Most handset manufacturers don't have a clue about UI design (or have lost it - Nokia did a really good and intuitive UI on the very first GSM phones way back when). Having them inflict their ill thought out cruft on users gives the platform a bad name.

Also, a key selling point of Android is its integration with the Google ecosystem. Having all my contacts and appointments synced into Google by default is the killer app for me. I don't want to have integration with some ill-thought-out Samsung platform that then all gets lost when I buy an HTC phone.

Why not just make a camera run Android?

It can't be hard, and then one would be able to have aftermarket software and goodies, twitter and the like.

The first DSLR to run Android would force me to open my wallet, I suspect.

Most mobile telcos have multiple APNs

So you can have an 'optimising' APN if you want these sort of shenanigans, or a vanilla APN normally. They also squash image files and the like.

Most 3G smartphone and tether users are well advised to take the latter option. This sort of thing has been happening for at least 10 years, BTW.

Whyever would you want one?

You can get a server in the cloud for a fraction of the cost of buying and maintaining a physical box.

If you do have a vital need for a server on a short leash bandwidth and latency wise, you can get an Intel box for a few hundred bucks and put Ubuntu on it. (Mine has 4G, mirrored 1T disks, an admittedly trailing edge AMD64 dualcore, but cost in the $500 range - the case, motherboard and processor came for free).

I guess the only people who use these are design shops where there are only Apple skills, and they want something impressive to show people. (I've never seen an Apple server, but assume it's something like a titanium cube suspended in a tank of Fluorinert, glowing with Cherenkov radiation from the plutonium backup battery).

Down to the browser & OS, surely?

The browser and OS makers need to distinguish between a local host and a TLD and put in appropriate checks.

Trusting an endpoint just because it doesn't have a domain is a bit risky anyway. If someone connects to a random access point, it can easily have a DNS that resolves mailhost or whatever.

I'd also think that spending over $100k on a TLD would create a paper trail back to any perps - it's a bit like trying to buy a house undetectably.

What's the point of a social network for a "small number of people"

Surely the whole point is that you need a critical mass? Why would I want to post something that goes to four or five acquaitances, when I can get 75% of my friends on FB?

I reckon that Google are doomed to fail in this unless they leverage all their search/gmail user base into social network users. And they can't do that without getting nailed for privacy invasion.

So is this monopoly assurance?

If Telstra kept or sold their copper network, they or a purchaser could sell cheap connectivity to all the customers who don't care about getting FTTH speeds. That'd threaten the viability of fibre, so this is a play to ensure that doesn't happen and users get a choice of fibre or nothing?

A better way

Would be for corporate IT admins to concentrate on delivering central services through a web interface and leave users and departments to sort out their own desktops.

It's possible to do location based info without tracking

You can upload location databases for a region and then locate the data offline.

Have you tried doing this?

Finding somebody to talk to at Telstra who understood what a restricted APN was, and how they might set one up, probably taxed the patience of the staff at the electricity meter company to far, and they just threw standard retail SIMs into the meters.

How about $0

Round here you get computers being put out with the recycling. Swap a few parts maybe, and you've got a working machine for zilch.

SETI wouldn't have worked

Any aliens developing radio communication will rapidly run into spectrum scarcity, just as we have. They'll then (as we have) start using modulations and protocols that compress the signals into something resembling white noise.

So SETI would only detect aliens in the morse code / AM broadcasting phase of development. We've gone through this in a little over 100 years (I'd expect the last old-school transmitters to be gone by maybe 2050), so there's a pretty narrow margin between a civilisation discovering radio communication and it disappearing back into (ostensibly) white noise.

Run a VPN and tether over that

Of course, you'd have to pay for the VPN portal, mostly.

Here in NZ, we get absurdly low (500M) data caps but no restrictions on tethering.

Good reasons not to buy US

NZ has a small fleet of surplus, obsolete Skyhawks. They could have been sold years ago to one of many nations or collectors who want obsolete miljets, but the US holds a power of veto and has refused all sales.

Hence they are having to be scrapped at non-insubstantial cost. If we'd bought French planes, none if this would have happened.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/4149581/Skyhawk-giveaway-after-failed-sale

Why the name

After John Poulson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poulson), a corrupt English 1970s property developer?