There is certainly stuff that could survive on Mars(tardigrades, various spores, probably some lichens and assorted extremophiles), the trick would be finding something that retains metabolic activity under those conditions. Cold and dry is usually code for "shrivel up and wait". The fact that certain organisms can wait for a century or more and then rehydrate just fine is impressive; but not too useful if you want metabolic activity out of them...
In a (for them) perfect world, HP certainly would like customers to re-buy for every last incremental patch and/or no reason at all. However, this world is hardly a perfect one for them, and their real focus right now has to be on getting customers to buy. If they can successfully do that, they can still count on the appeal of new and shiny, relatively high attrition rates among mobile devices, and the phenomenon of "Hey, consumer, get a FREE*(terms and restrictions may apply, subject to new 2-year contract) HP Whatever!" from the carriers.(also, for the moment, cellphones are in a period of relatively rapid spec change, especially RAM numbers, so it hardly takes deliberate malice to build WebOS N+1 that runs just fine on the new devices and runs like pure suck on the older ones.)
The certainly don't lose exactly zero; but they lose less than, say, a company whose super-special custom adroid shell enhancements can be ported to every other android handset released in the past year. If, of course, it turns out that the Huwai somethingorother, available for $100 pay as you go, also runs WebOS just fine, their stance may harden considerably...
At present, though, I would suspect that the situation would be not unlike that of Apple vs. MS when it comes to OSes. Both want you to pay for them; but MS, for whose system compatible hardware sold without any OS is trivially available, spends a fair amount of time trying to ferret out and suppress pirates. Apple, by contrast, certainly prefers that you buy your OS upgrades; but doesn't actually bother doing very much about it; because they can be confident that almost all OSX instances are running on Macs for which they were paid, and whose obsolescence they can drive by building shinier ones...
With the Palm acquisition, HP found themselves with a fairly nice mobile OS(with reasonable prospects of also doing Meego-esque tablet/netbook stuff); but one that was more or less dead last(even WinMo6.x has a legacy base).
It seems reasonable, then, for them to cozy up to the platform homebrewers. They are the conveniently-already-self-selected group who has the greatest enthusiasm for the product. They will also be the ones who volunteer themselves to test dubiously stable new features, experiment with stuff, and so forth. A useful asset, particularly if one does not have a large group of developers who support your platform for financial reasons.
Also, since(unlike Android or WP7), HP is currently the only distributor of WebOS devices, they have comparatively little to lose if homebrew ROMs circulate around. The only issue that might induce them to take a harder stance would be if commercial publishers start crying about piracy. We'll see if that happens...
Odds are nobody "went after" them in any direct way. The viruses and worms you are most likely to run into in the wild are the ones that propagate either automatically, or through undiscriminating means like bugged ads injected into unscrupulous or incompetent 3rd-party ad networks.
It is certainly conceivable that somebody mounted a direct attack, the opportunity to cause some deaths with limited chance of repercussions is probably attractive to a few people; but the odds are much greater that some automated attack mechanism hit them without knowing anything more than that the OS and services running on those hosts were vulnerable...
Until some serial killer, when caught, complains that he was "just grinding them[the 45 dismembered prostitutes found on and around his dwelling] for the XP", we can probably conclude that WoW keeps children away from virtually all dangers except those of physical inactivity...
On the other hand, Roman emperors also had the habit of occasionally getting things done in grand style. That is what I find most baffling about Berlusconi's endurance: Not only is the guy a grossly corrupt sleazeball plutocrat, he hasn't achieved particularly thrilling results in economic, law-and-order, or quality of life metrics.
He's like the decadent and incompetent version of Putin.
This thing does have a docking connector of some sort. Assuming that they aren't total assholes, it should be a PDMI connector, which is amply capable(USB2OTG, USB3 slave and host, displayport, some charging lines) and a standard, albeit not yet widely deployed.
If it is some samsung proprietary port, then that is nearly useless. It'll have all the openness of Apple's pet connector, with far less ubiquity. Hooray!
