Today, we’ve been informed that Apple has removed Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store.1 We first heard from Apple about this decision two days ago, and we’ve been discussing the pending removal with them since then. However, we still do not yet have a clear answer on why Apple has chosen to remove Airfoil Speakers Touch.

Microsoft wants Windows developers to write Windows 8-specific, Metro-style, touch-friendly applications, and to make sure that they crank these apps out, the company has decided that Visual Studio 11 Express, the free-to-use version of its integrated development environment, can produce nothing else.<p>

If you want to develop desktop applications—anything that runs at the command line or on the conventional Windows desktop that remains a fully supported, integral, essential part of Windows 8—you'll have two options: stick with the current Visual C++ 2010 Express and Visual C# 2010 Express products, or pay about $400-500 for Visual Studio 11 Professional. A second version, Visual Studio 11 Express for Web, will be able to produce HTML and JavaScript websites, and nothing more.

Yahoo has <a href="http://axis.yahoo.com">just announced Axis</a>, a browser extension thing and mobile app that “redefines what it means to search and browse the Web [sic].”

Striking is the sheer volume of takedown notices Google receives: in just the last month, it processed over 1.2 million requests for Search alone, from 1,296 copyright owners and 1,087 reporting organizations. That scale allows it to present trends in the data that might not otherwise be apparent. For example, even in the case of notorious "pirate" sites like The Pirate Bay, Google has received takedown notices for less than 5% of their indexable pages.<p>

On the other hand, this report also provides a clearer look into the abuse of copyright tools. Google explains that it's complied with 97% of takedown requests received between July and December of 2011, but also provides examples of obviously invalid copyright requests it's received.

Mr. Caspar asked [in spring 2010] to see the hard drive [with the Wi-Fi data collected from Street View]. Google said handing it over could expose it to liability for violating German telecommunications law, which prohibits network operators and other data managers from disclosing the private communications of their clients.<p>

This made no sense to Mr. Caspar, who explained that as data protection commissioner [for Hamburg] he was empowered to receive the data. Finally, in autumn 2010, the company yielded and gave Mr. Caspar the hard drive. By this point, Hamburg prosecutors had opened a criminal investigation.<p>

Google was equally resistant with the American authorities.

The stylus with haptic feedback, comes with a built-in haptic actuator and a short-range wireless receiver. The vibration commands are sent via tiny wireless transmitters built into the bezel of your iPad.

Like Google's press images for what it calls "Project Glass," the glasses Brin wore while walking down King Street were lens-free with a small, clear prism-like display mounted above the right eye. It wasn't clear if the glasses were completely self-contained, or if they were wired to what appeared to be a smart phone in his left hand. Brin, who has been seen sporting the headgear before, wasn't using them at the moment, though - he said they were out of power.

In the end, the conclusion is that a ‘modern browser’ according to Google is a browser which sends ‘Chrome’ as its UA string and supports Flash or the Web Audio API.<p>

Can we instead on production sites standardize on something like “this site requires (experimental) features not yet present in your browser” (Thanks @getify for the idea) and a link to instructions on how they can update their browser, or if it is a browser specific feature, information about the feature and why it isn’t yet supported in their browser of choice.

The Guardian has led the way in API-based development since 2009 and now its spinoff hyperlocal social network&nbsp;<a href="www.n0tice.com">n0tice</a> has <a href="http://about.n0tice.com/2012/05/22/announcing-n0tice-org-the-open-journalism-toolkit/">launched its own set of API tools</a> to entice users and brands to build things using its content and functionality.

I got a London call last week from Bob Apfel, a Brooklyn neighbor (and fellow Oberlin College graduate).<p>

"Two weeks ago," he began. "I completed the debt restructuring of Greece."

Smartphones powered by the Android and iOS mobile operating systems accounted for more than eight out of ten smartphones shipped in the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12). According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the mobile operating systems held shares of 59.0% and 23.0% respectively of the 152.3 million smartphones shipped in 1Q12. During the first quarter of 2011, the two operating systems held a combined share of 54.4%. The share gains mean that Android and iOS have successfully distanced themselves from previous market leaders Symbian and BlackBerry, as well as Linux and Windows Phone 7/Windows Mobile.

The American wireless industry is increasingly taking a page from the airlines, adopting irritating fees and surcharges while curtailing the perks and rewards that used to come with customer loyalty and family plans that routinely run into the hundreds of dollars.<p>

Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile all have a nasty surprise in store for customers who have not upgraded their smartphones in the last year or so: the equipment upgrade fee.  Sprint and AT&T both charge $36 per phone, Verizon Wireless now charges $30, T-Mobile $18.<p>

Verizon customers are especially peeved because that wireless company used to reward loyal customers with a $50 credit off any new phone at contract renewal time. Today, instead of getting “New Every Two” discounts, Big Red will charge you $30 for every new phone when you renew your contract.

