It's BS, and none of the blogs seem to get is. So far as we can tell, google only fixed the root exploit because it was a serious security concern, because of how it worked. I don't think they are going to make a real effort to stop people from hacking their device aside from fixing security flaws.
We'll see. The fact is that the only root exploit discovered thus far was closed within a few days. I really don't think Google has that much to do with it - let's look at what they actually do: provide an open source software stack to the telcos. T-Mobile control their network and the devices using it, they control the cryptographic keys for the G1, so if an OTA update is rolled out that fixes some issue, obviously T-Mobile didn't like that issue. What power does Google actually have in this arrangement? They're just an upstream provider of source code.
Bottom line: if Google wanted the G1 to ship with root access, and they had the power to do so, they it would've happened already.
it's still possible to make your phone open... But you can still jailbreak it just like anything else.
Not anymore, at least not with such a simple root exploit. I guess we'll have to wait for another exploit to come along... wouldn't it be nice to be given root access to hardware that you own? And if a java sandbox were really all we needed, then why are so many people trying to get (and keep) root access on the G1?
Now, personally, I see no reason why T-Mobile would care whether you're running Android or Debian.
They probably don't. What they do care about is support calls and returns because someone bricked their G1 whilst trying to flash some fancy new OS image. They may even think that installing a new OS allows users to use other networks, or VOIP applications, more easily. Basically, if you can imagine a revenue stream that might be possible on the G1, and imagine a way in which a completely open platform might remove that revenue stream, then that is a reason (in the view of T-Mobile) for T-Mobile to worry.
The root exploit is unrelated to the ability to flash the ROM.
From what I've heard, you need root access or the T-Mobile private key to flash the ROM.
The question then is, will there be attempts made to stop user flashing of updates to the device...
Err, yes, the head of the Android team at Google has actually confirmed that only the manufacturer or the cell network provider have the cryptographic keys required to flash the G1 (via OTA updates or otherwise).
I do not think there will be, it's just that Android fixes should not be confused with openness of the device itself.
When root access to the G1 is denied by default, and exploits that allow root access are quickly patched, how would you interpret this? The fact is that you do not get root access to the G1 by default, and as of this moment, there is no known way to get root access, or to flash your own kernel, on a RC30 G1.
Re:WTF? If AMD64 can't do it with a full x86 core.
on
Ubuntu Ports To ARM
·
· Score: 1
We are having problems moving to AMD64,
The only problems with AMD64 at the moment are related to legacy software and closed source software. Whilst the kernel and compiler obviously needed to be adapted, in user space land the changes weren't so great (an int is still 32 bits, etc.) Obviously sloppy pointer code also needed updating. But mainstream Linux distributions have supported AMD64 for years now.
Plus Wine wouldn't work, since it isn't an emulator.
You could probably run Wine under QEMU if you really want. But I doubt this is a showstopper - someone considering an ARM based system probably isn't that bothered about running legacy Windows applications.
Having a version of ubuntu you can customize for a large # of devices does open up a lot of opportunities
I wonder, what opportunities does it open up that Debian on ARM doesn't? As you rightly point out, ARM platforms tend to be embedded, and in the embedded space the end user doesn't care about what distribution the developer used to build their system, since the distribution is usually completely hidden. In fact, there usually isn't a real distribution, since there's usually no way to provide updates or install new software.
I can only imagine that Ubuntu are thinking that the current crop of Android cell phones and ARM based PDAs are going to need (or it will be desirable to have) a proper Linux distribution, targetted at end users rather than developers, as Debian would be.
Something like Ubuntu running on an Openmoko phone, with the Dalvik VM, classes and Google app store would probably be the ultimate PDA/phone convergence device at the moment.
Of course it worked for Intel. Higher resolution lithography processes mean you can fit multiple cores in the same space as a single core from a decade ago. It means that the latency for critical paths is reduced, which means you can run the chips at a higher clockspeed. It means current consumed by transistor switching is reduced, so that chips can run at a lower power whilst maintaining or increasing throughput (thought interestingly leakage current increases as feature size shrinks).