Special mention should probably be made of the "SVU" sub-genre, which combines all the vices of its conventional TV Police/crime ancestors with a relentless undercurrent of the most transgressive flavors of sexual violence currently available.
You pretty much have to resort to import-only, often not even available in English, Japanese stuff to get close in a video game context. And pretty much all of that is cartoon/animated, rather than FMV live action...
Video games are among the best ways yet invented for keeping children from using the television to watch the news, an action which exposes them to a seamy world of corruption, pestilence, brutal exploitation, slavery, lust, violence, and savage, inevitable, death.
The idyllic gameworld, on the other hand, offers a few PG-13 "situations", some morally unambiguous violence, and a world were death is a temporary setback.
The low end definitely isn't going anywhere(between the developing world where they can't afford smartphones and the parts of the developed world where "smartphone"="compulsory 2 year expensive data plan", along with the people who don't care but want a week+ standbye time).
I suspect that Nokia's real problem there is going to be that, since low end phones are a mostly solved problem, they will still sell like crazy; but on margins that can support Chinese cloning sweatshops, or local manufacturers in places with high import tariffs, rather than large R&D teams in Finland. Somebody will have to make them; but the ability of a large, expensive, company like Nokia to be supported by them seems rather less likely.
They do have elections, though I'm not sure how hiqh-quality they are thought to be. The fact that said democracy has been continually operating under emergency powers since the end of the Algerian Civil War probably doesn't make people entirely cheerful.
Ultimately, though, I suspect that they are hitting the same demographic/economic crunch that has caused trouble for other states recently: Fairly high unemployment(particularly among the large portion of the population that is fairly young), rising costs of staple commodities, and the perception(generally accurate) that the state is corrupt and exploitative in favor of some well-connected elite. Even in well-functioning democracies, that demographic circumstance will produce substantial volatility. If the state is having any legitimacy issues: boom. (On the other side of the coin, as our dear friend Putin can attest, if you preside over a period of improved wellbeing for the population, people will eagerly forgive egregious corruption and repression...)
The punchline: Unless you are using an atypically paranoid browser config, there are a Lot of CAs and subordinate CAs(some of them known-slimy, others known-incompetent), whose certs your browser will silently trust.
What would be nice would be a mechanism for tracking the cert-chain of websites of interest over time and from various endpoints on the internet. Companies do, legitimately, get tired of getting shafted by Verisign, er, um. switch certificate providers; but sudden shifts, not corresponding with certificate expirations, or shifts visible only from a subset of IPs would raise a red flag...
I can only assume that the Algerian government is minimally concerned with the fact that Facebook can restore profiles from the bowels of their titanic data mines and maximally concerned with disrupting efficient organization among dissidents and potential dissidents.
The jackboots start at a numerical disadvantage; but they start organized and comparatively well equipped. The dissidents enjoy potential numerical superiority and a PR advantage; but they start poorly organized and only partially mobilized.
If communication is functioning at or above a certain level of efficiency(and people are, in fact, just that pissed off) the dissidents will make up the lost ground in organization and mobilization and move a serious volume of newsworthy photos and such. If, however, communication is disrupted beyond a certain point, odds are that the jackboots will be able to contain the ill-organized initial activity, "disappear" a few of the key figures as the situation permits, and retard the recruitment of potential dissidents into an active revolt.
That would be the main health concern. As a freestanding gamma source you don't have much to worry about; but a mixture of uranium, decay products, and whatever delightful residues and impurities remain from the leaching process is not the sort of dust one would want to be breathing.
If the drums were properly sealed, no problem. If one or more of them were damaged, the handlers could quite easily be tracking around and breathing the dust. That would probably be unrecommended...
14 tons of yellowcake isn't worthless(there was a peak in 2007, to $136/pound, which would give that shipment a best-case value of ~$3.8million. More typically, though, spot prices are under $50/pound, often more like $30, which would only be ~$840,000); but I'd be quite surprised if that operation ended up being profitable for anybody, unless it was handed over to some lucky winner at a totally sweetheart price. C-17s aren't exactly RyanAir, never mind the broader costs...
