Keep in mind that it is easier to put more/faster/better parts into a larger phone than into a small one. And even the smaller/less powerful Android phones are usually still upgrades from previous generation (not talking about the extremely cheap rubbish phones).

I disagree on multiple points.

1. Nowadays, the main use of phones is as multimedia devices (gaming, movies, facebook...). You need as large screen for this as possible. Everybody will agree that selfies look soooo much better on a larger screen :-)
The average user will cope with some usability issues to gain advantages of a larger screen. Simple as that. Note that I am talking about the average user here.

2. You are writing the article implying that Apple is the driver of the large screen devices. This is not true...
Before iPhone 6 there were several large-screen android devices (by Samsung for example) which were very successful. iPhone sales were going down and people wanted larger screens. Apple just followed the trend despite Steve Jobs' claim that "You can't get your hand around it, no one's going to buy that."

3. The only way manufacturers can force a larger screen on you is if they don't sell smaller screens. However, last time I was at a phone shop there were lots of models running Android with smaller screens... not sure about iPhones.

You quote statistic that is 6-8 years old. Things got worse in the meantime. For example, scroll down to the list of countries, specifically to the US:
" Internet access by individuals in the US is not subject to technical censorship, but can be penalized by law for violating the rights of others. As in other countries, the potential for legal liability for civil violations, including defamation and copyright, constrains the publishers of Internet content in the United States. This can have a "chilling effect" and lead to self-censorship of lawful online content and conduct. Content-control software is sometimes used by businesses, libraries, schools, and government offices to limit access to specific types of content.^[117]
In 2014, the United States was added to Reporters Without Borders's (RWB's) list of "Enemies of the Internet", a category of countries with the highest level of Internet censorship and surveillance. RWB stated that the U.S. ""¦ has undermined confidence in the Internet and its own standards of security" and that "U.S. surveillance practices and decryption activities are a direct threat to investigative journalists, especially those who work with sensitive sources for whom confidentiality is paramount and who are already under pressure."^[2]"

Some more interesting parts from the main article about the US censorship:
"The strong protections for freedom of speech and expression against federal, state, and local government censorship are rooted in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. These protections extend to the Internet and as a result very little government mandated technical filtering occurs in the U.S. Nevertheless, the Internet in the United States is highly regulated, supported by a complex set of legally binding and privately mediated mechanisms."

"Significant public resistance to proposed content restriction policies have prevented the more extreme measures used in some other countries from taking hold in the U.S"

"Public dialogue, legislative debate, and judicial review have produced filtering strategies in the United States that are different from those found in most of the rest of the world. Many government-mandated attempts to regulate content have been barred on First Amendment grounds, often after lengthy legal battles.^[3] However, the government has been able to exert pressure indirectly where it cannot directly censor. With the exception of child pornography, content restrictions tend to rely more on the removal of content than blocking; most often these controls rely upon the involvement of private parties, backed by state encouragement or the threat of legal action.^[4] In contrast to much of the rest of the world, where ISPs are subject to state mandates, most content regulation in the United States occurs at the private or voluntary level."

And so on... it is not direct as in other parts of the world but it is there.

The parts of the quote in the last paragraph are quite contradictory to the ONI (OpenNet Initiative) classifications, see here. Some of the "nice" countries are not that "nice":

• US is classified as "enemy of internet" with pervasive censorship.
• Australia is "changing".... definitely for worse.

And let's not forget about Internet surveillance with a nice analogy:
- the door is closed in the censorship countries
- the door is open in the non-censorship countries.However, be prepared to bend over as the "big brother" will be watching. And here come US and Australia again...

Developing countries following US and AU is probably not the best idea.

Thank you.
Let me try...
New line.

On android there were and there still are LOTS of options if your phone is rooted. I have been using adaway on android for a few years. It uses hosts file to blocks ads in browsers, apps etc.

Off topic, any idea why newline disappears when I post from Chrome on Android? Everything appears as one long paragraph. Posting from desktop Chromium is fine.

They will have hard time "selling" less intrusive ads back to people. Everybody I know has already tasted the freedom of not having ads thanks to the ad blockers and I am sure that going back to ads would be a step back.What guarantee is there that ads won't start being intrusive again in a while? Intrusive ads are better noticed than other ads and over time they would become dominant again.

You should install an ad blocker on your mobile. Plenty of choices for most of the platforms. No need to prevent loading images or to completely stop js.

Stupid idiots is all I can say. First we need to pay to be spied on and then we need to pay extra not to be spied on.

