Needed more space for GearVR stuff. Popped out 128GB card, dropped in 200GB card. $60. Less than a minute and... Done. Always amazed otherwise reasonable people tolerate Apple'$ extortion.

Meanwhile, Memepool has been down for a while. It's been down before. Maybe for good this time?

I remember an account of one case where as adults, both men had (among other similarities) chosen identical belt buckles Show a study of at least several hundred monozygotic twins where similar choices in fashion were dictated by twin genetics and we can talk. Until then, you're just repeating freak stories. Look hard enough and you will find two twins with this sort of thing, but your confirmation bias is preventing you from registering all the twins without the genetic fashion imperative.

Designing a machine to invisibly spy on schizophrenics. What could possibly go wrong? On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

Altering permissions after install is standard on iOS. And of course there is no bundled spyware.

1) iOS permission request handling is crude, not granular, and accepts as default and not presented certain basics such as net access. As usual, you are stuck with what Apple deigns to expose to the user.

2) As for the latter, what do you call advertising frameworks and analytics?

I tried to install flashlight app but the top 5 or 10 all wanted egregious access to my phonecalls, instant messages, or full network access. I gave up.

Permissions Manager LBE is the kind of thing Apple would never allow on iOS. You can fine-tune any app's permissions *after* install, and even autoblock bundled spyware.

Except that when pancreatic cancer manifests itself, it's already too late.

Except Jobs didn't have a standard "pancreatic cancer", that is, usually an exocrine adenocarcinoma . He had a neuroendocrine insulinoma. That's a quite atypical variant, indolent, localised, and eminently resectable with a much lower probability of mets if caught early when compared with an adenocarcinoma.

you cannot volunteer your technology to become part of a standard and then later hold the industry (or competitors in the industry) to ransom by selectively refusing to license that technology on FRAND terms

You're got it backwards. It's Samsung that has "essential" patents and demanding payment but it's Apple that's refusing to pay anything for them. So ironically, thanks to the US's obvious native-company favouritism, a company with essential patents (like Samsung's) can't get money or redress, while a company with trivial, obvious patents (like Apple with rounded corners, hyperlinks, search bars, etc) can sue, and sue, and sue, and sue till the sun dies. Basically, Apple gets to pirate Samsung's essential patents in the US, thanks to govt protectionism.

Apple wants a royalty rate of $24 per unit from Samsung for its alleged use of Apple's design patent, the notorious tablet shape with rounded corners ... when Samsung asked Apple for a much lower amount per unit that everybody else in the market pays for Samsung's standards patents, Apple refused, offered no counter-offer, and sued instead. To date, it's paid nothing at all for those patents or for the other regular patents Samsung is accusing Apple of infringing. In its trial brief, Apple states in one header:
        To The Extent That Samsung Is Entitled To Any Remedy, its FRAND Damages Cannot Exceed $0.0049 Per Unit for Each Infringed Patent
        Less than a penny should be Samsung's lot for patents that are essential to even be in the mobile phone business, but Apple wants Samsung to pay $24 for rounded corners, plus from $2.02 and up to $3.10 per unit for its utility patents.

The Commission also found that Apple had failed to argue other FRAND-based defenses, such as promissory estoppel, laches or fraud. Finally, the Commission determined that even if Apple had offered evidence of the proper interpretation of ETSI’s IPR policy and had shown that the patents at issue were actually necessary to practice the standard, that the FRAND declaration was a legally enforceable obligation, and that Samsung was required to grant irrevocable licenses under FRAND terms to any party, it still would not have found in Apple’s favor, because the parties’ final offers were sufficiently close to each other that Samsung did not violate its obligation to negotiate in good faith.

"Rome" persisted for 1,500 years after their discovery of concrete, until it's final fall in 1453. Along the way, it saw off the tax-averse Germans that immigrated into the West, Persians, Arabs, Kievan Russians, the Germano-Franks returning again as "Crusaders", and diverted the Mongols into attacking the Slavs and Islam. Not bad, and not really indicative of anything to do with concrete. Or lead.

Android has had a good permission manager for years: LBE.

You can do blanket bans, whitelists, etc or drill down into granular permissions for each app. It can also block abusive texts, etc. You do need root.

It's pretty incredible but sadly predictable that Apple can keep winning over juries in its home county of Santa Clara to award it damages mainly for a patent (pinch to zoom) already declared invalid twice by the USPTO. Thanks however to the US's weird system, Apple can go on appealing until 2017 or 2018 before it finally runs out of people to whine to. I'd like to think that sanity could prevail then, but as recent experience shows, the US President would have no qualms about vetoing any adverse judgement against Apple but would be okay letting it stand against Johnny Foreigner.

The research being conducted with the data collected in MOOCs is one of the most socially valuable results possible since it leads directly to better education for the world.

This scans like marketing newspeak. Astroturf?

Says the Republican

There's not enough space in the world for laughter sigils here.

Again with the labels. You're really into simplifying, aren't you.

everyone but Samsung and the Apple haters agree.

It must be nice to see the entire world split into these tidy categories that define behavior. Very soothing. Very simple.

Your argument seems to rest on drawing a complete comparison between the evils of Apple and the evils of Samsung. As such, given that the two companies are apparently, by your argument, about approximate, then the only quantitative, non-falsifiable difference between them within the parameters of argument is their relative donations to Obama. We then arrive back at our original premise, which is that politicians' behavior is correlated with their relative payment amounts from donors. Congratulations, thanks for backing me up.