"murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers. For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons"
OK, so killers, pimps, people who "defile themselves with mankind" (which, despite fun modern Tea Party-esque interpretations that claim it's about homosexuality, isn't), adulterers, and liars.
I'll grant you that Romans is discussing homosexuality, but I'll point out that Jesus didn't say it. Paul said it, and Jesus was already dead and so wasn't around to correct him. I'll also point out that it doesn't say anything about what mortal mankind should do about homosexuals - only that god supposedly doesn't like them (which is interesting, considering the claim that he created them along with the rest of us).
I'll counter with a few choice ideas of Jesus himself:
Judge not Let he who is without sin cast the first stone Love thy neighbor
In short: Mind your own business and leave people who are doing things you don't like but that don't hurt anyone else alone.
I dunno. Is it really a software industry problem, or a "management roles tend to attract sociopaths" problem? Not trying to say that it's not a problem in the software field, but I've worked in a lot of industries since getting my first job at the ripe old age of 15, and every single one of them has had at least one management-type who was a psychopath.
When you think about it, if you're prone to lording it over people and treating them like underling crapnuggets, you're naturally going to be attracted to a management position.
No. That still counts. And gays are still evil and must be persecuted. But it's OK to shave (contrary to Leviticus 19.27). And to wear blended fabrics.
See, Jesus really said that only the parts of the bible that are convenient to our goals of oppressing people who are not like us are valid. I know that's not actually in the bible, but it's true. Honest. The rest of the bible can be disposed of, which is good because bacon tastes good.
I feel it should be pointed out that thanks to the Patriot act and other examples of Shredding the Constitution in the Name of Safety from Terrists, the government does not need a warrant to spy on you anymore. All they have to do is say they're spying on you to make sure you're not a terrorist, or talking to any terrorists.
It depends on the state. "One party consent" states work as you described. "Two party consent" states require that BOTH (or all, if more than 2) ends of the conversation be aware that there is a recording being made. That's why any time you call a business they have the recording at the start that says the call may be recorded - to cover themselves for people who live in two-party states.
While I do tend to agree that language is important and should be preserved, and I even tend to snark at people who type in "txt spk, u no" on forums, there is a point at which language correction becomes pedantic and annoying.
Unless you are my English professor or my editor, or unless my error actually effects comprehension of my post, I'm probably going to be at least mildly irritated if you sit there correcting every typo and minor grammatical mistake. I'll be even more annoyed if your corrections derail the thread from its intended topic.
I was amazed that the TCG was popular. It was an obvious moneyspinner by Sony to get people to pay for trinkets in-game that should have been available through the in-game crafting system. I find it hard to sympathize with anyone who paid real money for that crap, especially since it's been obvious for years now that Sony never had any intention of putting real development effort into the game and therefore they were just riding the downhill slide to make profit with no investment.
In a comparison of operating systems, it's fair to compare sales of one operating system to another. In a comparison of phone design and build quality, it's stupid to compare phones using one operating system to phones using another. Compare phones by brand, not by type (unless you're willing to admit that Toyota is crap because Yugo made hatchbacks too). The operating system has absolutely nothing to do with the design and build quality of the physical hardware.
When you include Yugos, Trabants, and Ladas, foreign cars have much worse reliability than Ford.
I really hate it when the media writes dumbassed articles like this. "Let's compare phones made by 30 different companies with a phone made by 1 company and see if there are quality variations." Abject stupidity.
Wonder if they'll capitalize on Verizon's stupidity, or if they'll follow them and start limiting phones as well. Either way, if it's unlimited now that's good enough for me. Now I just have to decide between the Evo and the Samsung. Leaning toward Evo because of bad experiences I've had previously with Samsung mobile products.
Yep. Me too. Sprint actually has a plan that's 300 minutes more and $10 cheaper than my Verizon plan. I've been holding off on switching because of Verizon's network, but this is ridiculous. Can anyone verify that Sprint's unlimited data is actually unlimited, 3G and 4G, with no hidden caps? It's what the salesman claimed, but who trusts them?
If it's popular enough you can, because someone always figures out how to get around any roadblocks to 3rd party servers, and then keeps them running forever. Hell, you can still play the original Tribes, and official servers haven't been up for that in years.
