From the dissent: "In the 1990s, Oracle created a programming language called Java..."
Sun Microsystems was acquired in 2010... I guess I should give Thomas the benefit of the doubt that he intended the statement to apply to Oracle's owned IP & not be a historical account of the language's creation and creators, but this rubbed me the wrong way.
He addresses this in footnote 1 on the same page, though. "A different company, Sun, created the library. But because Oracle later purchased Sun, for simplicity I refer to both companies as Oracle."
Thanks for pointing that out -- I skipped over that first footnote. On my screen, it's on the previous page from the quote I posted (for what it's worth).
Also from the first page of the dissent: "A different company, Sun, created the library. But because Oracle later purchased Sun, for simplicity I refer to both companies as Oracle."
You also forget that a justice might feel more comfortable with ruling in opposition so that he/she can write the dissent, but if his/her vote was a swing vote, the justice might have second thoughts about that. It's easy to vote in opposition when you know it doesn't matter - and then, hey, you get to write the position for the losing side.
> You also forget that a justice might feel more comfortable with ruling in opposition so that he/she can write the dissent, but if his/her vote was a swing vote, the justice might have second thoughts about that.
This doesn't make any sense. Justices vote in the majority while disagreeing with part or all of the majority opinion all the time. The mechanism for complaining about the majority reasoning is the same in either case: you write a separate opinion detailing your personal analysis of the case. That opinion is called a "dissent" if you voted against the majority and a "concurrence" if you voted with the majority.
There is no concept of "the dissent". Any dissenting justice is free to write one; it is routine for one case to have multiple dissents.
Is intellectual surprise caused by anything other than bias?
I noticed this when I started rereading the dissent with a s/Oracle/Sun Microsystems/g. I felt a bit more swayed when I started to recollect all my fond Sun memories: blogs, hobbyist customer experience, etc. and stopped thinking about my glowing hatred of Oracle.
The dissent does seem nuanced to me even though I am quick to dismiss it based on the premise and my superior technical knowledge and maybe a bit of my own biases that I can't quite completely ignore.
Amusingly, a short while ago I HN-commented on the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and nearby settlements. Vesuvius also destroyed the funicular that the song advertised, in a later eruption.
A cheap device would deliver lower performance, but that doesn't explain the poor OS design issues. I used to be quite a fan of Android, but even as performance has improved other things have gotten worse. I don't like the Apple ecosystem either so perhaps I will be a customer for the Pine phone as my app needs are quite limited.
That's one way to lower price, but in an industry of razor sharp hardware returns if you really want to make something cheap you do it by getting money from services and if those "services" include interest based advertising then it's even better. Just look at why all modern TVs are "smart TVs" and default (often hard to disable) "call home" tracking features.
This is one thing I don't understand about the Android ecosystem... Android fans like to point out that you have a choice of phone price points from $100 up to $1000, where on Apple devices it's generally $600 to $1000. But if you actually buy one of those $100 phones and have a problem with it, the first response is always "well yeah that's what you get for buying a cheap phone".
Seems like an illusion of choice if you're guaranteed a working phone only if you buy the latest $1000 Samsung flagship.
Smartphones are like many other technology products. Yes, you can get the cheapest one available but it will be total garbage or you could spend another $100 or so and get a pretty decent phone. Going beyond this point you get diminishing returns, is spending another $700-800 really worth it for a better camera, a faster CPU/GPU and a screen with a bit better colour when all you do is watch Youtube videos and browse facebook/instagram/whatever other social media?
I agree with you, but for the same of argument... this Android user will also earn prospective buyers up front that they should steer well clear of the cheap devices before they buy them too!
This list linked at the bottom is pretty insightful for Google products & relevant mitigations:
> You can learn more about mitigations that have been applied to Google’s infrastructure, products, and services here[1].
Confirms the `chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process` flag is useful here & sure enough, the 2018-01-05 SPL was waiting for me on my Pixel when I looked.
Monitors won't have an over-the-air tuner, so, you'd need to use an external device to watch broadcast TV.