mercurio

I don't know how it is in Australia, but the contract price discrepancy between Android phones and iPhones is well known in England. For example, O2 sells the Galaxy S2 for free with a 24 month £42 plan, while the 16GB iPhone 4 is free on a 24 month £67 plan.

http://shop.o2.co.uk/mobile_phone/pay_monthly/init/Samsung/G... http://shop.o2.co.uk/mobile_phone/pay_monthly/init/Apple/iPh...

The data consistently shows that iPhone share is growing, just not as fast as Android.

The reason this is not reflected in the contract-less prices is because US carriers have a very strong incentive to inflate them to force you to choose contracts.

Anyway the larger issue is that it is not clear exactly what information is being logged. We know some location info is vulnerable, but exactly what and how much? The O'Reilly researchers really should have done a better job. The least they should have done was to run some controlled experiments with a freshly wiped phone.

So all Windows phones will look the same and work the same. I'm skeptical that hardware manufacturers will be enthusiastic about Microsoft turning their products into commodities again. Unlike the situation with PCs, this time they have a viable alternative in Android.

Now the reason the internet is such a big deal when it comes to copyright, is that it makes distribution, and hence consumption, much much easier than in the past. In fact, it also makes creating derivative works a whole lot easier. So there is a strong argument to be made that the good gained by weakening copyright laws would outweigh any harm. In fact, this is the argument Google is making with their book scanning project and related settlement.

The fundamental issue is that because the model of the world on which our current copyright laws were based has changed so radically, we should consider rewriting the laws to obtain a better copyright balance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Mineralogy_Mapper

The bottom line - an American economist supporting Hugo Chávez

The author's political views do not automatically make his arguments valid.

Yes indeed Germans have up to 12 weeks in paid vacation. The question is who is paying for this? You can look at the taxes Germans pay and understand the German government is subsidizing it.

First, while the German government might subsidize a lot of things, I doubt that it pays employers for the vacation time taken by employees (except in special cases like childbirth). Even if this were true, since the subsidies would come out of taxes, it would be economically the same as a person choosing to take a pay cut for working less hours.

I agree here in US healthcare payment via insurance is not the best solution. From other side in Germany (I know Germany best) the government is subsidizing it. Guess who is paying this?

I don't recall the author claiming anywhere that healthcare is magically paid for in Europe. His point was that per capita it costs half has much and provides better outcomes.

"...the French could not afford their welfare state..." Again - who is paying the bills. Somebody has to pay the bills.

I don't get this rhetorical technique of asking who is paying the bills. Not only is it a bad argument, it is poor rhetoric.

Increased leisure time? So what is the point?

May I point out that almost all art, science and human culture originally came out of leisure time.

Carbon emissions - this was invented by Europeans academics to get more grants for research

Carbon emissions are real. They are byproducts of combustion. It is their trading that was invented. Consuming less energy reduces real world emissions, and increases the tradable commodity.

The irony here is that if Germans hadn't lost their freedom of expression under the Nazis, the holocaust might not have happened at the scale it did.

The bitwise XOR approach should depend on the maximum size of the numbers (say k) along with the length of the array (say n) as O(nk), and just using radix sort on the array will take time O(nk) too.

If you assume that bitwise XOR is constant time, that implies that the numbers in the array are bounded by a constant, and therefore Radix sort can sort the array in O(c.n) = O(n). In either case, they have the same running time.

Fred says he got a call from his broker saying "your bonds have not yet failed an auction but you should know that the risk of it happening has gone up". I imagine that a lot of startups must have got a similar call, but perhaps the founders were too focused elsewhere to pay attention. Or maybe the smart ones did listen and were able to avoid this sorry mess.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/our-run-in-with.html

The statement "My favorite paradox is the one I like least" has nothing paradoxical about it. It can easily be deduced to be false. Its just a contradiction, like saying "This sentence is true and false". Compare that to "This sentence is false" which is a paradox.