gibwell

Are you joking?

It's a false dichotomy from a strictly abstract point of view where other logical possibilities exist, but that's irrelevant. The people who are proposing to move control of the internet away from the US actually are foreign governments, and in particular Russia and the Chinese. In the real world it is not a false dichotomy.

If we want other alternatives, we actually have to devise and validate them before they become real.

Do you seriously think that Xiaomi makes the kind of changes that Apple makes to their products annually on a weekly basis?

Google has never had a standard IMAP implementation for Gmail.

It's not a loss leader. OSX has always been supplied as a component that is integrated with the Mac. I.e. You never had to buy a Mac and then separately purchase OSX.

What they are doing here is to integrate ongoing support for OS upgrades into the cost of the computer.

Even if they don't make it cross platform, it will probably give Adobe a run for their money. Progress on this thing had been astoundingly fast, and compared to Adobe it's practically free.

They sell millions of licenses a year. Their revenue per employee exceeds that of Google or Apple.

Is more explanation needed?

How are we going to use fewer antibiotics when they are a profit making venture?

We can't discipline ourselves because there are giant vested interests in selling antibiotics and none in resisting buying them.

It doesn't have more advanced features, and there is little or no software optimized for it.

I never made a 'childish ultimatum'. I simply said that if you believe Samsung is a more ethical company than Samsung, we have nothing to discuss, because it have no intention of debating that belief with you.

I am glad you were willing to own up to it.

I am also glad you admit that you do not respect the idea of contract law and think that Apple should be forced to give away their intellectual property.

StavrosK wanted a narrow definition of valid criticism.

Narrowly confining ourselves to a technical analysis of ignores that there are other dimensions to how people think about technology, and the perception that Google has created about its trustworthiness is one of them.

It's not as if we are going to explore that topic in a one-time thread and never say anything about it again. It is going to keep being discussed as related issues come up.

That's why that comment has now sunk to the bottom.

Interesting experimentation doesn't mean a more useful product, and those devices do not match the build quality.

Whereas a 30% weight reduction and 100% performance improvement makes the iPad air far more useable in every situation

More materials and more battery. That's what you are paying the extra for. The larger device is better for collaboration and creative use whereas the smaller one is better for casual use and reading, but both are equally capable when it comes to choice of software.

Touch covers are a bad idea. That's why Apple isn't fooling around with them.

Whereas the massive weight reduction is what will enable me to buy an iPad air instead of an iPad mini.

The larger device is far more usable for collaborative work than the mini, and the weight difference makes it far more portable.

So their 'non-revolutionary' changes have somehow produced a better product for you than their competitors?

Asking why we should trust a privacy related product from Google is legitimate. You are assuming that everyone will comprehend the trust model at a glance the way you do, but this is not so.

Your argument seems to be that people shouldn't state their opinions, but should instead do silent research until they come to what you think is the obvious conclusion.

That isn't how social discussions work.

Cloning other people's products and then dumping them onto the market using predatory pricing is a far more 'vehement' attack than anything Apple has done.

If you seriously believe Samsung is a more ethical company than Apple, then we need discuss this no longer.

The point is that Google was once held in high esteem because it acted in an unusually trustworthy way for a large corporation.

Almost everything they were fundamentally trusted on has turned out to be a betrayal. It is right and natural to question and distrust them until they have reestablished trust, which is likely to be a long process.

You will notice that as well as the appropriate distrust, there are also comments from people including yourself who have examined the proxy and determined that Google's trustworthiness is irrelevant to the trustworthiness of the proxy.

This is exactly how it should work. People are right to distrust Google, so the question should be asked. But we are also a technical community who can then analyze and understand the situation to determine whether concern is warranted.

The last thing we need is for people to silence their distrust and for scrutiny to stop.

Google is a long-time NSA collaborator. The risks of what they could share with them should always be scrutinized.

Sadly not true. Google is moving most new Android development into tightly controlled closed source: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

And portraying Samsung as the victim is absurd, they are one of the worlds most aggressive companies.

I think it's extraordinarily unlikely that a boycott of Apple would do anything to cause Samsung to improve their behavior in any way. Most likely they would conclude that their general PR campaign to tarnish Apple was successful and be encouraged to turn it up further.

A clear sunsetting roadmap still means that you trusted your business to something Google no longer cares about. It doesn't protect you from the cost of migration.

You say I'm wrong but your argument then supports exactly my position. The 'black box' is trained by humans, and it applies their judgments to the pages it processes.

I agree that Google uses one rule set across the whole internet. I don't think they have anything resembling a list of competitors to downgrade or anything like that.

However the algorithm is based on hundreds of metrics, and is highly discriminating. In addition, Google uses human raters to determine what a good quality result is. This is fed back into tuning the weighting of the metrics.

Therefore, the biases and judgements of these human employees will be reflected in the results.

They don't need magic powers. They employ hundreds of human raters to judge the quality of search results according to Google's criteria and biases.

You can't download and build what consumers think of as Android.

Surely you don't expect that to be taken seriously. Samsung is not some innocent well-meaning bystander in this. Nor is Google.