Manufacturing process improvements are the number one driver of processor advances. It is obviously true that processor architecture changes, but mostly this is a response to new developments allowing more circuitry to fit in the same space. The latest Core processors have basically the same pipeline design as the original Pentium Pro. If you could go back and re-design the PP using our "new" architectural advances but older technology process, you would end up with a pretty similar design, since the process itself imposes such huge constraints on the architecture.
Florian Mueller: "A local subsidiary like Microsoft UK or Microsoft Germany doesn't officially sell products. Those subsidiaries in the other 24 EU member states than Ireland only function as "marketing agencies". They get their costs reimbursed by the Irish operation but the profit itself is generated in Ireland where the tax rate is low. If they had any substantial profit in the UK or Germany, they'd pay a lot more than 10% on that."
True, MS will pay some small amount of tax in those countries, but the vast bulk of tax will be avoided through redirecting business through subsidiaries operating in low or zero tax regions. The European single market then allows these subsidiaries to supply any goods or services throughout Europe, whilst paying tax only to the low-tax rate country the subsidiary is registered in. For example, see Microsoft to hide Irish Tax Haven data of subsidiaries that have saved it billions of dollars in US taxes. Note their comment "Up to 50% of Irish corporate tax revenue may relate to taxes paid on income earned by US multinationals outside Ireland. Microsoft's effective global tax rate fell to 26 percent in its last fiscal year from 33 percent the year before. Nearly half of the drop was attributed to 'foreign earnings taxed at lower rates'"
For more examples of the fun corporations can have with cross-border EU trade and taxation, have a look at the practices of Tesco - they are a notorious tax avoider.
How on earth are they suing individuals? Google is a corporation and must be treated as such under the law.
Judicial processing of violations of criminal law are (usually?) targeted at individuals. For example, you can't just murder someone and then claim that as an employee of a corporation you have some kind of legal immunity. Obviously it all depends on the law and judicial authority in question.
I wonder if we'll ever see an American extradited to Europe, Australia, or even China for breaking intellectual property laws. The US is currently lobbying for criminal law to be used to enforce patents in the EU - it would be amusing to see the response if Europe actually started requesting the extradition of Americans who are suspected of violating EU patents!
In other news, treaties that are only enforced by one side suck.
If you look closely you'll notice that (a) the laptop the benchmarks are run on effects in no way, the validity of the benchmark as long as they are run consistently on the same laptop and (b) some benchmarks like RAM bandwidth have theoretical limits that are not effected at all by the Operating System but in actual practice, is entirely limited by the operating system you are using.
a) Well that depends on what you mean by validity of the benchmark. If you only run tests on a single laptop, then any statistically significant results you find apply only to that single laptop - not even that laptop model, but that specific laptop. Who knows, maybe this specific laptop has some faulty memory or hard disk? Maybe the PSU is under-powering the system leading to slow down? The point is that without wider testing, you just don't know. To draw general results, you need randomised testing across different hardware platforms.
b) You should see very little variation between operating systems when hardware is the limiting factor. "RAM bandwidth" is certainly not "entirely limited by the operating system you are using".
All of the benchmarks were testing the hardware and should have showed variation.
I believe you were missing the OP's point: when hardware is the limiting factor in a test, then there should be very little variance in the test result. If you are seeing a lot of variance, then you need to quantify why, because it is unexpected.
Wrong. You isolate it down to one independent variable, its called the scientific process. And there was only one independent variable involved, the distro. Everything else is dependant on that variable.
You then need to go and find out why you're seeing the results you see. Scientists also constantly question their own test methodology - you need to verify that the results you observe are indeed caused by significant differences between the systems under test, or by the test setup itself. And you also need randomised tests, otherwise your results can't be generalised. Oh, and you don't need to isolate it to one variable - see Factorial experiments.
Overall the benchmarks suggests that Linux (not just Ubuntu) needs some work on the graphics system and the Intel drivers.
Since they only tested on a Mac Mini, what the results actually suggest is that an operating system distribution that's been finely tuned for a very small set of hardware beats a generic distribution that's currently running on thousands of different hardware configurations. If they actually wanted to draw some generic conclusions about Ubuntu versus Mac OS X, then they should've installed both on as many different hardware platforms as possible, and then run their benchmarks and aggregated the results.
So what might be happening is that Ubuntu Linux isn't as optimised to run on a Mac Mini as OS X - imagine the surprise.