My understanding is that(unlike copyrights) patents are unaffected by cleanroom/non-cleanroom status. A patent confers a monopoly, for a limited time, on whatever it covers, period, whether the other party is copying you, an independent discoverer, or cleanrooming.
On the other hand, since Blackberries have traditionally run a JVM, Sun licenced and all, they would presumably have a license to use the patents at issue. I don't know whether the license under which they have that use would preclude their producing a "Dalvik mode", which would be mostly the same as their JVM; but with the necessary changes to run Android stuff...
The interesting thing will be to see how it is implemented. More specifically, how they handle the sharing of phone-related resources(address books, dialer access, memory card contents, etc.)
Merely getting Dalvik, or a JVM tweaked enough to act like it, up and running on QNX would take work; but wouldn't present fundamental challenges. Nor, unless you really screwed it up, would it be more dangerous than the potentially-untrusted java applications you can run on Blackberries.
However, that also wouldn't be too terribly useful. A fair number of phone applications depend, for their usefulness, on access to some amount of the outside world. Having a completely separate address book on the blackberry side and the "android" side would get really old, really fast. On the other hand, Mr. Corporate IT, MCSE, is going to be very, very unhappy if he learns that some skeezy android application is siphoning off the internal company directory to some offshore FTP site because RIM has provided the android environment with a link to the Blackberry side.
That seems like it will be the really tricky bit(both in terms of security, and in terms of user experience elegance). In principle, the technical difficulty of dumping a tame android-compatible environment in all sorts of places isn't that high. Making it worth using, and making sure that it plays nicely with the host environment, requires more finesse....
I'm no fan of patent-encumbrances, and I have the greatest enthusiasm for what WebM, Theora, and friends are pushing for(and specifically purchase portable music players based on ogg/vorbis and ogg/flac compatibility, and so forth); but I would, for those areas where h.264 cannot be dislodged, rather see a situation where I can use a OSS implementation of a patent-encumbered format than a situation where I need Flash, a closed(and notoriously buggy) implementation of a patent-encumbered format.
That is my concern: even for situations where some ridiculous DRM attempt isn't being made, a fair few operators are likely to take the "The hell with it, I'll use a flash widget decoding h.264 on PCs and h.264 on iDevices." Flash and patent-encumbered is the status quo, and it kind of sucks. My ideal is FOSS and patent-unencumbered; but I'd take patent-encumbered-in-some-jurisdictions, but high quality OSS implementations are available, over the current situation...
The other major cue is light levels: intensity is fairly close to being inversely proportional to preferred patron loiter time. "2km from ground zero" level strip-lighting means GTFO. Candles means "our patrons are welcome to make a leisurely recovery from their sticker shock".
Architecturally speaking, my understanding is that Microsoft's plugin simply exposes the (already bought and paid for) h.264 decoder that they ship with Windows 7. It doesn't remove the patent issues with h.264 in a broader sense; but Google and Chrome remain completely separate from any h.264-decoder-related code. Even if Google were to start shipping the plugin by default, on Windows Chrome installs, my understanding is that that still wouldn't expose them to any h.264 MPEG-LA trouble: they'd just be shipping a component that plugs into the decoder library available in Windows(Still using Directshow or a descendant thereof, I assume?).
While, personally, I would prefer to avoid patent encumbrances as much as possible, there is actually a very good 'realpolitik' (and even arguably architectural) argument to be made in favor of this approach. While the ideal would be a single, patent-unencumbered, codec, this seems less than likely at present. Since the FOSS browsers cannot ship the encumbered codecs, and some of the commercial ones don't want to, they could simply ship a mechanism for handing the problem off to the platform's native codec system, possibly along with a matching implementation of their open codec of choice, and let the OS deal with it. Windows, OSX, and Linux all have viable candidates with which to interface, and doing so makes any patent issues Not Their Problem.
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They have to offer some job perks to encourage people who could be chemists to endure a classroom packed with children...
I'm fairly sure that it isn't supposed to explode, per se; but if it doesn't stick to kids it just ain't the real thing...