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

Google Inc's Android mobile platform has not infringed Oracle's patents, a California jury decided in a high stakes trial fought by the two Silicon Valley giants over smartphone technology.

As part of the restructuring, HP expects approximately 27,000 employees to exit the company, or 8.0% of its workforce as of Oct. 31, 2011, by the end of fiscal year 2014. The company is offering an early retirement program, so the total number of employees affected will be impacted by the number of employees that participate in the early retirement plan. Workforce reduction plans will vary by country, based on local legal requirements and consultation with works councils and employee representatives, as appropriate.

The HP-popularised memristor device is a form of ReRAM – resistive RAM – and is fairly expensive to make. Metal oxide-based ReRAM technology promises to combine minimum memory speed with NAND non-volatility and be able to provide higher capacities than NAND, which is thought will cease to be usable as process geometries go down past 10nm. ReRAM dies will need less electricity to run and will take up less space than equivalent capacity NAND.

When Apple shipped Mac OS X Lion 10.7, the “Library” folder located within every user’s home folder, which had previously been visible to users in the Finder, was made invisible. To access the Library folder, users must now hold down the option key while selecting the “Go” menu in the Finder.<p>

This is probably a good move for the vast majority of Mac users, but for folks with even a small amount of interest in tinkering with the configuration files and caches of various applications, it’s an outright nuisance.

It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia. The third billion will be harder, and might not be reached until 2040.

The Space Hijackers had been using an altered version of the 2012 logo on their site and their Twitter page.<p>

The Olympic organisers are notoriously prickly about branding, but also about protest, and laws introduced after London won the right to host this years games could potentially <a href-"http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2011/11/olympic-ideal-puts-money-before-democracy/">place restrictions</a> on protest for the duration of the Olympics and Paralympics.<p>

It could be argued that the logo in itself was a justifiable reason for the suspension: but you have to seriously ask: is anyone actually going to confuse the Space Hijackers account for an official Olympic account?

Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.<p>

Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.

The team, led by Jeremy Elson in the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research Redmond, set the new sort benchmark by using a radically different approach to sorting called Flat Datacenter Storage (FDS). The team’s system sorted almost three times the amount of data (1,401 gigabytes vs. 500 gigabytes) with about one-sixth the hardware resources (1,033 disks across 250 machines vs. 5,624 disks across 1,406 machines) used by the previous record holder, a team from Yahoo! that set the mark in 2009.

It’s no <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/who_uses_pinterest.php">Pinterest</a>, but according to data from now Google-owned Admob, iPhone users were split pretty evenly along gender lines in February of 2010, with women accounting for 43% of iPhone owners. As for Android, that number was at 27% - less than a third. In 2011, a<a href="http://blog.hunch.com/?p=51781"> survey</a> of 15,818 Hunch users found that iOS users are more likely to be female, while Android users still trend male. But why?

Andrew’s tweet read:<br />

“Ryanair exhibit A. Looked up fare yesterday, total £123.00. Returned today and fare is £237.00. Flushed cookies. Fare back to £123.00.”<br />

What this means is that Ryanair has purposefully tracked when Andrew’s visited the site, looked at a specific fare and not made a booking. Usually this sort of thing is done for targeted advertising across other sites, but Ryanair it seems has something else in mind. The next time Andrew visited the site to look at the same fare he had look at previously, Ryanair had hiked up the cost. I assume this is to get a customer to worry that the cost will go up further and book a trip there and then.

I have just sent a letter to Eric Schmidt setting out these four points. In this letter, I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with first proposals of remedies to address each of these points.<p>

If Google comes up with an outline of remedies which are capable of addressing our concerns, I will instruct my staff to initiate the discussions in order to finalise a remedies package. This would allow to solve our concerns by means of a commitment decision – pursuant to Article 9 of the EU Antitrust Regulation - instead of having to pursue formal proceedings with a Statement of objections and to adopt a decision imposing fines and remedies.

Q: As strictly an online army of hackers, how powerful is Anonymous?<br />
A: Anonymous is kind of like the big buff kid in school who had really bad self-esteem then all of a sudden one day he punched someone in the face and went, “Holy s— I’m really strong!”