Another problem with the Phronix methodology is that they've made no effort to identify exactly why they're seeing differences. For example, see page 8 of the results. The "Bork file encrypter" should either be limited by CPU and memory bandwidth for the actual encryption, or by the speed of the hard disk if it's reading files, encrypting, and writing them back. Given that the limiting factors here are hardware, there's no way that MacOS X should be 27% faster than Linux on this benchmark. Or on the same page, the Java Scimark v2.0 benchmark shows OSX being 370% faster than Ubuntu x86. Given that the performance of Java code is dominated by the JVM performance, this is indicating a massive regression between java 1.5 (OSX) and 1.6 (Ubuntu). Has Sun really allowed this to happen? Or is the Phronix testing methodology broken? My money's on the latter.
"I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target. Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it."
Bill Joy doesn't sound that out of line. If you're going to confront terrorists, you need to understand their doctrine and motivation so that you can discredit the entire philosophy, rather than just turn them into martyrs.
Of course they can. They're going it alone just like they did in Iraq and Vietnam.
Maybe you'd like to tell the families of the 120 British casualties (versus 607 US casualties) from Afghanistan that the Yanks have been "going it alone" for all this time?
when Senator Obama was a young boy, black folk had to use different drinking fountains than white folk and had to use different bathrooms and go to different schools
When Senator Obama was a young boy, the mixed-race marriage of his parents was illegal in many states.
Submitter: "The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US"
TFA doesn't say anything about the EU trying to enforce measures on the US - in fact, what seems to be happening is that the RIAA, MPAA etc. and the US government are pushing for the removal of ISP liability protections, and the use of criminal law for enforcement within the EU. After all, didn't the Copyright Czar law already "add new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement" in the US, with one stated goal being to "lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws"?
Yeah, but that had everything to do with a small group of bankers borrowing heavily from international money markets, investing in bad assets, and those assets subsequently falling in value, and nothing to do with how they organise their own society (whether you call it socialism, or not).
McCain abandoned his opposition to torture? This would be the McCain who said in a national debate:
"I'm astonished that you haven't found out what waterboarding is... Then I am astonished that you would think such a - such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our - who we are held captive and anyone could believe that that's not torture. It's in violation of the Geneva Convention"
That's pretty clear cut. Regardless of whether McCain is the best man for the job of President, his clear anti-torture stance - which went against the general Republican stance at the time - was something he should be admired for.
The book "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford has a good analysis of the financials behind the NHS. His conclusion is that it is a better system for providing healthcare than the privatised U.S. style models, but interestingly he comes out as supporting a hybrid model based around that found in Singapore, where saving some percentage of your income towards healthcare provision is compulsory, but the actual expenditure is under control of the individual. This means that people can't optimise for the short term by not saving for their healthcare requirements in later life (a large percentage of healthcare expenditure goes on the old aged), but people have choice when it comes to selecting particular doctors and operations. Children and similar groups who obviously have no income still get their healthcare provision paid for by the government, as in most countries.
Where's my choice not to pay into your system, though?
Where's the choice not to pay towards the military, which takes by far the largest proportion of the national budget? Where's the choice not to pay towards the war on cannabis and other soft drugs, which puts millions of people behind bars in expensive-to-run prisons?
Being in a democracy means making compromises and coming to some general agreement with the rest of society about how that society functions. It doesn't mean you get to choose to pay only for the bits of government spending that you like. Though, actually, it would be an interesting experiment if you could..
A similar argument was had a long time ago over automobile safety, wearing seatbelts, crash helmets etc. The bottom line is that what you do has an effect on others. Who will pay for your emergency care when you have a heart attack and no insurance? What is the cost on society of allowing, or even encouraging through fancy adverts, young people to develop all kinds of unhealthy lifestyle related long term illnesses? A libertarian might say that's great, as these people will die earlier, thus requiring less medical care - but the truth is that somebody will end up paying for that medical care, either the tax payer through some government program, or the healthy insurance buyer who never claims.
To paraphrase your answer:
With a vehicle crash fatality epidemic... which candidate has the best answers?