You can still connect a higher res screen using HDMI. This one is using DSI port and keeps the HDMI port free for other uses.

If worried use pdf2ps or pdf2jpg or some other variety to convert it.

Hacking Team had no exploits for Nokia 3310. Seems like the platform of choice if you want to stay secure. :-)

Perhaps next time try addressing at least one of the real points I made.

As mentioned in the article, what ongoing resistance is actually there? I am in no way expert on systemd but the whole thing may be being blown out of proportion by few people who don't like systems or Sievers. Or who are resisting the change.And I keep wondering why would the more knowledgeable people (who make decisions at Debian etc) agree to go with it if it was that bad.Edit: Accidentally posted as reply to wrong post. Not sure how to fix...

Thank you for the warning. I decided not to follow the link.

Completely agree. I reinstalled linux few months ago and completely forgot to install flash. Didn't even realise it was not there until I read this article.
Flash = RIP

As far as I know the only things that really have been stripped out are Windows Media Center, DVD playback, gadgets and some games. The other stripped-out stuff can be downloaded separately (games or floppy drivers for example).

Media center can be easily replaced by several alternatives (XBMC for example), VLC will do the DVD player.

Unless I missed something, I am missing your point.

It rebooted and contact has been established.

However:
- Its exact position remains fuzzy, complicating two-way communication.
- The communication is not stable enough to apply the patch. So, they have to keep rebooting it regularly.

Quite often the only way to get rid of those people is to promote them to a higher level. That's why we have so many incompetent managers and, unfortunately, they do even more damage then.

All your tractors are belong to us

I wanted to mod you up but I could not find an appropriate option... I was looking for something like "sad but true" or "we are so fucked"...

Considering the competition and how open source seems to be the "trendy choice", perhaps the "new M$" is just waiving an open-source-windows-carrot in front of millions of donkeys hoping they will follow.

After reading your first sentence I have already started a reply in my head along the lines "Australia too..." Only to see that you were talking about Australia.I finally have good ADSL speeds only because I live next to phone exchange now. But getting reasonable Internet connection was a struggle at 4 previous place I lived in.

They could. So could runbox or anybody else. Business run only as long as they make profit or have potential to make profit.

Us paying for a service does not guarantee that it won't shut down. The only way to be sure that a service won't shut down is to run it yourself.

You paying for it does not mean anything in terms of the business shutting down.

And, not trying to defend google but gmail, for example is also safe, secure, cheap (free) and reliable.

Same

The average user does not know what root access is and does not need it. I don't think that you or most of us here are average users. Hence, it does not make sense to enable root access on all handsets but it makes sense to make it easily obtained if the advanced user wishes to do so.

Damn, you almost had me crying before I got to the 3rd paragraph...

Well, if you want to go that path, 5120x2880 is also a double (x and y) resolution of Dell U2713HM and few other Dell monitors (possibly using the same panel). This could also be interpreted the other way from your conclusion. The most likely scenario however, is that LG came up with a high-res panel which got used by several companies, including Apple and Dell.

There is zero evidence to your claim that Apple ordered the panel from LG. If they did I am sure that they would not allow any other company to get access to "their premium panels", and especially not to let anybody beat them to the game and release a 5K monitor before them, like Dell did.

And why do you think that 5120x2880 is a weird resolution? The numbers are higher than everything else around but they are just a multiple of very commonly used 720p resolution (1280x720 -> 2560x1440 -> 5120x2880 - doubling x and y at each step).

And I think that your argument that Apple loves "2x pixel ratio" does not make sense in this case. We are not talking about a phone or a tablet where doubling a display makes sense because the apps are full-screen and they scale easier. This is iMac where the applications are designed to run at any size you want them to be. And even iPhone resolution did not follow 2x (x and y) resolution jumps, actually the only 2x (x and y) change was from iPhone 3 to 4. After that the increments were much smaller and also aspect ratio changed.

And finally your comparison of who sold how many is irrelevant to the question. And you are also comparing apples and oranges (monitors and computers).

Apple does make nice hardware. However, it should be noted that they are not the first to have 5K displays:
http://gizmodo.com/dells-27-inch-5k-monitor-is-like-filet-mignon-for-your-1630946185

Almost marked you as spam :-)

Will it have rounded corners?

And a very interesting "feature", the RasPi 2 crashes when photographed with a flash:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=99042

It seems like the switchmode power supply chip is somehow xenon flash light sensitive and the voltage fluctuates significantly when illuminated by flash light.