That's OK. I think you're a dick for continuing to ignore what I've typed over and over again - that merely using an iPhone does not make you a moron, but rather that using a non-iPhone without bothering to find out if what you're doing is safe when you're dealing with a device that probably has a great chunk of your financial data on it, makes you a moron, and that it is this type of moron who can be very well served by getting an iPhone.
So as long as we each think the other's a dick, I'd say we cancel each other out and can stop fighting each other;)
Considering the fact that I'm in a fringe technical field, and not a programmer like everyone's been having fun assuming, your entire post misses the point entirely.
Your lawyer argument is stupid. No, I don't call a lawyer when I sign a car loan (btw a lawyer is involved in mortgages because those involve title transfers, and the title company has. ..Lawyers), but I do read the loan carefully. The people who are getting malware on their Androids aren't even going that far. They aren't reading anything. They're just slapping "OK" on the permissions screen without bothering to look at what permissions they are OKing.
I know it's awfully fun to join the anti-intelligence dogpile (anonymously - how very impressive) but if you're going to do it, at least make a good job of it. I'm not going to apologize for expecting members of society to exercise intelligence now and then. I get that this is not a popular view these days, but if you look around at the state the USA is in, perhaps it should be.
Are you one of those people who thinks we should have a warning label on anything that could possibly be hazardous? I mean, squirt guns don't have a label telling you not to take the trigger off and jam it in your eye. Are you saying that someone who does that is not stupid?
element-o-p got what I was saying precisely. If you use anything, at all; Smart phone, skateboard, saw, glue, anything, you should familiarize yourself with it just on a basic level. As element said, you don't need to go out and get an IT degree to use a smart phone, but it wouldn't hurt to read the information you are given about it, which is written in plain, non-nerd English, and will help you avoid most if not all of the trouble spots.
I mean, it's really simple, you just sorta "know" when something looks suspicious
Well, yes, it is, and you don't have to keep up on malware trends to do it. If you find a calculator that wants to read your contacts, and use the internet, and access your GPS location, and send email, it's pretty damned obvious that a calculator would not need to do these things and therefore there's something suspicious about it. No, you don't know for certain that it's a trojan, but you damn well know that it's suspicious and so you find another calculator that doesn't want so much free reign on your phone. Android makes it easy even for the non-tech savvy to filter out probably 99% of the malware on the app store. Just read the damn permission screen that flashes up EVERY time you hit that download button. That's all you have to do, is read. It even puts a big old warning triangle and exclamation point next to the permissions that might be dangerous. The trouble isn't that people are mentally deficient, or even technically ignorant. The trouble is that people don't bother to read. They don't bother to look at the warnings that they are provided, and then they download something bad, get in trouble, and want to blame Android when it's their own fault.
Look at the lists of apps that these articles are listing to show us how anarchic and dangerous the Android app store is. A lot of 'em are porn slideshows. There's a calculator on there. A smattering of other types of apps, none of which would need to read contacts, send email, and trace your location. I don't need a PhD in compsci to figure out that a slide show of naked women should not need to email anyone. I don't need a genius-level IQ to figure out that if a slide show of naked women wants to email people, it might just not be on the up and up.
I am not saying that these people are morons in the sense that they have a sub-average IQ. I am saying that they are morons in the sense that they can't be bothered to learn about their equipment, and then go around trashtalking Android because they got in trouble through their own willful ignorance.
I'm growing tired of responding to the same points over and over, but I'll point out something that you're not getting:
"ignorant" has two components: Willful, and natural. I don't fault people for natural ignorance. I do fault them for willful ignorance, in which they decide to get involved with something, be it smart phones, computers, cars, or politics, with out bothering to find out anything about it, and then complain because they (intentionally) didn't know how it worked, and screwed it up.
What you, and several others in this thread, can't seem to grasp is that I understand that not everyone is going to be tech savvy. That's fine. But if you don't want to be tech savvy, by which it seems you guys mean "refuses to learn anything about technology" then why are you buying technology?
