I'm not sure if it's relevant but from what I understand it's a little bit different, nVidia has a small GPL-licensed patch to the kernel which essentially gives them raw kernel memory access (read/write/allocate/free) and then puppeteers the kernel from user space. So the nVidia proprietary code doesn't live in the same memory space like a kernel module would, they just have a lot of very close inter-process communication.
Likewise, I would call you silly for anthropomorphizing God.
You can't have it both ways, if God doesn't have a consciousness or doesn't care then prayer and worship is meaningless and how you live your life is irrelevant. It's an application process where your request is either approved - your prayers have been answered - or not. Because God is all-seeing, all-knowing no request is lost or ignored, if it wasn't approved it was reviewed and denied. And we don't know the exact nature of the process, but most any theistic religion has some concept of worthiness like are you a good Christian.
And that's really the crux of the matter, you can't say that those worthy of God's grace have their prayers answers without saying those who don't are unworthy. That they're not faithful enough, not moral enough, that somehow every decision God does is right even though we don't understand it. That God works in mysterious ways that are divine and beyond human comprehension. Atheists say bad shit happens to good people, it's just arbitrary. Theists say bad shit happens to bad people, God's aim is true. It's a shitty way to add insult to misery.
That would mean a formal legal letter. Honestly, I don't think I want to pay a lawyer for it. And I have my reasons for thinking that their word that "it's Ok", is not something that I can rely on. I don't want to break the thin veil of anonymity which is slashdot, but my former boss was prone to changing his mind. I would not want to rely on it as legally binding.
While I wouldn't rely on it to have good relations with a past employer, any kind of permission is a strong defense against legal liability even if the permission was withdrawn, misleading, incomplete or invalid. Both the doctrine of clean hands and promissory estoppel should stop them from collecting damages on a situation they themselves created, regardless of whether any laws were actually violated. That said a more formal permission may be useful to avoid a frivolous lawsuit, but being realistic some permission is better than none since you're unlikely to get a formal agreement for free and it's a work for hire that is not yours to give away. So it's either that or not at all, IMHO.
The annoying part isn't that Microsoft would try to advertise on your own lock screen. No, the moment we heard that Windows 10 was announced as a free upgrade, we all knew they'd eventually stoop to this level. The annoying part is how they refer to it in their settings.
Actually I expected them to pull the old bait and switch by coming out with something quite reasonable and innocent then boil the frog slowly. But I guess they figured they got the lid on the situation....
But what if the shop keeper is skimming off your card? How does the customer know that the chip reader has not been hacked? And yes, this situation has happened.
At least here in Norway, if the customer is not at fault for losing either the card or the PIN then it's the card company/merchant's problem. The consumer authorities have made it quite clear that the individual customer has no power to introduce extra security measures, so if they're insufficient it's the card company's loss and the card company's choice whether or not to improve security. One of the ways they've ensured big roll-outs is to shift blame to the merchant if they stay on old technology, like for example offline terminals. If the merchant doesn't have an online terminal, it has to cover any fraud themselves. So it's almost hopeless to exploit stolen cards here, almost always they try using them abroad. Which is why the cards typically have regional blocks, try "using" my card outside Scandinavia and it's going to get blocked and flagged immidiately. I can of course go in my online bank and turn regions back on if I'm travelling.
but if they pick you then the odds of them being a bad person are significantly higher.
In case of a child who looks obviously lost? I don't think that's significantly higher. There are a lot of people who would want to help a lost child.
If the odds are say 99% and 99.99%, then the odds of a good outcome is only increased 1% because usually either way is fine. But the risk of a bad outcome is increased by a factor of 100 from 0.01% to 1%. The latter is the significant number.
"It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."
With a little more training he could be like Stephen Elop, bringing down Nokia with less than 8kB ASCII memo. Sure, the truth is a little more complex;)
What they're talking about is putting the phone into Device Firmware Update mode, like this. Only then will they be able to update it remotely and on the newest iPhones that'd also wipe the encryption keys. But not on the model in question here.
Since 1980, median individual income has risen from $20,500 per year to $27,000 per year, an annual increase of about 0.8% per year. Over that same period, inflation has averaged 3.37%. after 35 years of that, buying power is only 28% of what it used to be, and wages are only up 31%. This means that the total buying power of the median wage today is only 36% of the median buying power in 1980. In effect, wages have fallen to 1/3 of what they were in 1980.