"That isn't something that the government should be dealing with, or even give a damn about. If people (and this includes me, I drive an unsafe car, so I'm not just picking on others here) are too damn stupid or lazy to drive a safe car, that's their own fault. Our government has WAY more important issues to deal with than trying to coax some fat Americans into improving their cars."
Almost everybody here is comparing phones on different networks. The only way you can say anything useful about the phones is if they're using the SAME NETWORK.
It depends what you want to test. Most (probably >99%) people are incapable of unlocking their phones and switching to an alternative data SIM, and since these phones are locked to a single network, most people in the real world are going to evaluate them together as a single product.
If you are a phone manufacturer, and you sign an exclusive deal with a single cellular provider, it's hardly a big surprise that most people will evaluate the complete experience that they receive from the combined package, rather than fiddling around trying to unlock their phone and obtain an alternative SIM.
Slashdot Mirror
We'll see. The fact is that the only root exploit discovered thus far was closed within a few days. I really don't think Google has that much to do with it - let's look at what they actually do: provide an open source software stack to the telcos. T-Mobile control their network and the devices using it, they control the cryptographic keys for the G1, so if an OTA update is rolled out that fixes some issue, obviously T-Mobile didn't like that issue. What power does Google actually have in this arrangement? They're just an upstream provider of source code.
Bottom line: if Google wanted the G1 to ship with root access, and they had the power to do so, they it would've happened already.
Not anymore, at least not with such a simple root exploit. I guess we'll have to wait for another exploit to come along... wouldn't it be nice to be given root access to hardware that you own? And if a java sandbox were really all we needed, then why are so many people trying to get (and keep) root access on the G1?
They probably don't. What they do care about is support calls and returns because someone bricked their G1 whilst trying to flash some fancy new OS image. They may even think that installing a new OS allows users to use other networks, or VOIP applications, more easily. Basically, if you can imagine a revenue stream that might be possible on the G1, and imagine a way in which a completely open platform might remove that revenue stream, then that is a reason (in the view of T-Mobile) for T-Mobile to worry.
From what I've heard, you need root access or the T-Mobile private key to flash the ROM.
Err, yes, the head of the Android team at Google has actually confirmed that only the manufacturer or the cell network provider have the cryptographic keys required to flash the G1 (via OTA updates or otherwise).
When root access to the G1 is denied by default, and exploits that allow root access are quickly patched, how would you interpret this? The fact is that you do not get root access to the G1 by default, and as of this moment, there is no known way to get root access, or to flash your own kernel, on a RC30 G1.
The only problems with AMD64 at the moment are related to legacy software and closed source software. Whilst the kernel and compiler obviously needed to be adapted, in user space land the changes weren't so great (an int is still 32 bits, etc.) Obviously sloppy pointer code also needed updating. But mainstream Linux distributions have supported AMD64 for years now.
You could probably run Wine under QEMU if you really want. But I doubt this is a showstopper - someone considering an ARM based system probably isn't that bothered about running legacy Windows applications.
I wonder, what opportunities does it open up that Debian on ARM doesn't? As you rightly point out, ARM platforms tend to be embedded, and in the embedded space the end user doesn't care about what distribution the developer used to build their system, since the distribution is usually completely hidden. In fact, there usually isn't a real distribution, since there's usually no way to provide updates or install new software.
I can only imagine that Ubuntu are thinking that the current crop of Android cell phones and ARM based PDAs are going to need (or it will be desirable to have) a proper Linux distribution, targetted at end users rather than developers, as Debian would be.
Something like Ubuntu running on an Openmoko phone, with the Dalvik VM, classes and Google app store would probably be the ultimate PDA/phone convergence device at the moment.
Of course it worked for Intel. Higher resolution lithography processes mean you can fit multiple cores in the same space as a single core from a decade ago. It means that the latency for critical paths is reduced, which means you can run the chips at a higher clockspeed. It means current consumed by transistor switching is reduced, so that chips can run at a lower power whilst maintaining or increasing throughput (thought interestingly leakage current increases as feature size shrinks).
Manufacturing process improvements are the number one driver of processor advances. It is obviously true that processor architecture changes, but mostly this is a response to new developments allowing more circuitry to fit in the same space. The latest Core processors have basically the same pipeline design as the original Pentium Pro. If you could go back and re-design the PP using our "new" architectural advances but older technology process, you would end up with a pretty similar design, since the process itself imposes such huge constraints on the architecture.