There is certainly stuff that could survive on Mars(tardigrades, various spores, probably some lichens and assorted extremophiles), the trick would be finding something that retains metabolic activity under those conditions. Cold and dry is usually code for "shrivel up and wait". The fact that certain organisms can wait for a century or more and then rehydrate just fine is impressive; but not too useful if you want metabolic activity out of them...
In a (for them) perfect world, HP certainly would like customers to re-buy for every last incremental patch and/or no reason at all. However, this world is hardly a perfect one for them, and their real focus right now has to be on getting customers to buy. If they can successfully do that, they can still count on the appeal of new and shiny, relatively high attrition rates among mobile devices, and the phenomenon of "Hey, consumer, get a FREE*(terms and restrictions may apply, subject to new 2-year contract) HP Whatever!" from the carriers.(also, for the moment, cellphones are in a period of relatively rapid spec change, especially RAM numbers, so it hardly takes deliberate malice to build WebOS N+1 that runs just fine on the new devices and runs like pure suck on the older ones.)
The certainly don't lose exactly zero; but they lose less than, say, a company whose super-special custom adroid shell enhancements can be ported to every other android handset released in the past year. If, of course, it turns out that the Huwai somethingorother, available for $100 pay as you go, also runs WebOS just fine, their stance may harden considerably...
At present, though, I would suspect that the situation would be not unlike that of Apple vs. MS when it comes to OSes. Both want you to pay for them; but MS, for whose system compatible hardware sold without any OS is trivially available, spends a fair amount of time trying to ferret out and suppress pirates. Apple, by contrast, certainly prefers that you buy your OS upgrades; but doesn't actually bother doing very much about it; because they can be confident that almost all OSX instances are running on Macs for which they were paid, and whose obsolescence they can drive by building shinier ones...
With the Palm acquisition, HP found themselves with a fairly nice mobile OS(with reasonable prospects of also doing Meego-esque tablet/netbook stuff); but one that was more or less dead last(even WinMo6.x has a legacy base).
It seems reasonable, then, for them to cozy up to the platform homebrewers. They are the conveniently-already-self-selected group who has the greatest enthusiasm for the product. They will also be the ones who volunteer themselves to test dubiously stable new features, experiment with stuff, and so forth. A useful asset, particularly if one does not have a large group of developers who support your platform for financial reasons.
Also, since(unlike Android or WP7), HP is currently the only distributor of WebOS devices, they have comparatively little to lose if homebrew ROMs circulate around. The only issue that might induce them to take a harder stance would be if commercial publishers start crying about piracy. We'll see if that happens...
Odds are nobody "went after" them in any direct way. The viruses and worms you are most likely to run into in the wild are the ones that propagate either automatically, or through undiscriminating means like bugged ads injected into unscrupulous or incompetent 3rd-party ad networks.
It is certainly conceivable that somebody mounted a direct attack, the opportunity to cause some deaths with limited chance of repercussions is probably attractive to a few people; but the odds are much greater that some automated attack mechanism hit them without knowing anything more than that the OS and services running on those hosts were vulnerable...
Nothing. It was purely a hypothetical. Given that this is samsung, quite possibly a contrafactual hypothetical at that...
Until some serial killer, when caught, complains that he was "just grinding them[the 45 dismembered prostitutes found on and around his dwelling] for the XP", we can probably conclude that WoW keeps children away from virtually all dangers except those of physical inactivity...
On the other hand, Roman emperors also had the habit of occasionally getting things done in grand style. That is what I find most baffling about Berlusconi's endurance: Not only is the guy a grossly corrupt sleazeball plutocrat, he hasn't achieved particularly thrilling results in economic, law-and-order, or quality of life metrics.
He's like the decadent and incompetent version of Putin.
This thing does have a docking connector of some sort. Assuming that they aren't total assholes, it should be a PDMI connector, which is amply capable(USB2OTG, USB3 slave and host, displayport, some charging lines) and a standard, albeit not yet widely deployed.
If it is some samsung proprietary port, then that is nearly useless. It'll have all the openness of Apple's pet connector, with far less ubiquity. Hooray!