According to Michel van der Bel, COO of the Greater China region at Microsoft, sales of Windows Phones have accounted for 7% in China's smartphone segment recently, compared to a 6% share for Apple's iPhones.<p>

The strong sales enjoyed by Lumia phones at present are typical short-term results for the newly launched model, and it remains to be seen whether the sales momentum will continue, commented industry sources.<p>

Given that sales of iPhones totaled over five million units in China in the first quarter of 2012, it would be difficult for Windows Phone models to yield the same results in a quarter, the sources commented.

WoA (Windows on ARM) tablet PCs, based on estimated general BOM costs of US$300-350 for 10-inch tablet PCs and US$150-200 for 7-inch models, are struggling to meet vendors' price targets for competition against Apple and Amazon's tablet PC products because of the additional US$90-100 fee for Windows 8, according to Taiwan-based supply chain makers.<p>

The average price of tablet PCs has been dropping rapidly sine the launch of Amazon's Kindle Fire. But PC brand vendors, who are used to price wars, are nevertheless struggling to compete, because unlike Amazon they do not see additional revenues from post-purchase content sales.

<a href="http://androidcommunity.com/samsung-s-voice-leaked-for-all-ics-devices-20120520/">The S-Voice APK</a>, which contained services that were exclusive to the Galaxy S III, allowed owners of other Ice Cream Sandwich-powered smartphones to install Samsung's new voice assistant (its Siri rival) and perform commands on their devices.</p>
<p>It appears that in the last 24 hours, Samsung (and its partner Vlingo, the technology behind the voice functions) have begun detecting requests from non-supported devices and blocking them, displaying the message: "Network Error. Please Try Again."

Ironically, the vulnerability is introduced by a class of firewalls cellular carriers use. While intended to make the networks safer, these firewall middleboxes allow hackers to infer TCP sequence numbers of data packets appended to each data packet, a disclosure that can be used to tamper with internet connections.

Indeed, this is not just another too-clean looking and ultimately boring 3-D virtual tour of Egypt's famous archaeological site.<p>

"Many 3-D models of ancient sites have more to do with fantasy and video games than with archaeology. The colors, surfaces and textures are not researched and appear quite flat or unrealistic," Peter Der Manuelian, Philip J. King professor of Egyptology at Harvard University and director of the MFA's Giza Archives, told Discovery News.

A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.<p>

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other.

Microsoft quietly revealed this week that it will kill off the Aero glass interface in Windows 8 and replace it with a flat, Metro-like Explorer that’s more in line with the company’s current design mantra. But this change isn’t just about obfuscation. It’s about the Windows team abandoning the very market that drove Windows’s success for over 25 years in order to chase a coming and potentially illusory market for tablet devices.

Apple Inc. is defending its voice-recognition software Siri - she of the iPhone 4S - against claims that it doesn't perform as advertised.</p>
<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/03/12/so-sirious-iphone-user-sues-apple-over-voice-activated-assistant/">A cluster of lawsuits</a> seeking class action status in Oakland, Calif., allege that iPhone 4S commercials and company statements about the phone were false and misleading. Siri, they say, is brilliant on TV, but she's dim in reality…<p>The plaintiffs don’t say how the advertisements are misleading, or how their personal experiences relate to those advertisements, Apple said. And if Siri so disappointed them, they could have — but did not, apparently — avail themselves of Apple’s 30-day return policy, the company said.

Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world's No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones…<p>A main condition of the deal is that the Android system remain free and open for five years, said a source who is familiar with the Chinese approval but not authorized to discuss it.

Britney Spears was Google's most popular search query -- followed by Paris Hilton, Christina Aguilera, and Pamela Anderson. (Yes! Pamela Anderson!)
<br />Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction was the most searched term to date on Lycos.<br />
people still used Lycos.<br /> 
The Howard Dean campaign was pioneering grassroots organizing and fundraising on the Internet.

Think about it: this may well be the only time Zuckerberg will take a company public. That moment of being in New York and ringing that bell is something many entrepreneurs dream about. And he’s forgoing it. Instead, he’s pulling an all-night hackathon with the team as I write this post. It may be posturing but, if that’s the case, it’s brilliant posturing.

