Eideard

There have always been two Androids. Lazy journalists – including myself – have called Google’s smartphone OS free and open source, but that’s never been the whole story. Google’s apparent decision last week to strictly control access to its Honeycomb tablet software puts a quiet division front and center, and it throws down a gauntlet that I would love to see open-source advocates finally meet.

Let’s get this “open Android” thing out of the way first. There are really two Androids. The first – let’s call it Android-O – is an open-source project that Google contributes a lot to. The second – Android-G – is a proprietary Google project that happens to frequently ingest and excrete open-source code.

At any given moment, the latest, hottest Android phones and devices are running the closed Android-G, not the open Android-O. That’s always been the case. Every new version of Android is introduced with Android-G devices, and eventually, once Google’s mind has moved on to other things, that code gets dumped out into the Android-O repository…

Google’s become unusually strict with Honeycomb, though, and that’s because the tablet market is very different from the phone market. The phone market has a shifting cast of minority players with different strengths. The tablet market, on the other hand, is dominated by one big gorilla: Apple.

The world is littered with the corpses of open-source mobile projects. Nokia’s Maemo, Intel and Nokia’s MeeGo, LiMo, OpenMoko, and TuxPhone have all failed in the market so far. Back in 2009, I said that “open source phones still fail” because wireless carriers don’t like the unexpected, dynamic nature of open-source projects.

But this time, I think the problem is different. Going up against Apple, the tablet leader, Google realized it needs an industry-leading UI and a consistent brand experience for Android on tablets.

And open-source projects, as is well known, have serious problems creating industry leading UIs. For one thing, open-source projects tend to attract hard-core programmers who love adding features, not visual visionaries. But possibly more importantly, a great end-user experience is often about editing – about making things fit to a consistent vision, which is much easier when there’s one consistent vision driving the project…

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Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.

But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.

The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.

That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.

The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.

RTFA. To me, the best that religions can offer is guidance to the spirit of charity that lies at the [oft-forgotten] roots of most. I never worked construction projects with Habitat for Humanity because the inevitable prayer sessions were a distraction from the task at hand; but, I would be the last to deny the good performed by such groups.

Ownership of the brand more often comes down to conflict, armed or otherwise, over who owns which patch of ideology, ritual or a chunk of land and livelihood. The article provides beaucoup details. All pretty silly.

Some ex-CIA operatives on the front lines during the Bush-era war on terror are reported highly critical of planned U.S. Senate probes into their activities.

Some say the investigations smack of politics and hypocrisy, that congressional leaders knew all along what was going on and that questionable tactics wouldn’t have been used without explicit legal guidance from the Bush administration, Time magazine reported.

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., confirmed Thursday that her Senate Intelligence Committee will investigate the CIA’s interrogation and detention programs under the Bush administration.

A former senior CIA official was quoted by Time as saying Feinstein’s investigation would have a “chilling effect on people who are asked to do risky things for this administration.”

Another said staff members will wonder why they are singled out for carrying out Bush administration policies “while those who made those policies are busy writing their memoirs.”

“We were only obeying orders” is the name of the defense. Google “Nuremberg Trials” if you wish to know how successful that was – after World War 2.

Obama is working at being a nice guy – you’ll probably get off with a slap on the wrist, anyway. Next case?