Special mention should probably be made of the "SVU" sub-genre, which combines all the vices of its conventional TV Police/crime ancestors with a relentless undercurrent of the most transgressive flavors of sexual violence currently available.
You pretty much have to resort to import-only, often not even available in English, Japanese stuff to get close in a video game context. And pretty much all of that is cartoon/animated, rather than FMV live action...
I have never understood people that believe they must impose there beliefs and supposed morals on others.
Being surrounded by people who are wrong is just more than decent, right-thinking, members of society should have to stand...
Can you pick up their severed limbs and beat them to death therewith? That is a pretty necessary feature...
Video games are among the best ways yet invented for keeping children from using the television to watch the news, an action which exposes them to a seamy world of corruption, pestilence, brutal exploitation, slavery, lust, violence, and savage, inevitable, death.
The idyllic gameworld, on the other hand, offers a few PG-13 "situations", some morally unambiguous violence, and a world were death is a temporary setback.
Video games are protecting the children!
The low end definitely isn't going anywhere(between the developing world where they can't afford smartphones and the parts of the developed world where "smartphone"="compulsory 2 year expensive data plan", along with the people who don't care but want a week+ standbye time).
I suspect that Nokia's real problem there is going to be that, since low end phones are a mostly solved problem, they will still sell like crazy; but on margins that can support Chinese cloning sweatshops, or local manufacturers in places with high import tariffs, rather than large R&D teams in Finland. Somebody will have to make them; but the ability of a large, expensive, company like Nokia to be supported by them seems rather less likely.
They do have elections, though I'm not sure how hiqh-quality they are thought to be. The fact that said democracy has been continually operating under emergency powers since the end of the Algerian Civil War probably doesn't make people entirely cheerful.
Ultimately, though, I suspect that they are hitting the same demographic/economic crunch that has caused trouble for other states recently: Fairly high unemployment(particularly among the large portion of the population that is fairly young), rising costs of staple commodities, and the perception(generally accurate) that the state is corrupt and exploitative in favor of some well-connected elite. Even in well-functioning democracies, that demographic circumstance will produce substantial volatility. If the state is having any legitimacy issues: boom. (On the other side of the coin, as our dear friend Putin can attest, if you preside over a period of improved wellbeing for the population, people will eagerly forgive egregious corruption and repression...)
https://www.eff.org/observatory
The punchline: Unless you are using an atypically paranoid browser config, there are a Lot of CAs and subordinate CAs(some of them known-slimy, others known-incompetent), whose certs your browser will silently trust.
What would be nice would be a mechanism for tracking the cert-chain of websites of interest over time and from various endpoints on the internet. Companies do, legitimately, get tired of getting shafted by Verisign, er, um. switch certificate providers; but sudden shifts, not corresponding with certificate expirations, or shifts visible only from a subset of IPs would raise a red flag...
I can only assume that the Algerian government is minimally concerned with the fact that Facebook can restore profiles from the bowels of their titanic data mines and maximally concerned with disrupting efficient organization among dissidents and potential dissidents.
The jackboots start at a numerical disadvantage; but they start organized and comparatively well equipped. The dissidents enjoy potential numerical superiority and a PR advantage; but they start poorly organized and only partially mobilized.
If communication is functioning at or above a certain level of efficiency(and people are, in fact, just that pissed off) the dissidents will make up the lost ground in organization and mobilization and move a serious volume of newsworthy photos and such. If, however, communication is disrupted beyond a certain point, odds are that the jackboots will be able to contain the ill-organized initial activity, "disappear" a few of the key figures as the situation permits, and retard the recruitment of potential dissidents into an active revolt.
That would be the main health concern. As a freestanding gamma source you don't have much to worry about; but a mixture of uranium, decay products, and whatever delightful residues and impurities remain from the leaching process is not the sort of dust one would want to be breathing.
If the drums were properly sealed, no problem. If one or more of them were damaged, the handlers could quite easily be tracking around and breathing the dust. That would probably be unrecommended...
