Why is it so hard to believe that us humans are responsible for global warming?
It's not. Therein lies the rub. Even if it the evidence is flimsy its not hard to believe. We can look at how much we waste, how much power we personally consume, and how much we have changed the world from how it was and think, "how could I not be responsible for destroying the Earth?" When the basic thought is so simple, but the true understanding is so complex, I think that we tend towards acceptance without burdening our limited understanding with actual proof.
There are so many, many studies on it. Are they right? Could be so, but I've yet to see any direct proof, nor working (practically testable) models that demonstrate the principal. Without that, I always have my doubts - especially in the face of so much extrapolation.
Of course, the converse is also true. I've yet to see any working models that demonstrate that we're not causing global warming. However, I'm holding the default view of "I don't know, and until I do I won't use the idea in any decision I make," which in this case is generally a ruling in favor of the idea that we're not responsible.
It should be noted that I might be totally wrong here. I don't have an opinion on the veracity of any theory of cosmic origins or of evolution (or creationism), or even on the current "theory of everything" models for precisely the same reason - lack of a tested model and an abundance of extrapolation. I've noticed a lot of./'ers seem to be so sure of their opinions on these subjects as to consider the opposing side ignorant, and deride them.
I'm open to suggestions, of course. Why should I lower my standard of what constitutes reasonable proof to weigh evidence in favor of one view over another?
...but since phase has no unit, it's the same. P is not the same as S, but VA has the same unit as Watt. Electrical engineering is not allowed to hold to different stoikiometric conventions than the rest of math does.
Putting another unitless entry to an equation does not a new unit of measure make.
For anyone else with a basic knowledge of electricity who was confused, Power=Voltage*Current in DC.
Converting that to units, Watts=Volts*Amps
So a watt is a volt-amp. So the units are the same.
What's the difference in the rating between P and S?
Apparent power is V*I, where both are measured the usual way - root mean square.
In AC, Actual power output is less because the current lags behind the voltage a bit. So at any given point, the power output is actually P=S*cos(phase), where the phase is the difference between the voltage and the current waves.
VA is important because the part of the power that isn't absorbed by a device is still actually going through your system, so it could damage something.
I think that content distribution channels would be a better place for this. Tucows, for instance, could include a "spyware" rating on the stuff they distribute. That would be a lot more impartial and likely to work than getting a certification that you pay for and then distributing it yourself.
Ultimately, my Litmus test for this will be whether or not Realplayer is considered spyware. If its not, then Yahoo has sold out, and I won't trust them for anything other software.
These are highly specialized things. The reason there's not a lot of free software in this area is that there's just not a lot of demand for it at all, in either the Windows world, or the free one.
I don't really see a problem, though. It seems reasonable to make an exception with open formats for those who need aid. We let seeing-eye dogs in where pets aren't allowed.
And as far as the public face goes - dissemination of info to the public, that is - that should really be in 508 compliant HTML, shouldn't it? Which means no Word, PDF, openoffice, etc. anyway.
Yeah, but they're still a lot of work for developers. You have to draw stuff.
Pure text adventures are a lot closer to actually writing stuff. You can make nice long ones that say what you want to say without the trouble of graphics.
You can even do it all completely alone.
Its why they can still hold an interactive fiction competition every year and have enough entries to make "top ten" a meaningful ranking.
This is all assuming you're talking about some kind of actual complexity in the interface. Obviously "find the spot on the screen that you can click on to make something happen" isn't a big deal, but making something like Myth is.
Man. Didn't even read your own link. They're illegal in California, land of the freak, home of the bravado. What California decides to do is absolutely no indication of what's happening in the rest of the country.
Fortunately, this time it looks like other states have followed California's example, but the number of states with anti-SLAPP laws is far short of fifty.
Either an interpreted language which does all the checking real time, which is painfully slow
You don't know what Java does, do you? Modern JVMs use JIT compiling. Think of it like compiling the parts that keep happening. Java is a match for C++ generated code now, and in certain circumstances - such as database business logic - Java usually wins the optimization race, because it can use profiling to figure out how to optimize (unlike something that optimizes at compile-time).
It does it all inside a sandbox, too. Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of C++. It does startup faster, and C++ code is necessarily smaller than java code. But this "its slower" FUD needs to go away.
If you're not using an MS language, you're going to probably be connecting to it using ODBC, which is slow and often buggy.
Also, my pet peeve about it is lack of a date type (as opposed to a DateTime type). This is part of the standard, so it should be in there. Its a pain to have to constantly cast your datetime into a date every single time you use it.
There is a long held belief in nearly all religions that hold that creation itself is evidence of a creator. The idea is that doing things the way that we see them is itself evidence of intelligence.
If this is true, then the properties of intelligence itself will give us a mechanism for predicting things, i.e. we can ask the question "how would an intelligent being design an X?" for any given thing in order to get a predictor.
There are predictors, be they ever so hard to use.
Intelligent Design proponents no more believe in their so-called theory than any other critically thinking human. Okay, I'm getting a bit sick of this. "So-called theory" is charged language (flamebait); it's a theory. When we're not in the realm of pure math (and we're not), a theory is a conjecture used to explain a phenomenon. Testability is not a necessary condition for it to be a theory. AFAIK intelligent design isn't testable, but it does explain a phenomenon.
