> Graphene is fundamentally vanilla Windows Phone, except with all Windows/Microsoft branding removed in favour of Facebook
Not a chance. Microsoft would never compromise their branding. They're not THAT desperate yet, and their still in a stronger position than Facebook in terms of having money to throw around.
> phone functionality swapped with a custom Skype UI (integrated with Facebook contacts)
You'll never get the carriers to agree with that. Not yet. Even Apple couldn't do it.
> For data service, Facebook makes a deal with one carrier in every region on Earth to become a "dumb pipe" of unlimited 4G/3G, negotiates a reasonable globally consistent rate, and handles billing with users (acting as a middleman between users and carriers, effectively becoming its own carrier with borrowed infrastructure).
Again, for the same reason, it's extremely unlikely that carriers would agree to this on any level. Not yet. They've still got a few dying gasps yet.
> In the end, we get a Facebook-controlled and Facebook-powered "Facebook Phone" which shuns legacy telephony technology and seamlessly moves between regional 3G/4G and Wi-Fi networks (and makes Facebook, Microsoft, and Nokia a ton of money).
I still disagree that Facebook are in any position to heavy-hand away the branding of either Microsoft or Nokia. Especially Microsoft. They're not going to hand over the OS they spent a lot of effort developing for no recognition, even if it makes them tonnes of money in licensing.
It's a good idea, but I don't think it's likely at all in this climate.
The header: "Apple 2.0 - Covering the business that Steve Jobs built" shows the category that this blog post is in.
While it doesn't point out in big letters that this is an opinion piece, this article is in the category of a well established Apple opinion blog in their tech blogs category.
It's also pretty clear from the writing style that this is an opinion piece.
There's no one standard definition of "4G". A myriad of differing technologies all claim to be 4G, which is why it's just about impossible for a vendor to produce a device compatible with every one worldwide. If "4G" had a solid definition, and everybody was using it, but iPad didn't support it, then it would be understandable.
You fail to account for the variables involved in "calories out".
Metabolism is controlled in a large way by hormones. For example, extremely undernourished people will slow their metabolism way down in order to preserve what fat reserves are left. A diet that significantly increases blood sugar will, in many people, cause a high insulin response and cause fat to be stored and only glucose to be burned.
Essentially you're looking at this from the wrong way. For the body to grow in any manner, hormones are required (c.f. growth hormones during puberty). And for the body to have grown, excess calories must have been consumed. What forces people to eat so many calories that they grow in size is triggered by their hormones generally telling them that they are starving, even if they are not. See Metabolic Syndrome, Diabetes, Insulin Resistance, etc.
So yes, calories in/calories out, but you're not even considering _why_ those calories were consumed in the first place.
Disclaimer: I've been eating Low-Carb/High-Fat diet that brought my steadily worsening weight issue to a much more healthy level (91kg to 75kg) through control of my blood sugar and appetite.
Interpreted code is perfectly legitimate to use in an iOS app, under certain restrictions.
The first is that you cannot JIT it, because the OS prevents execution of memory that has been writable (this is true for every app except for MobileSafari and it the reason why the only arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities have been found through MobileSafari).
The second is that you're not allowed download executable code to increase or change the functionality of the app. The reasoning for this I see as a little bit of selfishness on Apple's part, in that you can't really build a native app that acts as a platform for other people's fully-fledged 'apps' bypassing the app store, and the second being that the user's expectation of an app is that it be pretty much self contained in terms of functionality.
There have been exceptions to this though. CouchDB for iOS runs interpreted on the Erlang VM, but its database queries are executed by Mozilla's command line javascript engine. The code that runs on this query engine is actually downloaded through the database's syncing functionality, and it IS allowed in the app store.
So there does seem to be some leeway in terms of what is actually banned in that case. It seems that if downloading something technically turing-complete is REQUIRED as part of an essential function of the app, and cannot by necessity actually _change_ the main functionality of the app through running in a very limited sandbox (no I/O of any kind or indeed anything but data processing in this case), then it's allowed.
To get back to your original point, if someone wanted to build a bit of middleware that bridged the CocoaTouch libraries with python, then distributed that and allowed people to compile apps with it, it would be perfectly legal on iOS.
You're kidding, right? It sounds like you don't know how the GPL applies to them or you think Apple is really dumb.
There is absolutely no reason to move those apps. They're binaries. The GPL only threatens them if the use free code in a nonfree program and don't distribute the source.
The only other option is Apple doing it out of spite, which would be stupid on all accounts.
There's a reason for that. U.S. accounting law requires that non-subscription devices that are upgraded have a fee associated with the upgrade under Apple and many analysts’ interpretation of the law.
This is why iPod Touch owners have to pay for upgrades while iPhone users do not.
I think Apple may have relaxed that recently though, and I wouldn't be surprised if they release Mountain Lion for free.