And this crap is at +5, no wonder American politics is full of clowns.... in the header of the income figures it says (Reported in $2012), so the numbers are all inflation adjusted already. So you might have missed that but to be so out of touch with reality that you really think they're 64% down instead of 31% up... you should run for president! It looks like you got/.'s vote.
Technically any phone that supports SDXC should be able to do that, it's the maximum defined in the standard but most just list the capacity available on release. And I don't think cards bigger than 512GB exist yet, so no you can't actually have that at least not today.
I've got a smartphone...sure, it's great. But I can't honestly say that I feel I've gotten the upfront price plus the monthly fee's worth of utility/entertainment out of it. What's everyone else's experiences with smartphones?
I feel there's great utility in having a smartphone, but that I don't really care which one. I used to have an iPhone 4, but the screen broke and all the other phones were growing so I decided to get a really cheap-ass Motorola Moto E (4.3" screen) as a holdover and it doesn't impress but it also hasn't disappointed me. I'm also not a heavier user than that I'm on the lowest data use tier anyway, so it doesn't get any cheaper with a dumbphone. That said, Android 6.0 seems to bring some nice improvements and I don't expect my phone will ever see it, so I'm thinking maybe a compact/mini of this generation. It'll have to be a phone I can afford to lose though, I don't want a phone I worry about getting dropped or stolen or otherwise broken.
There are lots of vague deductions, but the Constitution is perfectly clear: it ensures the right of people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects.
Yes, but that's not what the Supreme Court has invoked when it struck down laws against contraception, abortion and sodomy. The way it's been framed in US is as a right to non-interference in deeply personal and intimate matters. While that's certainly a question of freedom, for me that's not privacy. To me privacy is the degree to which the government can collect information on me, dealing with all aspects of that process. Like what sources they can use, what means they can use, to what degree or level of detail they can collect, how long they can keep it, how they can use it and so on.
Now obviously that could have a great effect on the degree the law can be enforced, but how hard it is to detect should have no bearing on the legality. And there I think the Supreme Court got a bit creative, like if women have the right to take contraceptives why don't people in general have the right to take the drugs they want? It's an equally intimate issue involving only yourself, at least until you break some other law. I think they're more or less creating new law from the bench.
Perhaps... but it looks like a tough act to follow. By decomposing the picture he shows how many different characteristics we use in combination on an ordinary image. The sharp drop-off shows how we latch on to one small defining feature and work our way backwards to the answer. Or maybe it's easier to argue in reverse, this here blob looks like anything. Add a bow here and it's a ship. Extract the neck up, it's a horse. Show a chin here, it's a suit. Several times it's about seeing the edge and thus then entire shape, like here's a wing and here's a leg.
I must admit I don't know where the state of the art in computer vision is today. But the kind of "decompose and integrate" we see here would be rather impressive, like you don't compare "a horse" to other horses. You actually divide it up and say it has a horse's head, a horse's neck, a horse's legs, a horse's overall shape, they're all like voting for whether it's a horse or not... like say a centaur wouldn't be a bad match but a split vote, is this a human or is it a horse because parts of it score really well on one or the other.
Picking a metric that most people would misconstrue to mean something else is not exactly honest reporting, even though it's technically true. It's clear that the impression the headline gives is that wind is a comparable power source to nuclear in volume. It's a bit like measuring cargo delivery using motorcycle and semitrailer by miles driven. Sure in a few cases like mail delivery maybe that is the right metric since it's about making the rounds, not the bulk size or weight but for the most part it's totally meaningless to ignore the carrying capacity. Which is quite a bit like ignoring the actual power output of a power plant...
This is a win-win situation for competitor corporations who might find themselves ideologically aligned with Apple's stance, yet lack the political will to stand against the governors ubiquitous snooping. If Apple wins, everyone of them win. If Apple loses, and they could, they lose alone.
First of all, corporations are rarely ideologically aligned to anything. Apple wants people to trust the iPhone so they'll buy iPhones. And post-Snowden, the more noise they can make about the US government not being able to crack it the better for world sales. Even if they lose, I think they'll still win by introducing the "iPhone Clipper Chip" edition for the US, creating an impossible situation where businessmen, tourists and others come to the US with uncrackable phones. I really doubt Apple gives a crap about this one phone, they know exactly what they're doing now by making a big deal out of it.