Why is it that someone who'd never had a flying lesson, but who bought a plane and crashed it because he chose not to learn to fly it would be considered an idiot, but someone who doesn't know anything about smart phones but who buys one and then gets in trouble because they *actively chose to avoid learning about it* is not?
No one can know everything about technology. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you *actively choose to avoid learning about your equipment,* and then you run in and randomly push buttons, and then you run around yelling that your equipment sucks because it broke after you randomly pushed buttons because you *actively chose not to learn how to use it,* then yes, you're stupid. End of story.
The whole point about Apple is that they've set their phone up to protect people from themselves. The tradeoff is that some legitimate apps that are not security risks, such as tethering, may not be available on the iPhone. For iPhone users to sit there and point at the Apple app store and say "see? It protects me from screwing up my phone because I can't be bothered to learn about security and therefore it's inherently superior to the Android app store which assumes its users are going to find out how to use their phone properly" is ludicrous.
You have. . Utterly missed my point. I have no problem with layers of abstraction. (and btw the last time I coded anything was about 15 years ago, and it was in assembly, was a dismal failure, and I can't remember anything about that or any sort of programming beyond old Logo commands. Not my field). I have a problem with people using their particular abstraction and then pointing at people using a different abstraction that they obviously don't understand and howling about how dangerous it is. Android is not dangerous, even if various iPhone users don't understand how it works well enough to use it safely.
One of my pet peeves is people automatically assuming that that-which-they-do-not-understand is inherently dangerous and scary. Another pet peeve is people who decide to get into something without finding out at least the basics of how it works. There seems to be a general mood of impatience among the general population regarding technology. It's not just smart phones. Look at home theater. People routinely go out and buy a jillion dollars worth of fancy theater equipment, and they make sure it's capable of doing about a hundred different things, and then they get it home and set up, and get pissed off that they can't just push one button and have everything turn on and do exactly what they want when they want it.
As I've said elsewhere, that's fine. If they want to remain willfully ignorant about the device they dropped hundreds or thousands of dollars on, that's their call. But I'm not going to think they're Mensa material when they complain that it broke when they did something that they shouldn't have done, and that there are reams of material online, in the manual, and elsewhere telling them not to do it. And I'm going to be annoyed when literally *everything* in life is dumbed-down to cater to people who can't be bothered to read a manual. If that makes me arrogant, then so be it.
I'm with you. I don't recommend Android to strangers. If you come up to me asking which smart phone you should buy, that's a good sign you don't know much about smart phones and so you should probably get an iPhone, because if you were tech-savvy you'd already know what you wanted. If it's someone I know, I'll only recommend Android if they're reasonably competent with tech toys. I don't even mean "able to root a phone successfully." I just mean "able to read "this app wants to read your contacts" and determine whether or not the app should be doing that. Otherwise, I recommend iPhone too. As I've said elsewhere in this expanding thread, I have no problem with iPhone and it's catering to tech-inept people. I have a problem with iPhone people running around yelling that Android is dangerous because it doesn't cocoon them in virtual bubble wrap.
I appreciate what you said, and hope you don't have the impression that I go around seeking out stupidity and yelling "moron!" at those who do something dumb.
I have, however, been known to tell people (yes, including my mother) that something they did was dumb. In fact, I've even told her that it was dumb to download random games off the internet without checking to see if they're legit first. I told her that after wiping and reinstalling Windows for her (again) not because I think she is an idiot, but because she kept doing dumb things and then getting angry that her computer broke because of them.
I think we've diverged a bit from my original point anyway, which was that while (yes I did use the word) phone-security morons might need the crutch of a completely locked down app store that the iPhone grants us, the rest of us do not. That iPhone caters to the less security-savvy amongst us is not a black mark on that platform, but by the same token Android should not be bashed for *not* catering to such people. "Android's dangerous!" is bullshit. It's fine, as long as you check to see what the apps you install want to do, and verify that they want to do it for a legitimate reason.