Florian Mueller: "A local subsidiary like Microsoft UK or Microsoft Germany doesn't officially sell products. Those subsidiaries in the other 24 EU member states than Ireland only function as "marketing agencies". They get their costs reimbursed by the Irish operation but the profit itself is generated in Ireland where the tax rate is low. If they had any substantial profit in the UK or Germany, they'd pay a lot more than 10% on that."
True, MS will pay some small amount of tax in those countries, but the vast bulk of tax will be avoided through redirecting business through subsidiaries operating in low or zero tax regions. The European single market then allows these subsidiaries to supply any goods or services throughout Europe, whilst paying tax only to the low-tax rate country the subsidiary is registered in. For example, see Microsoft to hide Irish Tax Haven data of subsidiaries that have saved it billions of dollars in US taxes. Note their comment "Up to 50% of Irish corporate tax revenue may relate to taxes paid on income earned by US multinationals outside Ireland. Microsoft's effective global tax rate fell to 26 percent in its last fiscal year from 33 percent the year before. Nearly half of the drop was attributed to 'foreign earnings taxed at lower rates'"
For more examples of the fun corporations can have with cross-border EU trade and taxation, have a look at the practices of Tesco - they are a notorious tax avoider.
Judicial processing of violations of criminal law are (usually?) targeted at individuals. For example, you can't just murder someone and then claim that as an employee of a corporation you have some kind of legal immunity. Obviously it all depends on the law and judicial authority in question.
What, you mean you can be sentenced to several years in jail in a nation that you're never even visited? Imagine the shock.
I wonder if we'll ever see an American extradited to Europe, Australia, or even China for breaking intellectual property laws. The US is currently lobbying for criminal law to be used to enforce patents in the EU - it would be amusing to see the response if Europe actually started requesting the extradition of Americans who are suspected of violating EU patents!
In other news, treaties that are only enforced by one side suck.
a) Well that depends on what you mean by validity of the benchmark. If you only run tests on a single laptop, then any statistically significant results you find apply only to that single laptop - not even that laptop model, but that specific laptop. Who knows, maybe this specific laptop has some faulty memory or hard disk? Maybe the PSU is under-powering the system leading to slow down? The point is that without wider testing, you just don't know. To draw general results, you need randomised testing across different hardware platforms.
b) You should see very little variation between operating systems when hardware is the limiting factor. "RAM bandwidth" is certainly not "entirely limited by the operating system you are using".
I believe you were missing the OP's point: when hardware is the limiting factor in a test, then there should be very little variance in the test result. If you are seeing a lot of variance, then you need to quantify why, because it is unexpected.
You then need to go and find out why you're seeing the results you see. Scientists also constantly question their own test methodology - you need to verify that the results you observe are indeed caused by significant differences between the systems under test, or by the test setup itself. And you also need randomised tests, otherwise your results can't be generalised. Oh, and you don't need to isolate it to one variable - see Factorial experiments.
Since they only tested on a Mac Mini, what the results actually suggest is that an operating system distribution that's been finely tuned for a very small set of hardware beats a generic distribution that's currently running on thousands of different hardware configurations. If they actually wanted to draw some generic conclusions about Ubuntu versus Mac OS X, then they should've installed both on as many different hardware platforms as possible, and then run their benchmarks and aggregated the results.
So what might be happening is that Ubuntu Linux isn't as optimised to run on a Mac Mini as OS X - imagine the surprise.
Another problem with the Phronix methodology is that they've made no effort to identify exactly why they're seeing differences. For example, see page 8 of the results. The "Bork file encrypter" should either be limited by CPU and memory bandwidth for the actual encryption, or by the speed of the hard disk if it's reading files, encrypting, and writing them back. Given that the limiting factors here are hardware, there's no way that MacOS X should be 27% faster than Linux on this benchmark. Or on the same page, the Java Scimark v2.0 benchmark shows OSX being 370% faster than Ubuntu x86. Given that the performance of Java code is dominated by the JVM performance, this is indicating a massive regression between java 1.5 (OSX) and 1.6 (Ubuntu). Has Sun really allowed this to happen? Or is the Phronix testing methodology broken? My money's on the latter.
