Absolutely. Also, better get somebody to tail them while driving to see if they're one of those scofflaws who routinely violate speed limits. Anyone with such flagrant disrespect for the law has no business making my sandwich.

Other than the G1 and the Nexus One, is there any other vanilla Android phones?

The upcoming G2 runs stock Android.

And that system used to work because people used to spend a higher proportion of their incomes than they do now.

Well yes, and apparently most customers didn't think spending so much of their income on food was as wonderful as you do. It's very unlikely that grocery stores are involved in a huge conspiracy to force everyone to eat worse food. They'd probably much prefer to sell higher-quality higher-margin products because they'd earn more profits; Whole Foods does exactly that. But amazingly it turns out that different people have different price/quality tradeoffs, and I don't see how any of them are objectively wrong.

And what will they stock up on? Processed foods that have long shelf lives

And they shouldn't have that choice?

You're missing the point because you do not accept that foodstuffs are *TOO* cheap, that's the problem.

Right. And I'm sure that if the stores raised their prices to the "proper" level, you would not at all be complaining about price gouging and how the poor can't afford to feed themselves.

Go and ask the poor sap on the DVD counter to recommend you a good family movie for the evening.

And I take it Netflix is the devil incarnate.

ideally we’d like to punish her for having it

Please remove me from your list of advocates of thoughtcrime.

In order to elevate the new messiah, the apple faithful have to tear down the old one and deny all of the things that was supposed to make it special.

I love that. By their own standards Apple is creating a horrible user experience by including bash and emacs and Python and Java in Mac OS X, and being criminally irresponsible by allowing users to run random apps downloaded from anywhere.

Agreed. Also, access to the SD card should be limited to an app-specific directory by default.

I'm quite happy for an app to talk to it's own server for a cloud based service. I see no reason that the same permission should let it blindly send unlimited amounts of my phone SD card data (possibly at great expense) to a mysterious web site in China.

Well, once you let an app talk to the developer's servers they can do whatever they want with the data from there. The advantage of whitelisting specific URLs is when the app doesn't need to talk to the developer's server directly, but uses third-party services like ads or high score tracking.

The best fight would be fighting to not have them installed at all. If they are going to be installed, then don't fight storing images-- that just makes them *more* useless.

A perfect example of the "enforcement need" slippery slope.

Virtual +1. Even more specifically, look at the trend of healthcare costs in areas where government *isn't* heavily involved, such as cosmetic surgery and LASIK.

The 'big' companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and such even lean towards PhD as a minimum bar for entry. That's even more stupid, and you'll find you have trouble even getting a phone interview without a PhD even if you have, say, 10+ years experience in exactly the field they want.

I know that's not the case for Apple, and I have a hard time believing Google would be that stupid. Maybe it's true for very senior positions, but for typical software development positions, no way.

it took Barack Obama 48 years to win a prize for being born

Oh come on, it's more than that. He also had to not be George W. Bush, which only a single US President has managed to accomplish in this millenium.

I actually kind of like that Verizon and Motorola are managing the OS on my phone because I want it to just work.

The ability to unlock your bootloader would in no way prevent it from "just working". As to why you should care even if you don't want to use custom ROMs: by now it should be clear that cell phones and their descendants are going to replace PCs for most of the population. If carriers and manufacturers are able to get away with using this transition as an excuse to take control over the hardware that we pay for, it will be very bad for future innovation and freedom.

Under the FSF interpretation, yes

Which is ridiculous. I have source code that compiles and runs under both Mac OS X and GNUstep. It is a derivative work of both of them?

I bought the Nexus One because it was more "open" ... and then discovered that it really wasn't

How is it not? You can develop and distribute apps without begging for permission, and Google specifically makes it easy to unlock the N1's bootloader (and void your warranty, yes), while Apple considers you to be a criminal if you jailbreak.

Yes, the carriers are being as obnoxious and user-hostile as always. Which means if you want a phone that's actually open you have to do a bit of research beforehand. But at least you have that choice, unlike with the iPhone.

You save 10 dollars a month on your contract. That's 240 dollars over the course of a 2 year contract.

With data, you save $20 per month and $480 over 2 years: http://www.t-mobile.com/shop/plans/Cell-Phone-Plans.aspx?catgroup=Individual&WT.z_unav=mst_shop_plans_individual

kids that don't get vaccines prove with 100% accuracy that their parents are fucking retarded

This is true. And autism is more common among children of parents with high IQs. Correlation!