Regarding offending people with the term moron, I have no problem admitting that I'm a moron in certain areas. Buying jewelry for the SO would be one of them. I tell people I don't know a carat from a carrot, and have absolutely no idea whether the price a store charges for a bauble is a fair price (beyond the blanket assumption that it's a retail store and so therefore, no). I have no idea how to tell if a diamond is good or not (or even if it's real - I can't tell a real one from cubit zirconium to save my life). Being a jewelry moron, I'm a jeweler's dream customer, because he could sell me sparkly glass in a brass ring and I'd probably never know the difference. But, being a jewelry moron, when I go shopping for such things, I grab someone who is *not* a jewelry moron and take them with me, and they keep me out of trouble.
That's the point I'm trying to make regarding smart phones. If you're a security moron, whether because you're actually stupid or because you just can't be bothered to find out about proper security basics, then I'd submit that you really are pretty stupid if you don't grab someone who does know what they're doing and ask if what you're about to install on the device that has all your contacts, and probably has your credit card and bank account information, and is capable of transmitting all of that over the internet, is safe. If you can't manage even that, then you need an iPhone, and even then you should be nervous about getting into trouble.
And so I stand by what I said originally, but I will point out that, in keeping with your post, what I say here does not represent what I say to people's face when they break their smart phone. I do have a smidgen of tact (though I can be a moron in that arena as well from time to time;) )
Depends. If I pick up a jar labeled "biohazard" and open it without finding out what the stuff inside might do to me, or finding out how to properly handle jars with such labels, then yes, yes I am.
There's no fallacy here. People complain when their phone gets jacked. People use their phone. People don't bother learning the basics about using their phone so it doesn't get jacked. That's dumb.
I'm probably dumb to reply to this, because I somewhat suspect you're trolling but... (and to be fair, as the latest Mercedes commercials featuring drivers crediting the car for bailing them out from being idiot drivers demonstrates, it's not just in electronics).
You're right, we'd all be better off if these people and their passengers were dead, or better yet, quadriplegics on disability.
How about we'd be better off if they paid attention to their driving instead of texting or talking or whatever else they were doing to require electronic overrides to prevent their stupid driving?
The rest of your reply just indicates you need to look up the definition of "flame."
Slashdot Mirror
"murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers. For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons"
OK, so killers, pimps, people who "defile themselves with mankind" (which, despite fun modern Tea Party-esque interpretations that claim it's about homosexuality, isn't), adulterers, and liars.
I'll grant you that Romans is discussing homosexuality, but I'll point out that Jesus didn't say it. Paul said it, and Jesus was already dead and so wasn't around to correct him. I'll also point out that it doesn't say anything about what mortal mankind should do about homosexuals - only that god supposedly doesn't like them (which is interesting, considering the claim that he created them along with the rest of us).
I'll counter with a few choice ideas of Jesus himself:
Judge not
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone
Love thy neighbor
In short: Mind your own business and leave people who are doing things you don't like but that don't hurt anyone else alone.
I dunno. Is it really a software industry problem, or a "management roles tend to attract sociopaths" problem? Not trying to say that it's not a problem in the software field, but I've worked in a lot of industries since getting my first job at the ripe old age of 15, and every single one of them has had at least one management-type who was a psychopath.
When you think about it, if you're prone to lording it over people and treating them like underling crapnuggets, you're naturally going to be attracted to a management position.
Whether he's a drone in a corporation, or corporations hire him as a contractor, he still got work off of his rep as a hacker.
No. That still counts. And gays are still evil and must be persecuted. But it's OK to shave (contrary to Leviticus 19.27). And to wear blended fabrics.
See, Jesus really said that only the parts of the bible that are convenient to our goals of oppressing people who are not like us are valid. I know that's not actually in the bible, but it's true. Honest. The rest of the bible can be disposed of, which is good because bacon tastes good.
Came here to say this. How these dopes could list all those minor guys and skip Mitnick is beyond me.
Apparently if you have an unlimited plan before 7/7/11, you'll be grandfathered in and won't lose it until you cancel service.
I feel it should be pointed out that thanks to the Patriot act and other examples of Shredding the Constitution in the Name of Safety from Terrists, the government does not need a warrant to spy on you anymore. All they have to do is say they're spying on you to make sure you're not a terrorist, or talking to any terrorists.
It depends on the state. "One party consent" states work as you described. "Two party consent" states require that BOTH (or all, if more than 2) ends of the conversation be aware that there is a recording being made. That's why any time you call a business they have the recording at the start that says the call may be recorded - to cover themselves for people who live in two-party states.