The old RasPis are not affected.

Rivals include the Arduino...

I would not say that Arduiuno is a rival. The popularity of Arduiuno and RasPi may be similar but they are two different worlds, you are comparing "microcontrollers" and "computers".

For example:
Ardiuno is based on a microcontroller, there is no "real" OS apart from some specialised microcontroller OS' like RTOS. Apart from Due (84MHz) all other MCUs are 16MHz or slower. RAM and internal flash memory is in the order of KB.

On the other hand all other boards you listed are running proper OS (linux/windows), all have frequencies in the range of 1GHz, RAM is external and is in the order of GB. Memory is usually on a separate chip from the CPU, for example on memory cards or eMMC flash.

1920 x 1200 and 1920 x 1080

Ah, I can't even count to 5 properly :-)
Late night.
Thanks.

And even more interesting, the first bounce was about 1km into space!!!
source: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30034060

Actually 4 BB boards + 1 revision update pre-dated Raspberry Pi:

1. BeagleBoard, July 28, 2008
2. BeagleBoard rev.C, May 13, 2009
3. BeagleBoard-xM, September 14, 2010
4. BeagleBone, October 31, 2011
5. BeagleBone Black, April 23, 2013

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeagleBoard

I was surprised as well.

According to Wikipedia the release date of the original Beagleboard was July 28 2008. Raspberry Pi was released in February 2012.
RasPi came almost four years later!!!

I think that lots of people (including me) didn't hear about the BB until after the release of the RasPi. Hence the wrong assumption.

Unfortunately Kardashian's butt is a much better headline than landing on a comet.

They should have said that the comet/asteroid was on the collision course with Earth and that Bruce Willis was on the lander to blow it up :-)

Whatever Nokia 3310 is running :-)

Since there isn't anything to 're-hide' for atheists

->

That's complete nonsense. There are a huge number of religious artifacts out there. Nothing that proves the existence of an all-powerful being, of course, but lots and lots of artifacts none-the-less.

Your argument makes no sense. While there are lots of religious artifacts out there, atheist scientists have no interest in hiding them. As you said yourself, they do not prove the existence of god so why hide them? Even more they may have historical significance so not hiding them makes even more sense for a scientist.

But I can easily see a religious scientist hiding a religious artifact. For them religious artifacts may signify a proof of a deity which is great news if it is a proof for their God. But what if it is not...

Again, I am completely against all this crap but:
1. Terrorism: Data retention can show who contacted who and when and hence lead to new suspects. For example see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention
"The authorities in Spain and the United Kingdom have claimed that retained telephony data made a significant contribution to police enquires into the 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings and the 7 July 2005 London bombings."

2. The article/legislation is about storing metadata only and not content. Stuff like 'Hey, wanna help me to blast a building tomorrow?' won't be stored.

3. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-30/turnbull-introduces-data-retention-bill-to-parliament/5853156
"For example, in a current major child exploitation investigation, the AFP has been unable to identify 156 out of 463 potential suspects because certain internet service providers do not retain the necessary IP address allocation records,"

Of course 90% of this is politician's bull... but there must be at least a bit of truth in it.

The main goal of this proposed law is not copyright. Every government's/leader's/dictator's dream is to have a complete control of their people so they can retain power. Surveillance is a step towards it. Copyright is just an additional bonus.

Two things in the summary are misleading:
1. I want to know where $100 to $200 figure came from? It is not in the linked article and, as far as I know, no cost estimates have been released yet.
And it definitely sounds WAY TOO HIGH. Does it mean my Internet bill will go from $50 to $250???

2. "The data will be used for copyright enforcement and to track the exact location of mobile phone users."
This is VERY MISLEADING as it sounds that the main goal is copyright enforcement. The data retention is part of anti-terrorism legislation and it will be used for a variety of investigations (counterterrorism, organised crime, counter-espionage and cyber security). Yes, copyright enforcement also gets mentioned but I don't think it is not the main goal.

Having said that, I completely disagree with the proposed laws as they are more than open for abuse. Even "metadata" has not been defined yet.

And I agree with Tanuki64's comment how such laws are inevitable. The whole world is slowly turning into a police state. Unfortunately resistance is futile :-(

Why the Apple-specific headline?As the summary mentions there are other players in the game. Why not mention them?Or even better have a headline without trying to catch people's attention by playing on Apple fanboyism or Apple hate.

Thank you. This news just made my day.
So little do we know...

Fully agree. If I could give you 5 mod points I would.