ID is simply fundamentalist's latest attempt into having evolution taught in highschool science classes. They have been knocked back time and time again on this issue,
You make ID sound like a new thing recently proposed by fundamentalist politicians. This is not the case; the idea has been around for as long as I can remember (admittedly, that's only about two decades, but still...), and has long been held as a possibility by Christian scientists (not to be confused with Christian Scientists who go around suing everybody).
The fact that politicians are now making use of it is a new thing that has brought it to public attention. The fact that the theory has been around as long as it has leads me to believe that there are lots of people who believe it to be true. Otherwise it would have died out entirely. Is it possible that you are not fully versed on why they believe this? I'm willing to concede that point myself.
and now are trying to beat science at its own game
You're basically implying that Christian leaders have basically been ignoring science in the past, and are only just now seeing its usefulness. This is certainly not the case. Until recently, the majority of the scientists in the world were monks; science has always had a very high position in Christian theology.
It should be this: "netcat (nc) is the most bettererest than telnet at diagnostimicating"
No, that's not nearly the most important thing.
on
Open-Source Insurance
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· Score: 1
The real question is what other things you can package with it, and if they give you a discount for buying a package. Obviously GPL insurance isn't enough.
For instance, do they sell giant robot attack insurance as well? I feel its important to be protected from the ever present threat of robots. And this is only one of the many kinds of insurance that I'll need from them.
I'm certianly also going to need spontaneous existence failure insurance for all my stuff, werewolf treatment insurance for if I get bit, and bunny attack insurance.
If they can't provide all this insurance to go along with my GPL compliance insurance, I don't think I can take them seriously.
I live in Orlando, Florida. The local newspaper is called the Orlando Sentinel, a.k.a. the Slantinel. Their agenda-pushing sometimes makes our mud-slinging presidential candidates seem mild. In an internet full of freedom of choice, the Sentinel will most likely lose. People read it just because it's really the only local paper we've got.
When everyone gets all their written news online, it'll die because it's so bad. I doubt it will be the only paper like this, and I doubt it'll die willingly and quietly for that matter. I expect it'll be fairly ugly. Lots of "the internet can rape your children, steal your soul, and cause you to gain 50 pounds" type stories.
The moment Windows fixes its filesystem API so that you don't have to be a master of Windows kernel internals - only of your filesystem - is the moment that this will be easy.
And Exchange will die horribly like it should have five years ago.
of course multi-threading for stuff like audio playback is a no-brainer
Its also not something that's generally handled by the processor. There's a separate processor for that. On PCs they call them sound cards.
Even my PDA has one. You send it the location of the audio stream in fairly large chunks and it takes care of the rest by interacting with the bus and memory controller. Making a thread for just that is a braindead decision. The only reason you'd want to do that is if you keep all your audio compressed and decompress it constantly.
Nowhere does it even imply your explanation, the general one seems to be that somehow a subspace field pushes the ship faster than light.
Pardon? I think not. While the math wasn't there, this is consistent with everything I've heard, read, or seen about Star Trek. I'm fairly certain that this is what the writers had in mind. Its not that hard to come up with once you know that gravity bends space.
I think you're confused: data is transmitted through subspace. They can use it the way we transmit radio signals now. Matter is carried along using a warp field. Its not as easy, and not the same thing. Or have you read something to the contrary that I'm not familiar with?
The general idea behind how this works predates the concept of subspace, which IIRC wasn't invented until TNG. Warp=>warp space
From that article, btw: The on-board spaceship clock runs at the same speed as the clock of an external observer, and that observer will detect no increase in the mass of the moving ship, even when it travels at FTL speeds.
Despite all the inconsistencies, the bad physics, and the details added after the fact, there are a lot of bits from Star Trek that actually are very well thought out, and in many cases more complicated than things that have been thought up on other shows.
This is not a good comparison. Star Trek has an explaination for most of their phenomena in a way that fits in with current theory, and this is no exception. Its just that they'd never try to explain modern space-time theory in a 1-hour long episode that also has to have a plot.
But why don't we do it here? Warp drives are called that because they warp space by changing the mass of the ship. Generally speaking, the idea is that the distance between two points in space decreases as mass increases.
Its something like this: 1) Ship gets really massive - extending a gravity field (which we can do because in the Star Trek future we can use gravitons the way we use protons today) in the direction of travel, thus bending space there. Spatial locations get closer together 2) Ship moves 3) Ship gets less massive - removing the field. Spatial locations get further apart.
The result is faster than light travel (i.e. you get to a new spot faster than light does), but your velocity never actually exceeds light speed. The only time they ever actually did faster than light travel was that funky thing that Kirk did to go back in time, but I believe they came up with a reason for it. I believe they were fitting it into the theory based upon the fact that it resulted in time travel.
What's the point of this? Don't mess with the Trek. Star Trek has so many hardcore Sci-Fi fans that somebody has come up with a way to fit it into our current knowledge of the universe without calling it magic.