While I do tend to agree that language is important and should be preserved, and I even tend to snark at people who type in "txt spk, u no" on forums, there is a point at which language correction becomes pedantic and annoying.
Unless you are my English professor or my editor, or unless my error actually effects comprehension of my post, I'm probably going to be at least mildly irritated if you sit there correcting every typo and minor grammatical mistake. I'll be even more annoyed if your corrections derail the thread from its intended topic.
I was amazed that the TCG was popular. It was an obvious moneyspinner by Sony to get people to pay for trinkets in-game that should have been available through the in-game crafting system. I find it hard to sympathize with anyone who paid real money for that crap, especially since it's been obvious for years now that Sony never had any intention of putting real development effort into the game and therefore they were just riding the downhill slide to make profit with no investment.
In a comparison of operating systems, it's fair to compare sales of one operating system to another. In a comparison of phone design and build quality, it's stupid to compare phones using one operating system to phones using another. Compare phones by brand, not by type (unless you're willing to admit that Toyota is crap because Yugo made hatchbacks too). The operating system has absolutely nothing to do with the design and build quality of the physical hardware.
When you include Yugos, Trabants, and Ladas, foreign cars have much worse reliability than Ford.
I really hate it when the media writes dumbassed articles like this. "Let's compare phones made by 30 different companies with a phone made by 1 company and see if there are quality variations." Abject stupidity.
Wonder if they'll capitalize on Verizon's stupidity, or if they'll follow them and start limiting phones as well. Either way, if it's unlimited now that's good enough for me. Now I just have to decide between the Evo and the Samsung. Leaning toward Evo because of bad experiences I've had previously with Samsung mobile products.
Yep. Me too. Sprint actually has a plan that's 300 minutes more and $10 cheaper than my Verizon plan. I've been holding off on switching because of Verizon's network, but this is ridiculous. Can anyone verify that Sprint's unlimited data is actually unlimited, 3G and 4G, with no hidden caps? It's what the salesman claimed, but who trusts them?
If it's popular enough you can, because someone always figures out how to get around any roadblocks to 3rd party servers, and then keeps them running forever. Hell, you can still play the original Tribes, and official servers haven't been up for that in years.
That's OK. I think you're a dick for continuing to ignore what I've typed over and over again - that merely using an iPhone does not make you a moron, but rather that using a non-iPhone without bothering to find out if what you're doing is safe when you're dealing with a device that probably has a great chunk of your financial data on it, makes you a moron, and that it is this type of moron who can be very well served by getting an iPhone.
So as long as we each think the other's a dick, I'd say we cancel each other out and can stop fighting each other ;)
Considering the fact that I'm in a fringe technical field, and not a programmer like everyone's been having fun assuming, your entire post misses the point entirely.
Your lawyer argument is stupid. No, I don't call a lawyer when I sign a car loan (btw a lawyer is involved in mortgages because those involve title transfers, and the title company has. . .Lawyers), but I do read the loan carefully. The people who are getting malware on their Androids aren't even going that far. They aren't reading anything. They're just slapping "OK" on the permissions screen without bothering to look at what permissions they are OKing.
I know it's awfully fun to join the anti-intelligence dogpile (anonymously - how very impressive) but if you're going to do it, at least make a good job of it. I'm not going to apologize for expecting members of society to exercise intelligence now and then. I get that this is not a popular view these days, but if you look around at the state the USA is in, perhaps it should be.
Are you one of those people who thinks we should have a warning label on anything that could possibly be hazardous? I mean, squirt guns don't have a label telling you not to take the trigger off and jam it in your eye. Are you saying that someone who does that is not stupid?
element-o-p got what I was saying precisely. If you use anything, at all; Smart phone, skateboard, saw, glue, anything, you should familiarize yourself with it just on a basic level. As element said, you don't need to go out and get an IT degree to use a smart phone, but it wouldn't hurt to read the information you are given about it, which is written in plain, non-nerd English, and will help you avoid most if not all of the trouble spots.