You mean this?
"I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber's next target. Kaczynski's actions were murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it."
Bill Joy doesn't sound that out of line. If you're going to confront terrorists, you need to understand their doctrine and motivation so that you can discredit the entire philosophy, rather than just turn them into martyrs.
Maybe you'd like to tell the families of the 120 British casualties (versus 607 US casualties) from Afghanistan that the Yanks have been "going it alone" for all this time?
When Senator Obama was a young boy, the mixed-race marriage of his parents was illegal in many states.
Submitter: "The main purpose of the trade agreement is to impose the European enforcement measures for IPR infringements on the US"
TFA doesn't say anything about the EU trying to enforce measures on the US - in fact, what seems to be happening is that the RIAA, MPAA etc. and the US government are pushing for the removal of ISP liability protections, and the use of criminal law for enforcement within the EU. After all, didn't the Copyright Czar law already "add new classes of felony criminal copyright infringement" in the US, with one stated goal being to "lobby foreign governments to adopt stronger IP laws"?
Most of the population probably didn't want the DMCA. And yet it's still the law.
According to those articles, there were 7 completely untrue urban legends about McCain, and 29 (!!) completely untrue urban legends about Obama.
Yeah, but that had everything to do with a small group of bankers borrowing heavily from international money markets, investing in bad assets, and those assets subsequently falling in value, and nothing to do with how they organise their own society (whether you call it socialism, or not).
McCain abandoned his opposition to torture? This would be the McCain who said in a national debate:
"I'm astonished that you haven't found out what waterboarding is... Then I am astonished that you would think such a - such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our - who we are held captive and anyone could believe that that's not torture. It's in violation of the Geneva Convention"
That's pretty clear cut. Regardless of whether McCain is the best man for the job of President, his clear anti-torture stance - which went against the general Republican stance at the time - was something he should be admired for.
The book "The Undercover Economist" by Tim Harford has a good analysis of the financials behind the NHS. His conclusion is that it is a better system for providing healthcare than the privatised U.S. style models, but interestingly he comes out as supporting a hybrid model based around that found in Singapore, where saving some percentage of your income towards healthcare provision is compulsory, but the actual expenditure is under control of the individual. This means that people can't optimise for the short term by not saving for their healthcare requirements in later life (a large percentage of healthcare expenditure goes on the old aged), but people have choice when it comes to selecting particular doctors and operations. Children and similar groups who obviously have no income still get their healthcare provision paid for by the government, as in most countries.
Where's the choice not to pay towards the military, which takes by far the largest proportion of the national budget? Where's the choice not to pay towards the war on cannabis and other soft drugs, which puts millions of people behind bars in expensive-to-run prisons?
Being in a democracy means making compromises and coming to some general agreement with the rest of society about how that society functions. It doesn't mean you get to choose to pay only for the bits of government spending that you like. Though, actually, it would be an interesting experiment if you could..
A similar argument was had a long time ago over automobile safety, wearing seatbelts, crash helmets etc. The bottom line is that what you do has an effect on others. Who will pay for your emergency care when you have a heart attack and no insurance? What is the cost on society of allowing, or even encouraging through fancy adverts, young people to develop all kinds of unhealthy lifestyle related long term illnesses? A libertarian might say that's great, as these people will die earlier, thus requiring less medical care - but the truth is that somebody will end up paying for that medical care, either the tax payer through some government program, or the healthy insurance buyer who never claims.
To paraphrase your answer:
"That isn't something that the government should be dealing with, or even give a damn about. If people (and this includes me, I drive an unsafe car, so I'm not just picking on others here) are too damn stupid or lazy to drive a safe car, that's their own fault. Our government has WAY more important issues to deal with than trying to coax some fat Americans into improving their cars."
Woohoo, car analogy!
It depends what you want to test. Most (probably >99%) people are incapable of unlocking their phones and switching to an alternative data SIM, and since these phones are locked to a single network, most people in the real world are going to evaluate them together as a single product.
If you are a phone manufacturer, and you sign an exclusive deal with a single cellular provider, it's hardly a big surprise that most people will evaluate the complete experience that they receive from the combined package, rather than fiddling around trying to unlock their phone and obtain an alternative SIM.