Apart from the tired PR effort (gawker media-level headline, samefag comments) this project looks really great. I'd love to have that for the insight alone, even though I don't play competitively anymore it seems like it would allow me to understand myself better.
The answer is simple: these are not democracies. Pretty much the only democratic aspect in nowadays "representative democracies" is that every 5 years you get to chose which of 2 leaders you prefer to govern your state/city. That's a little light to call the whole system a "democracy".
You'll never make sense of politics if you don't get that.
After trying to outcompete Apple with similarly closed but way crappier controlled and closed environments (Windows 8 store and metro UI), they finally understood they had to push their own strength, that is: "developers developers developers developers".
If you have a smartphone you could use that as your Skype-machine. I have a cheap Chinese Android phone bought 1 year ago and it can take video calls easily. The point being that in most cases you don't have much choice giving up security on your phone anyway so you may as well put all the spyware in one place.
From what I've seen of Material it's also a lot about classifying information visually and that's definitely something where desktop OS interfaces can be improved. Nobody likes looking at a jumbled mess of information spread on a flat plane without any general cue as to where you're supposed to look first.
They made it like that for the mobile readers obviously. Ideally you'd want responsive design so it doesn't need to stay full width even on wide computer/tablet screens, but if you can't do that then you have to give priority to the iPhones. For some reason.
Sorry somehow I thought that was obvious. Basically they cut the line very close to the letter, that way it doesn't break the line visually, which is what the other comments here on HN seem to criticize. It's a very simple and subtle thing but that's what makes the difference. My point was that sometimes the incremental steps between the default design and Apple's design are worst than if you just kept to the default design. You have to make a big step before perceiving benefits.
Sorry for the pigeonholding though, that was more of a general rant.
That's nice in theory, but it's also yet another example of Apple innovating and getting it right, and people implementing a quick copy without going through nearly as much necessary design thinking as Apple did. The end result is that only Apple's implementation is better than the default one. Of course I'm not blaming you personally for that, I mean, even Microsoft has fallen prey to this phenomenon (and on a vastly larger scale). But it would nice if people were more observant.
If you don't want to feel discriminated against yes, make sure to keep your culture/lifestyle level in check so it doesn't clash with your (new) neighborhood.
People are people. Everybody is going to get insulted at least once in their life. If you're fat you're going to get called a whale, if you're short you're going to get called a dwarf, if you're disabled you're going to get called a monster, if you're a woman you're going to get called a whore, if you're black you're going to get called a nigger. And if you're a tall handsome white male don't worry they'll find something about you that you can't change and that they think will hurt you.
While what the author described happening to himself and his parents is genuinely terrible, his children have it easy, if you can't deal with people don't live with people.
You don't need to become rich, just move to another country than the USA. A good one is France, here "colored" foreigners are socially protected. Just make sure to move into a neighborhood with the same general level of education as yourself and your family (as that's the aspect on which most of the discrimination occurs) and you will be fine. Don't make the mistake of being white and educated and moving into a poor neighborhood though, you'll fare worse than having your children being called "whities" or similar heart-wrenching insults.
You don't need to become rich, just move to another country than the USA. A good one is France, here "colored" foreigners are socially protected. Just make sure to move into a neighborhood with the same general level of education as yourself and your family (as that's the aspect on which most of the discrimination occurs) and you will be fine. Don't make the mistake of being white and educated and moving into a poor neighborhood though, you'll fare worse than having your children being called "whities" or similar heart-wrenching insults (think broken windows and physical aggressions).