As for the political grandstanding, it'll always happen... take phone cameras, before anything like it would be considered spy cameras. Ask people about the potential for espionage, taking pictures of people in the shower, underage sexting and so on and they'll all agree that's terrible. But if you ask them if they'd really like to get rid of digital cameras and go back to huge, dedicated cameras with film rolls and processing labs, then hell no. We want the good, without the bad... and a free pony. Like we want the justice system to put all the bad men in jail, and we're angry with the ones that get away. And we're angry about innocent people being wrongfully convicted. We want a perfection we can't have.
Heh, I'm starting to feel like that at work. I must have dozens of attributes, hundreds of code values memorized by now without really trying to, I work so much with XML and the data tables where I don't have the labels - there are of course documentation and views for that - that I for the most part don't need them anymore. I know what code 22 here, code 3 there, code 6 in this field and code 4 in that field means. It actually tends to freak people out that I don't need to look it up...
You're right but he's right too. Opera used to have their own engine (Presto) but is was discontinued in favor of Blink (Google's Webkit derivative) and as far as I know never open sourced, Vivaldi also uses Blink so we're down to just Edge, Webkit-ish and Gecko. But with the dominating engine open source (Chromium = Chrome minus a few proprietary plug-ins) I'm not really all that concerned about that.
And as part of the PATRIOT II act we'll criminalize any Congress member who votes "no" because clearly they refuse to aid national security. I think Apple picked just the right time to make a stand and put the US in a lose-lose situation, either they back down (unlikely) or lose (lots of good PR) or win and Apple is forced to decrypt this one phone while most their market moves to phones with Secure Enclave, so by the time the case closes (expect appeals) they can rightfully say it's irrelevant now because Apple can't do that anymore. And then the government has to try a new round if they want to force Apple to redesign their hardware to include a backdoor. It's a lot better for Apple than a law suit about the current system.
The GPL does not autmatically apply to anything that touches the kernel. It only applies to derivative works of a GPLed work. If they write a GPLed wrapper that is a derivative of both the kernel and the ZFS sources and chose to dual license it, then there's no need for the ZFS sources to be GPL licensed -- merely the wrapper. No GPL-code-inspired modifications, no GPL-defined derivatie work and no GPL licensing requirement. (So sad.)
That's not how copyright works. If you have say a piece of code licensed for non-commercial use you can't just write a wrapper and say my commercial use application talks to a wrapper, the wrapper talks to your code so the terms don't apply. Instead it relies on a sleight of hand where the user is creating the illegal derivate through assembling bits that were acquired legally using a prepared script. Just like you can acquire a bunch of legal chemicals, start a meth lab and end up with an illegal product.
So instead of a $600 iPhone (that cost a fraction of that to make), I get to pay $1200 over the course of 2 years... what a deal. This is the kind of predatory crap I expect from a loan shark not from... oh wait, nm.
I'm not surprised that Apple is trying to get in on this action as "buy now, pay later" deals are a huge business just like credit cards and once you're hooked... I got a friend of mine who lacks impulse control, maxed loans and maxed credit card debt. But he's a "functional shopoholic" meaning he manages to pay interest every month. And of course complains that he's short on cash, well I'd be too if that much of my paycheck just disappeared on top of my fixed costs. And what it means is that every time he gets a little breathing room he feels he's been frugal for so long the temptation to splurge is so great he ends up right back where he started. It's a negative spiral.
Personally I'm the other way around, if I have some leftover disposable cash I'll make a down payment on my mortgage - no credit card debt - so that next month, I'll have even more disposable cash. That's the positive spiral, once you have a growing surplus it becomes easier and easier not to spend all of it. I realize that most people can't make the huge investments like house and car without loans. But a phone? If I couldn't buy an iPhone outright, I'd just get some cheap-ass Android phone until I could. Because what happens when you bat outside your economic league is it catches up to you, my friend's economy is just getting worse and worse relative to mine. Which of course doesn't help...
The Apple docs use the word "fused" so I think they're using the same technique as PROM circuits, except they're not directly readable. Essentially every bit is wired to a circuit breaker, you start with all 1s and intentionally trip some to burn in a fixed patterns of zeros and ones the first time you power it up. If they use the on-chip RNG to initialize it it's possible that not even the manufacturing facility knows what value it has encoded, only the chip itself. Looks like a real tin foil hatter designed this system and did it well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure if it's relevant but from what I understand it's a little bit different, nVidia has a small GPL-licensed patch to the kernel which essentially gives them raw kernel memory access (read/write/allocate/free) and then puppeteers the kernel from user space. So the nVidia proprietary code doesn't live in the same memory space like a kernel module would, they just have a lot of very close inter-process communication.
Likewise, I would call you silly for anthropomorphizing God.