I mean, it's really simple, you just sorta "know" when something looks suspicious
Well, yes, it is, and you don't have to keep up on malware trends to do it. If you find a calculator that wants to read your contacts, and use the internet, and access your GPS location, and send email, it's pretty damned obvious that a calculator would not need to do these things and therefore there's something suspicious about it. No, you don't know for certain that it's a trojan, but you damn well know that it's suspicious and so you find another calculator that doesn't want so much free reign on your phone. Android makes it easy even for the non-tech savvy to filter out probably 99% of the malware on the app store. Just read the damn permission screen that flashes up EVERY time you hit that download button. That's all you have to do, is read. It even puts a big old warning triangle and exclamation point next to the permissions that might be dangerous. The trouble isn't that people are mentally deficient, or even technically ignorant. The trouble is that people don't bother to read. They don't bother to look at the warnings that they are provided, and then they download something bad, get in trouble, and want to blame Android when it's their own fault.
Look at the lists of apps that these articles are listing to show us how anarchic and dangerous the Android app store is. A lot of 'em are porn slideshows. There's a calculator on there. A smattering of other types of apps, none of which would need to read contacts, send email, and trace your location. I don't need a PhD in compsci to figure out that a slide show of naked women should not need to email anyone. I don't need a genius-level IQ to figure out that if a slide show of naked women wants to email people, it might just not be on the up and up.
I am not saying that these people are morons in the sense that they have a sub-average IQ. I am saying that they are morons in the sense that they can't be bothered to learn about their equipment, and then go around trashtalking Android because they got in trouble through their own willful ignorance.
I'm growing tired of responding to the same points over and over, but I'll point out something that you're not getting:
"ignorant" has two components: Willful, and natural. I don't fault people for natural ignorance. I do fault them for willful ignorance, in which they decide to get involved with something, be it smart phones, computers, cars, or politics, with out bothering to find out anything about it, and then complain because they (intentionally) didn't know how it worked, and screwed it up.
What you, and several others in this thread, can't seem to grasp is that I understand that not everyone is going to be tech savvy. That's fine. But if you don't want to be tech savvy, by which it seems you guys mean "refuses to learn anything about technology" then why are you buying technology?
Why is it that someone who'd never had a flying lesson, but who bought a plane and crashed it because he chose not to learn to fly it would be considered an idiot, but someone who doesn't know anything about smart phones but who buys one and then gets in trouble because they *actively chose to avoid learning about it* is not?
No one can know everything about technology. There's nothing wrong with that. But if you *actively choose to avoid learning about your equipment,* and then you run in and randomly push buttons, and then you run around yelling that your equipment sucks because it broke after you randomly pushed buttons because you *actively chose not to learn how to use it,* then yes, you're stupid. End of story.
The whole point about Apple is that they've set their phone up to protect people from themselves. The tradeoff is that some legitimate apps that are not security risks, such as tethering, may not be available on the iPhone. For iPhone users to sit there and point at the Apple app store and say "see? It protects me from screwing up my phone because I can't be bothered to learn about security and therefore it's inherently superior to the Android app store which assumes its users are going to find out how to use their phone properly" is ludicrous.
You have. . Utterly missed my point. I have no problem with layers of abstraction. (and btw the last time I coded anything was about 15 years ago, and it was in assembly, was a dismal failure, and I can't remember anything about that or any sort of programming beyond old Logo commands. Not my field). I have a problem with people using their particular abstraction and then pointing at people using a different abstraction that they obviously don't understand and howling about how dangerous it is. Android is not dangerous, even if various iPhone users don't understand how it works well enough to use it safely.
One of my pet peeves is people automatically assuming that that-which-they-do-not-understand is inherently dangerous and scary. Another pet peeve is people who decide to get into something without finding out at least the basics of how it works. There seems to be a general mood of impatience among the general population regarding technology. It's not just smart phones. Look at home theater. People routinely go out and buy a jillion dollars worth of fancy theater equipment, and they make sure it's capable of doing about a hundred different things, and then they get it home and set up, and get pissed off that they can't just push one button and have everything turn on and do exactly what they want when they want it.
