seedcorn of the future. Yet look at how long interest rates have been at zero, and how much money is being pumped into the economy although we just had one of the worst shopping seasons in years. I would think that at this point even someone such as yourself must have doubts about the truth of your claims... Watch as the continuosly poor state of the economy demands even more money printing, in order to "stimulate" spending...