You can't have it both ways, if God doesn't have a consciousness or doesn't care then prayer and worship is meaningless and how you live your life is irrelevant. It's an application process where your request is either approved - your prayers have been answered - or not. Because God is all-seeing, all-knowing no request is lost or ignored, if it wasn't approved it was reviewed and denied. And we don't know the exact nature of the process, but most any theistic religion has some concept of worthiness like are you a good Christian.
And that's really the crux of the matter, you can't say that those worthy of God's grace have their prayers answers without saying those who don't are unworthy. That they're not faithful enough, not moral enough, that somehow every decision God does is right even though we don't understand it. That God works in mysterious ways that are divine and beyond human comprehension. Atheists say bad shit happens to good people, it's just arbitrary. Theists say bad shit happens to bad people, God's aim is true. It's a shitty way to add insult to misery.
That would mean a formal legal letter. Honestly, I don't think I want to pay a lawyer for it. And I have my reasons for thinking that their word that "it's Ok", is not something that I can rely on. I don't want to break the thin veil of anonymity which is slashdot, but my former boss was prone to changing his mind. I would not want to rely on it as legally binding.
While I wouldn't rely on it to have good relations with a past employer, any kind of permission is a strong defense against legal liability even if the permission was withdrawn, misleading, incomplete or invalid. Both the doctrine of clean hands and promissory estoppel should stop them from collecting damages on a situation they themselves created, regardless of whether any laws were actually violated. That said a more formal permission may be useful to avoid a frivolous lawsuit, but being realistic some permission is better than none since you're unlikely to get a formal agreement for free and it's a work for hire that is not yours to give away. So it's either that or not at all, IMHO.
If you're talking to halflings, I don't think money will bail you out of the padded room.
The annoying part isn't that Microsoft would try to advertise on your own lock screen. No, the moment we heard that Windows 10 was announced as a free upgrade, we all knew they'd eventually stoop to this level. The annoying part is how they refer to it in their settings.
Actually I expected them to pull the old bait and switch by coming out with something quite reasonable and innocent then boil the frog slowly. But I guess they figured they got the lid on the situation....
But what if the shop keeper is skimming off your card? How does the customer know that the chip reader has not been hacked? And yes, this situation has happened.
At least here in Norway, if the customer is not at fault for losing either the card or the PIN then it's the card company/merchant's problem. The consumer authorities have made it quite clear that the individual customer has no power to introduce extra security measures, so if they're insufficient it's the card company's loss and the card company's choice whether or not to improve security. One of the ways they've ensured big roll-outs is to shift blame to the merchant if they stay on old technology, like for example offline terminals. If the merchant doesn't have an online terminal, it has to cover any fraud themselves. So it's almost hopeless to exploit stolen cards here, almost always they try using them abroad. Which is why the cards typically have regional blocks, try "using" my card outside Scandinavia and it's going to get blocked and flagged immidiately. I can of course go in my online bank and turn regions back on if I'm travelling.
but if they pick you then the odds of them being a bad person are significantly higher.
In case of a child who looks obviously lost? I don't think that's significantly higher. There are a lot of people who would want to help a lost child.
If the odds are say 99% and 99.99%, then the odds of a good outcome is only increased 1% because usually either way is fine. But the risk of a bad outcome is increased by a factor of 100 from 0.01% to 1%. The latter is the significant number.
"It's awesome to be credited with single-handedly bringing down a billion-dollar industry with eight kilobytes of code. But the truth is a little more complex."
With a little more training he could be like Stephen Elop, bringing down Nokia with less than 8kB ASCII memo. Sure, the truth is a little more complex ;)
What they're talking about is putting the phone into Device Firmware Update mode, like this. Only then will they be able to update it remotely and on the newest iPhones that'd also wipe the encryption keys. But not on the model in question here.
Since 1980, median individual income has risen from $20,500 per year to $27,000 per year, an annual increase of about 0.8% per year. Over that same period, inflation has averaged 3.37%. after 35 years of that, buying power is only 28% of what it used to be, and wages are only up 31%. This means that the total buying power of the median wage today is only 36% of the median buying power in 1980. In effect, wages have fallen to 1/3 of what they were in 1980.
And this crap is at +5, no wonder American politics is full of clowns.... in the header of the income figures it says (Reported in $2012), so the numbers are all inflation adjusted already. So you might have missed that but to be so out of touch with reality that you really think they're 64% down instead of 31% up... you should run for president! It looks like you got /.'s vote.