When Microsoft announced at the launch of Windows Phone Tango handsets in China that passing the iPhone in China was just an interim goal on the way to overtaking Android, it did seem rather grandiose.<p>

It seems Microsoft was right however, with Michel van der Bel, COO Greater China Region at Microsoft saying that a mere 2 months after the launch Windows Phone 7 handsets already had a 7% market share in China, ahead of the 6% of the iPhone there.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, be­cause apps are the fu­ture. Wait! Apps are doomed be­cause HTML5 is the fu­ture. I see some­thing al­most every day say­ing one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

One of the greatest strengths of the web is that the the ease of linking allows innovative new apps to succeed without asking anyone else's permission - but up until now that hasn't applied to integrations between web apps. Web Intents is an emerging <a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html" target="_blank">W3C specification</a> inspired by Android's Intents system that aims to solve the problems of communications.</p>
<p>Here are some <a href="http://bleeding-edge-tlv.appspot.com/#12" target="_blank">slides that explain the main concepts</a> from a pervious talk.

France's data protection watchdog has set up a meeting with Google to closely examine its controversial privacy policy.<p>

The search giant consolidated 60 privacy policies into one single agreement in March. The EU expressed concern over the legality and impact of the change.<p>

France's information commission, the CNIL, said it was not yet "totally satisfied" with Google's explanation of the amendments.

Roughly 50% of all the smartphones sold in the USA in Q1 2012 were iPhones. This is very different to the global picture:<p>

Android is outselling iPhone by more than 2:1 on a global basis. But in the USA, Apple is massively outselling Android. That has obvious implications for where (mainly US-based) developers should be placing their efforts.

Roughly a year ago when we summarized the state of smartphones at the Appnation conference, less than 40% of mobile subscribers in the U.S. had smartphones. Today, one in two mobile subscribers has a smartphone and that figure is moving steadily upwards.<p>

By most measures, it has been the year of the App once again, driven mostly by the rise of Android and iOS users who have more than doubled in a year and account for 88% of those who have downloaded an app in the past 30 days. In just a year, the average number of apps per smartphone has jumped 28%, from 32 apps to 41. Not only is the 2012 smartphone owner downloading more apps, they are increasingly spending more time using them vs. using the mobile web — about 10% more than last year.

And, that leads us to the number one issue cited as a problem: developer support. Developers claim the platform is too troublesome because of device specific variations, but the reality is that it's just that developers don't think they make enough money to justify that work. This could be because of the single listing and therefore single purchase of apps [for both phones and tablets], but it's really just a vicious cycle where developers don't put enough support into the ecosystem, and so the ecosystem doesn't support developers.

While tens of thousands of cases had transferred from the CSCS system to the CS2 system, the correct arrears balance did not transfer with them. This was because the information had been archived and, on transfer to CS2, these balances were not picked up by the system, the NAO [National Audit Office] said.

In addition, a number of cases managed off the primary IT systems, on a separate clerical case database, did not have opening arrears balances entered onto that database. In compiling the accounts the commission has estimated that this would have led to an understatement of the overall arrears balance by £59m at 31 March 2011.

If there's a simple lesson in all of this, it's that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.

Fragmentation matters to the entire Android community: users, developers, OEMs, brands & networks. It's a blessing and a curse.</p><p>

The Blessing. Fragmentation allows users to take their pick from thousands of devices. You can choose from phones with 3D screens, projectors, CDMA, GSM, or even CDMA & GSM. You may not care that Tag Heuer has made an Android phone but at least one person does (and they use OpenSignalMaps). It's a triumph for Android that as a single OS it can target so many markets.</p><p>

The Curse. The proliferation of devices with their associated screen sizes, internal hardware and custom ROMs creates some difficulties. We spend a lot of time making the app presentable (or at less functional) on exotic devices - this is the most common request we get from app users.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that—two words.</p><p>
But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model—in geek-speak, a “graph”—that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

Being wildly successful in tech is about anticipating change, and altering the status quo; being the 14th chief executive of a stodgy old major tech company is about extracting as much value as you can from the success it's already had. The CEOs of the Time Warners and Sonys and Yahoos and RIMs and even Microsofts of the world are experts only on their respective companies' existing businesses. They say things that sound stupid to us because they're not us, and because their goal for tech (to maximize profits at their companies) is not the same as ours (to get more awesome stuff that makes our lives better). They're not even really talking to us. They're talking to their boards.

<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052702304371504577406511931421118-lMyQjAxMTAyMDEwNTExNDUyWj.html">The Wall Street Journal</a> reports that the new strategy will accompany the launch of Android 5.0 - to be known as Jelly Bean, in keeping with Google's sweet tooth for Android code names – and involves several Android vendors. Several devices, including both tablets and unlocked smartphones, will be sold directly through Google's Web site and through some unnamed retail partners.