14 tons of yellowcake isn't worthless(there was a peak in 2007, to $136/pound, which would give that shipment a best-case value of ~$3.8million. More typically, though, spot prices are under $50/pound, often more like $30, which would only be ~$840,000); but I'd be quite surprised if that operation ended up being profitable for anybody, unless it was handed over to some lucky winner at a totally sweetheart price. C-17s aren't exactly RyanAir, never mind the broader costs...
My understanding is that(unlike copyrights) patents are unaffected by cleanroom/non-cleanroom status. A patent confers a monopoly, for a limited time, on whatever it covers, period, whether the other party is copying you, an independent discoverer, or cleanrooming.
On the other hand, since Blackberries have traditionally run a JVM, Sun licenced and all, they would presumably have a license to use the patents at issue. I don't know whether the license under which they have that use would preclude their producing a "Dalvik mode", which would be mostly the same as their JVM; but with the necessary changes to run Android stuff...
The interesting thing will be to see how it is implemented. More specifically, how they handle the sharing of phone-related resources(address books, dialer access, memory card contents, etc.)
Merely getting Dalvik, or a JVM tweaked enough to act like it, up and running on QNX would take work; but wouldn't present fundamental challenges. Nor, unless you really screwed it up, would it be more dangerous than the potentially-untrusted java applications you can run on Blackberries.
However, that also wouldn't be too terribly useful. A fair number of phone applications depend, for their usefulness, on access to some amount of the outside world. Having a completely separate address book on the blackberry side and the "android" side would get really old, really fast. On the other hand, Mr. Corporate IT, MCSE, is going to be very, very unhappy if he learns that some skeezy android application is siphoning off the internal company directory to some offshore FTP site because RIM has provided the android environment with a link to the Blackberry side.
That seems like it will be the really tricky bit(both in terms of security, and in terms of user experience elegance). In principle, the technical difficulty of dumping a tame android-compatible environment in all sorts of places isn't that high. Making it worth using, and making sure that it plays nicely with the host environment, requires more finesse....
I'm no fan of patent-encumbrances, and I have the greatest enthusiasm for what WebM, Theora, and friends are pushing for(and specifically purchase portable music players based on ogg/vorbis and ogg/flac compatibility, and so forth); but I would, for those areas where h.264 cannot be dislodged, rather see a situation where I can use a OSS implementation of a patent-encumbered format than a situation where I need Flash, a closed(and notoriously buggy) implementation of a patent-encumbered format.
That is my concern: even for situations where some ridiculous DRM attempt isn't being made, a fair few operators are likely to take the "The hell with it, I'll use a flash widget decoding h.264 on PCs and h.264 on iDevices." Flash and patent-encumbered is the status quo, and it kind of sucks. My ideal is FOSS and patent-unencumbered; but I'd take patent-encumbered-in-some-jurisdictions, but high quality OSS implementations are available, over the current situation...
The other major cue is light levels: intensity is fairly close to being inversely proportional to preferred patron loiter time. "2km from ground zero" level strip-lighting means GTFO. Candles means "our patrons are welcome to make a leisurely recovery from their sticker shock".
Architecturally speaking, my understanding is that Microsoft's plugin simply exposes the (already bought and paid for) h.264 decoder that they ship with Windows 7. It doesn't remove the patent issues with h.264 in a broader sense; but Google and Chrome remain completely separate from any h.264-decoder-related code. Even if Google were to start shipping the plugin by default, on Windows Chrome installs, my understanding is that that still wouldn't expose them to any h.264 MPEG-LA trouble: they'd just be shipping a component that plugs into the decoder library available in Windows(Still using Directshow or a descendant thereof, I assume?).
While, personally, I would prefer to avoid patent encumbrances as much as possible, there is actually a very good 'realpolitik' (and even arguably architectural) argument to be made in favor of this approach. While the ideal would be a single, patent-unencumbered, codec, this seems less than likely at present. Since the FOSS browsers cannot ship the encumbered codecs, and some of the commercial ones don't want to, they could simply ship a mechanism for handing the problem off to the platform's native codec system, possibly along with a matching implementation of their open codec of choice, and let the OS deal with it. Windows, OSX, and Linux all have viable candidates with which to interface, and doing so makes any patent issues Not Their Problem.