I didn't "have to be careful" to avoid the upgrade. All it took was deleting gwx.exe and everything else in that directory.
Been there, done that... updated Windows and they probably had an updated version because it came back.
FWIW, the G4 also supports a 2TB expansion slot.
Technically any phone that supports SDXC should be able to do that, it's the maximum defined in the standard but most just list the capacity available on release. And I don't think cards bigger than 512GB exist yet, so no you can't actually have that at least not today.
I've got a smartphone...sure, it's great. But I can't honestly say that I feel I've gotten the upfront price plus the monthly fee's worth of utility/entertainment out of it. What's everyone else's experiences with smartphones?
I feel there's great utility in having a smartphone, but that I don't really care which one. I used to have an iPhone 4, but the screen broke and all the other phones were growing so I decided to get a really cheap-ass Motorola Moto E (4.3" screen) as a holdover and it doesn't impress but it also hasn't disappointed me. I'm also not a heavier user than that I'm on the lowest data use tier anyway, so it doesn't get any cheaper with a dumbphone. That said, Android 6.0 seems to bring some nice improvements and I don't expect my phone will ever see it, so I'm thinking maybe a compact/mini of this generation. It'll have to be a phone I can afford to lose though, I don't want a phone I worry about getting dropped or stolen or otherwise broken.
There are lots of vague deductions, but the Constitution is perfectly clear: it ensures the right of people to be secure in their persons, homes, papers, and effects.
Yes, but that's not what the Supreme Court has invoked when it struck down laws against contraception, abortion and sodomy. The way it's been framed in US is as a right to non-interference in deeply personal and intimate matters. While that's certainly a question of freedom, for me that's not privacy. To me privacy is the degree to which the government can collect information on me, dealing with all aspects of that process. Like what sources they can use, what means they can use, to what degree or level of detail they can collect, how long they can keep it, how they can use it and so on.
Now obviously that could have a great effect on the degree the law can be enforced, but how hard it is to detect should have no bearing on the legality. And there I think the Supreme Court got a bit creative, like if women have the right to take contraceptives why don't people in general have the right to take the drugs they want? It's an equally intimate issue involving only yourself, at least until you break some other law. I think they're more or less creating new law from the bench.
I'm not going to hire any robot lawyer unless it can prove it is soulless.
Isn't that a bit like asking a fish if it can swim?
Perhaps... but it looks like a tough act to follow. By decomposing the picture he shows how many different characteristics we use in combination on an ordinary image. The sharp drop-off shows how we latch on to one small defining feature and work our way backwards to the answer. Or maybe it's easier to argue in reverse, this here blob looks like anything. Add a bow here and it's a ship. Extract the neck up, it's a horse. Show a chin here, it's a suit. Several times it's about seeing the edge and thus then entire shape, like here's a wing and here's a leg.
I must admit I don't know where the state of the art in computer vision is today. But the kind of "decompose and integrate" we see here would be rather impressive, like you don't compare "a horse" to other horses. You actually divide it up and say it has a horse's head, a horse's neck, a horse's legs, a horse's overall shape, they're all like voting for whether it's a horse or not... like say a centaur wouldn't be a bad match but a split vote, is this a human or is it a horse because parts of it score really well on one or the other.
Picking a metric that most people would misconstrue to mean something else is not exactly honest reporting, even though it's technically true. It's clear that the impression the headline gives is that wind is a comparable power source to nuclear in volume. It's a bit like measuring cargo delivery using motorcycle and semitrailer by miles driven. Sure in a few cases like mail delivery maybe that is the right metric since it's about making the rounds, not the bulk size or weight but for the most part it's totally meaningless to ignore the carrying capacity. Which is quite a bit like ignoring the actual power output of a power plant...
This is a win-win situation for competitor corporations who might find themselves ideologically aligned with Apple's stance, yet lack the political will to stand against the governors ubiquitous snooping. If Apple wins, everyone of them win. If Apple loses, and they could, they lose alone.
First of all, corporations are rarely ideologically aligned to anything. Apple wants people to trust the iPhone so they'll buy iPhones. And post-Snowden, the more noise they can make about the US government not being able to crack it the better for world sales. Even if they lose, I think they'll still win by introducing the "iPhone Clipper Chip" edition for the US, creating an impossible situation where businessmen, tourists and others come to the US with uncrackable phones. I really doubt Apple gives a crap about this one phone, they know exactly what they're doing now by making a big deal out of it.