As I've said elsewhere, that's fine. If they want to remain willfully ignorant about the device they dropped hundreds or thousands of dollars on, that's their call. But I'm not going to think they're Mensa material when they complain that it broke when they did something that they shouldn't have done, and that there are reams of material online, in the manual, and elsewhere telling them not to do it. And I'm going to be annoyed when literally *everything* in life is dumbed-down to cater to people who can't be bothered to read a manual. If that makes me arrogant, then so be it.
I'm with you. I don't recommend Android to strangers. If you come up to me asking which smart phone you should buy, that's a good sign you don't know much about smart phones and so you should probably get an iPhone, because if you were tech-savvy you'd already know what you wanted. If it's someone I know, I'll only recommend Android if they're reasonably competent with tech toys. I don't even mean "able to root a phone successfully." I just mean "able to read "this app wants to read your contacts" and determine whether or not the app should be doing that. Otherwise, I recommend iPhone too. As I've said elsewhere in this expanding thread, I have no problem with iPhone and it's catering to tech-inept people. I have a problem with iPhone people running around yelling that Android is dangerous because it doesn't cocoon them in virtual bubble wrap.
I appreciate what you said, and hope you don't have the impression that I go around seeking out stupidity and yelling "moron!" at those who do something dumb.
I have, however, been known to tell people (yes, including my mother) that something they did was dumb. In fact, I've even told her that it was dumb to download random games off the internet without checking to see if they're legit first. I told her that after wiping and reinstalling Windows for her (again) not because I think she is an idiot, but because she kept doing dumb things and then getting angry that her computer broke because of them.
I think we've diverged a bit from my original point anyway, which was that while (yes I did use the word) phone-security morons might need the crutch of a completely locked down app store that the iPhone grants us, the rest of us do not. That iPhone caters to the less security-savvy amongst us is not a black mark on that platform, but by the same token Android should not be bashed for *not* catering to such people. "Android's dangerous!" is bullshit. It's fine, as long as you check to see what the apps you install want to do, and verify that they want to do it for a legitimate reason.
Regarding offending people with the term moron, I have no problem admitting that I'm a moron in certain areas. Buying jewelry for the SO would be one of them. I tell people I don't know a carat from a carrot, and have absolutely no idea whether the price a store charges for a bauble is a fair price (beyond the blanket assumption that it's a retail store and so therefore, no). I have no idea how to tell if a diamond is good or not (or even if it's real - I can't tell a real one from cubit zirconium to save my life). Being a jewelry moron, I'm a jeweler's dream customer, because he could sell me sparkly glass in a brass ring and I'd probably never know the difference. But, being a jewelry moron, when I go shopping for such things, I grab someone who is *not* a jewelry moron and take them with me, and they keep me out of trouble.
That's the point I'm trying to make regarding smart phones. If you're a security moron, whether because you're actually stupid or because you just can't be bothered to find out about proper security basics, then I'd submit that you really are pretty stupid if you don't grab someone who does know what they're doing and ask if what you're about to install on the device that has all your contacts, and probably has your credit card and bank account information, and is capable of transmitting all of that over the internet, is safe. If you can't manage even that, then you need an iPhone, and even then you should be nervous about getting into trouble.
And so I stand by what I said originally, but I will point out that, in keeping with your post, what I say here does not represent what I say to people's face when they break their smart phone. I do have a smidgen of tact (though I can be a moron in that arena as well from time to time ;) )
Depends. If I pick up a jar labeled "biohazard" and open it without finding out what the stuff inside might do to me, or finding out how to properly handle jars with such labels, then yes, yes I am.
There's no fallacy here. People complain when their phone gets jacked. People use their phone. People don't bother learning the basics about using their phone so it doesn't get jacked. That's dumb.
I'm probably dumb to reply to this, because I somewhat suspect you're trolling but...
(and to be fair, as the latest Mercedes commercials featuring drivers crediting the car for bailing them out from being idiot drivers demonstrates, it's not just in electronics).
You're right, we'd all be better off if these people and their passengers were dead, or better yet, quadriplegics on disability.
How about we'd be better off if they paid attention to their driving instead of texting or talking or whatever else they were doing to require electronic overrides to prevent their stupid driving?
The rest of your reply just indicates you need to look up the definition of "flame."