Swarna Srinivasan's Library tagged policies →  View Popular

Addressing these issues requires data on just how inventive immigrants are, a
question that until recently was the province of educated guesswork. But William
Kerr, an economist at Harvard Business School, used name-matching software to
identify the ethnicity of each of the 8m scientists who had acquired an American
patent since 1975. He found that the share of patents awarded to scientists born
in America fell between 1975 and 2004. The share of all patents given to
scientists of Chinese and Indian descent living in America more than tripled,
from 4.1% in the second half of the 1970s to 13.9% in the years between 2000 and
2004. Nearly 40% of patents filed in 2005 by Intel, a silicon-chip maker, were
for work done by people of Chinese or Indian origin. Some of these patents may
have been awarded to American-born children of earlier migrants, but Mr Kerr
reckons that most changes over time arise from fresh immigration.

24-hour return window — Basically, this amounts to a
try-before-you-buy policy without being called that. From the time you buy any
application, you have 24 hours to use it and decide if you want to keep it. If
not, there is an option to uninstall the app, “returning” it to the Market for a
full refund.

Upgrades aren’t done through the Market — The official
wording on this is a bit odd, but it seems like any app upgrades won’t go
through the Market, and will instead be dished out from developers themselves.
This is different from the approach Apple takes, where upgrades come through the
App Store, and thus must be approved before they’re sent out (which can be
annoyingly slow).

Reinstalls flow freely — Once you’ve paid for an application
(after the 24-hour trial period) you can apparently uninstall and reinstall an
app as often as you’d like. It’s not clear if this can be done on an unlimited
number of Android devices (there is still only one so you can’t really test) or
only the device you bought it on.

Application removal — Yes, Google can and will pull
applications that violate policies (more on that below).

No porn — “We don’t allow content that contains nudity,
graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. We also don’t allow content
that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites,” Google writes on its
policy page. Though it probably doesn’t need to be said following that, Google
also has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to child pornography, and it will
alert authorities if it sees any app that violates that in the Market.

Apple also has
a policy against sexually explicit material, but there has been some
gray area around that recently
as the App Store policies loosen.

13 and up — You apparently have to be 13 years old or older
to use the Market, and if Google finds a user under that age it will delete
their account. Also odd, “users under 18 must have their parent or legal
guardian’s permission to use Android Market.” If there’s no porn, it’s not
entirely clear why that’s the case. [Update: Commenter
Tim F. makes the point below that since the paid Market is tied to a credit
card, parents probably don't want their kids running wild downloading apps and
charging them to their accounts.]

Billing disputes — You’re on your own.

No impersonations — You cannot impersonate someone else in
the Market. I assume that’s for reviews, otherwise it just seems like something
that needn’t be said.

Likewise, no hate speech — Also probably related to app
reviews.

No copyright infringement — This should be pretty obvious,
but several apps like PhoneSaber
and Duck
Hunt have been taken out of the App Store for violating copyrights. Google
will also have no problem removing apps such as those.

No viruses — Google is pretty clear here: “Don’t transmit
viruses, worms, defects, Trojan horses, malware, or any other items of a
destructive nature. We don’t allow content that harms or interferes with the
operation of the networks, servers, or other infrastructure of Google, carriers,
or any third-parties. Spam, malicious scripts and password phishing scams are
also prohibited on Android Market.”

The vague “prohibited products” — Google says “We don’t
allow products or services that violate Carrier Term of Service for allowed
usage.” Like Apple and AT&T, apparently if T-Mobile, the G1’s carrier,
doesn’t like the way some app is using its system, Google can pull it.

As I said, most of these rules make sense, and protect Google from certain
liabilities, but some may come as a surprise to those who are up in arms over
some of Apple’s App Store strict policies. It’s pretty clear that the Android
Market will share many of the same ones.

Luckily though, since Android is a more open platform overall, you don’t
actually have to use the Market to get applications on your device.

IN THE early 1990s America’s opinion-makers competed to outdo each other in
triumphalism. Economists argued that the “Washington consensus” would spread
peace and prosperity around the world. Politicians debated whether the “peace
dividend” should be used to create universal health care or be allowed to
fructify in the pockets of the people or quite possibly both. Francis Fukuyama
took the optimists’ garland by declaring, in 1992, “the end of history” and the
universal triumph of Western liberalism.

At the heart of the plan is a deep and homegrown faith in the pragmatism of
ordinary people. Decades ago professors at the University of Chicago developed
what has become known as the Chicago school of economics, which argues that
people behave rationally when given the facts. According to this framework, once
a homeowner or business executive understands the financial benefits of going
green, he or she should naturally choose to do so. “The economic argument is
critical,” Johnston points out. “Some people are going to do something out of
altruism and social conscience, but that’s a small percentage.”

Hence, the plan assumes that building owners will renovate skyscrapers and
factories for energy efficiency, to make them less costly to heat and cool, if
adequate loans are made available—a step the city has already taken in
cooperation with foundations and banks. Better insulation and new heating, hot
water and lighting systems can reduce energy expenses by 30 percent. City
officials note that when nine local companies recently spent a combined $277,000
to weatherize their buildings, their annual savings amounted to $100,000,
covering the costs within three years. Among the Chicago landmarks already
onboard for retrofits are the Sears Tower and the Merchandise Mart.

The same principle applies to running a household. The plan claims that by
replacing incandescent lightbulbs with fluorescent ones, homeowners would save
$108 a year. Another $23 could be saved by unplugging televisions rather than
keeping them on standby. More money could be found by turning down the
thermostat by three degrees Fahrenheit in the winter, keeping car tires properly
inflated and driving 10 fewer miles every week. These are among the 13
recommendations for how Chicagoans could change their behaviors in small but
significant ways, saving themselves $800 annually in the process. If only half
of the city’s residents followed the carbon-saving recommendations, 800,000
metric tons of emissions would disappear.

Foley’s treatment of the court’s legal issues is informed and direct. He
rightly draws attention to the coming debate on how the I.C.C. will define the
crime of aggression, a question that was deferred by the drafters of the court’s
treaty. This debate cuts very close to the privileges of powerful states, and
Foley implies that for that reason, the identification of the crime of
aggression will effectively be left to the great powers themselves. We shall
see.

John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who
have advocated forceful government action. Holdren will become Obama's science
adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which
oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government's
research on global warming.

Holdren also will direct the president's Council of Advisers on Science and
Technology. Joining him as co-chairs will be Nobel
Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus, a former director of the National
Institutes of Health, and Massachusetts
Institute of Technology professor Eric Lander, a specialist in human genome
research.