As for the political grandstanding, it'll always happen... take phone cameras, before anything like it would be considered spy cameras. Ask people about the potential for espionage, taking pictures of people in the shower, underage sexting and so on and they'll all agree that's terrible. But if you ask them if they'd really like to get rid of digital cameras and go back to huge, dedicated cameras with film rolls and processing labs, then hell no. We want the good, without the bad... and a free pony. Like we want the justice system to put all the bad men in jail, and we're angry with the ones that get away. And we're angry about innocent people being wrongfully convicted. We want a perfection we can't have.
Taliban, Al Queda, blah blah, these are just mobs. Organized crime. Treat them as such.
They have roughly as much in common as the Confederation and Al Capone.
Heh, I'm starting to feel like that at work. I must have dozens of attributes, hundreds of code values memorized by now without really trying to, I work so much with XML and the data tables where I don't have the labels - there are of course documentation and views for that - that I for the most part don't need them anymore. I know what code 22 here, code 3 there, code 6 in this field and code 4 in that field means. It actually tends to freak people out that I don't need to look it up...
Nope. Opera was its own thing.
You're right but he's right too. Opera used to have their own engine (Presto) but is was discontinued in favor of Blink (Google's Webkit derivative) and as far as I know never open sourced, Vivaldi also uses Blink so we're down to just Edge, Webkit-ish and Gecko. But with the dominating engine open source (Chromium = Chrome minus a few proprietary plug-ins) I'm not really all that concerned about that.
And as part of the PATRIOT II act we'll criminalize any Congress member who votes "no" because clearly they refuse to aid national security. I think Apple picked just the right time to make a stand and put the US in a lose-lose situation, either they back down (unlikely) or lose (lots of good PR) or win and Apple is forced to decrypt this one phone while most their market moves to phones with Secure Enclave, so by the time the case closes (expect appeals) they can rightfully say it's irrelevant now because Apple can't do that anymore. And then the government has to try a new round if they want to force Apple to redesign their hardware to include a backdoor. It's a lot better for Apple than a law suit about the current system.
The GPL does not autmatically apply to anything that touches the kernel. It only applies to derivative works of a GPLed work. If they write a GPLed wrapper that is a derivative of both the kernel and the ZFS sources and chose to dual license it, then there's no need for the ZFS sources to be GPL licensed -- merely the wrapper. No GPL-code-inspired modifications, no GPL-defined derivatie work and no GPL licensing requirement. (So sad.)
That's not how copyright works. If you have say a piece of code licensed for non-commercial use you can't just write a wrapper and say my commercial use application talks to a wrapper, the wrapper talks to your code so the terms don't apply. Instead it relies on a sleight of hand where the user is creating the illegal derivate through assembling bits that were acquired legally using a prepared script. Just like you can acquire a bunch of legal chemicals, start a meth lab and end up with an illegal product.
So instead of a $600 iPhone (that cost a fraction of that to make), I get to pay $1200 over the course of 2 years... what a deal. This is the kind of predatory crap I expect from a loan shark not from... oh wait, nm.
I'm not surprised that Apple is trying to get in on this action as "buy now, pay later" deals are a huge business just like credit cards and once you're hooked... I got a friend of mine who lacks impulse control, maxed loans and maxed credit card debt. But he's a "functional shopoholic" meaning he manages to pay interest every month. And of course complains that he's short on cash, well I'd be too if that much of my paycheck just disappeared on top of my fixed costs. And what it means is that every time he gets a little breathing room he feels he's been frugal for so long the temptation to splurge is so great he ends up right back where he started. It's a negative spiral.
Personally I'm the other way around, if I have some leftover disposable cash I'll make a down payment on my mortgage - no credit card debt - so that next month, I'll have even more disposable cash. That's the positive spiral, once you have a growing surplus it becomes easier and easier not to spend all of it. I realize that most people can't make the huge investments like house and car without loans. But a phone? If I couldn't buy an iPhone outright, I'd just get some cheap-ass Android phone until I could. Because what happens when you bat outside your economic league is it catches up to you, my friend's economy is just getting worse and worse relative to mine. Which of course doesn't help...
The Apple docs use the word "fused" so I think they're using the same technique as PROM circuits, except they're not directly readable. Essentially every bit is wired to a circuit breaker, you start with all 1s and intentionally trip some to burn in a fixed patterns of zeros and ones the first time you power it up. If they use the on-chip RNG to initialize it it's possible that not even the manufacturing facility knows what value it has encoded, only the chip itself. Looks like a real tin foil hatter designed this system and did it well.