[Sprint CEO Dan] Hesse pointed shareholders to other benefits of the iPhone, noting that the device helped provide protection against litigation over Google Inc.’s Android operating software and allowed it to trim a costly loyalty program put in place to prevent customers from leaving for other carriers offering the device. Sprint activated 3.3m iPhones over the past two quarters, compared with 11.9m at AT&T Inc. and 7.5m at Verizon Wireless.</p><p>

“If you have any doubt go look at T-Mobile’s net subscriber numbers,” Hesse told shareholders. T-Mobile USA is the only major carrier without a deal to carry the iPhone and has lost contract customers in 10 straight quarters.

Thailand reportedly also looked at some of China’s largest tablet manufacturers, such as Lenovo and Huawei, but the pricing per unit was too high for its budget. Conversely, a lower bid from another company was offered but rejected by the government, perhaps due to less specs for the value.</p><p>

The select device model, priced at $81 per unit, is the Scopad SP0712: An 7-inch Android device running the 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system. It’s also got 1GB of RAM, 8GB of internal memory, 1.5 GHz single core CPU, and comes in four color options: Red, blue, silver, and gold. Shenzhen Scope will also set 30 help centers around the Southeast Asian country to provide user support specifically for tablets received from the campaign. Not too shabby of specs for tablets for elementary school students.

In June 2009, Microsoft issued security update MS09-027, which fixed a remote code execution vulnerability in the Mac version of Microsoft Office. Despite the availability of the bulletin (and the passage of time), not every machine is up to date yet – which is how nearly three years later, malware has emerged that exploits the issue on machines running Office on Mac OS X. Fortunately, our data indicates that this malware is not widespread, but during our investigation we found a few interesting facts we’d like to share with you.

In a conference call, Eric Hirshberg, CEO of the Activision Publishing division, made a surprisingly direct statement on the success of Skylanders, the new toy/video game hybrid for consoles and iOS devices. With 30m toys sold and $100m in revenue across toys and games in the quarter, said Hirshberg, Skylanders made more money than the entire business of Rovio’s Angry Birds franchise. Rovio announced today that Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 1 billion times, across both free and paid versions.

Faster downloading speeds have helped make Google’s YouTube video-viewing more popular. Young urban Africans organise YouTube parties. The company is also trying to help African governments digitise information and make it freely available to their citizens. Many rulings in the higher courts of Ghana, for instance, are going online.</p><p>

Yet critics complain that Google is buying up enormous amounts of virgin digital land in Africa at virtually no cost. Within a couple of decades, without the regulatory oversight of the African Union or African governments, they say, Africa’s internet life will be almost entirely in hock to the Google giant. Even the company’s decision to go slow on seeking profits from Africa by offering cheap deals has been attacked by African would-be rivals, which say that such tactics are only extending Google’s unfair advantage.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users.</p><p>

This means we’re no longer accepting new signups. If you’re an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.</p><p>

Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/12/oops-5-ceos-that-should-have-already-been-fired-cisco-ge-walmart-sears-microsoft/3/">"the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today"</a> as Forbes's Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.

[Kaspersky CTO Nikolay] Grebennikov originally stated that Apple had invited Kaspersky Lab to work with the company on improving its security, but has since issued a clarification. The company has now said that its analysis of OS X was "conducted independently" but that "Apple is open to collaborating with [Kaspersky] regarding new OS X vulnerabilities."</p><p>

In Computing's original interview, Grebennikov was specifically asked three times if Apple had requested Kaspersky Lab's assistance.

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. 

The new Google-commissioned paper, written by well-known UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, argues that such regulations would be preempted by the First Amendment. Google's search engine, they write, "uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries."<p>

The authors argue that this selection process is no different, constitutionally speaking, from a newspaper editor selecting wire stories to run, a guidebook deciding which attractions to feature, or a parade organizer choosing which floats to include. The courts have ruled that all of these editorial processes are fully protected by the First Amendment.

When playing with the assumptions, it becomes clear that the model is most sensitive to the revenue per device and total devices in use. The profitability is entirely dependent on those figures as variable costs are a percent of sales and fixed costs are limited by talent constraints.</p><p>

For example, if revenues per device drop to $4.50/yr then the operating margin drops to 38%.</p><p>

Now we can calculate some of the more interesting figures. For example:<br />
• Android OEMs receive $0.76 on average per device per year<br />
• Android Operators receive $1.07 on average per device per year (including Play)<br />
• Android Developers, as a group, receive $1.94 per device per year (including Play and AdMob)<br />
• Google receives a contribution of $2.75 per device per year from Android</p><p>

Again, these figures are very sensitive to the revenue per device (currently assumed to be $6.50).