Yeah...and the pope's only barely Catholic. Microsoft's only a little power hungry.
They've got a consistent mechanism powering the ships (spinning matter/energy converter things). They've got a complete future history that includes the mixing of all peoples (so that everyone now speaks the two widest used languages- Chinese and English), colonization of another galaxy, and a civil war. Then they deal with the results of this - including the law of supply and demand, and variations in society.
Heck, they even went so far as to explain (**MINOR SPOILER WARNING***) which part of the brain the people who experimented with River used to do it, and why.
If this isn't Sci-Fi, then what is? You don't have to explain things using the particle-of-the-week (like Star Trek: TNG) just for it to be Sci-Fi.
In all seriousness, I think you've hit upon the root of the problem. Its sort of hard to classify Sci-Fi because it means different things to different people.
I would personally consider Firefly/Serenity to be pure, uncut, and mainstream Sci-Fi. I'd go so far as to say that you could use it as an paragon example when someone asks "What is Sci-Fi?"
does linux support such specialized chips as used in mobile phones
Yes and no. In general, GCC supports nearly every chipset used by mobile phones. Also in general, linux supports nearly everything that GCC does. Getting Linux to work on whatever you've got, therefore, only requires tweaking the kernel.
A lot of the I/O type chips used in mobile phones are used elsewhere in drivers that you get from Linux. So you may not have to do anything as far as module development goes.
The big thing that you'd have to do is the bootloader and a lot of times the hardware interfaces between chips. These may also require you to tweak Linux - enough so that reversing things require some work on the part of your competitors.
thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.
I don't think manufacturers would mind that at all. Would you mind if a competing manufacturer bought your phone at retail only to change the OS and sell it at what they paid you+some profit?
You don't think that phone manufacturers don't know how their competition's phones work, do you? They all use commodity parts. The chips that they're using are well documented, and for DSPs, an assembly call can be almost as involved as a function call; reversing is fairly trivial (and serves almost no purpose since the chips are well documented).
What you really want to have an edge over the competition is the ability to swap out parts of your code base really fast to fit with whatever the latest chip to come along is so that you can beat your competitors to the market with the new models. With linux's support of many devices it is an ideal choice for this.
Of course, if you do foolishly decide to make some ASICs, you can write your own kernel module and install it alongside. Linux is quite compatible with that.
This confirms my long held suspicion that those pseudo-scientific explainations of the Oz effect (that hurricanes, cyclones, and other cyclonic weather phenomena can tear holes in our space-time continuum and send us to parallel earths or back in time) are all totally correct.
Its time to harness hurricanes to establish trade relations with dinosaurs, talking animals, and anything else we can get at through the dimensional rifts torn into existance.
I, for one welcome the chance to become a hurricane overlord.
Then again, maybe I don't get enough visitors for any kind of accuracy. I keep getting somebody from "cups.cs.cmu.edu," and I've got no idea who that is. They're visiting enough to be statistically significant, though.
All of the things you mention are part of creating a character.
If you think that making notes on a sheet is creating a character, then you're probably not a very good RPGer. Doing something and creating are one thing, just as writing a program and writing a program that does something are one.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it so hard to believe that us humans are responsible for global warming?
./'ers seem to be so sure of their opinions on these subjects as to consider the opposing side ignorant, and deride them.
It's not. Therein lies the rub. Even if it the evidence is flimsy its not hard to believe. We can look at how much we waste, how much power we personally consume, and how much we have changed the world from how it was and think, "how could I not be responsible for destroying the Earth?" When the basic thought is so simple, but the true understanding is so complex, I think that we tend towards acceptance without burdening our limited understanding with actual proof.
There are so many, many studies on it. Are they right? Could be so, but I've yet to see any direct proof, nor working (practically testable) models that demonstrate the principal. Without that, I always have my doubts - especially in the face of so much extrapolation.
Of course, the converse is also true. I've yet to see any working models that demonstrate that we're not causing global warming. However, I'm holding the default view of "I don't know, and until I do I won't use the idea in any decision I make," which in this case is generally a ruling in favor of the idea that we're not responsible.
It should be noted that I might be totally wrong here. I don't have an opinion on the veracity of any theory of cosmic origins or of evolution (or creationism), or even on the current "theory of everything" models for precisely the same reason - lack of a tested model and an abundance of extrapolation. I've noticed a lot of
I'm open to suggestions, of course. Why should I lower my standard of what constitutes reasonable proof to weigh evidence in favor of one view over another?
...but since phase has no unit, it's the same. P is not the same as S, but VA has the same unit as Watt. Electrical engineering is not allowed to hold to different stoikiometric conventions than the rest of math does.
Putting another unitless entry to an equation does not a new unit of measure make.
For anyone else with a basic knowledge of electricity who was confused,
Power=Voltage*Current in DC.
Converting that to units, Watts=Volts*Amps
So a watt is a volt-amp. So the units are the same.
What's the difference in the rating between P and S?
Apparent power is V*I, where both are measured the usual way - root mean square.
In AC, Actual power output is less because the current lags behind the voltage a bit. So at any given point, the power output is actually
P=S*cos(phase), where the phase is the difference between the voltage and the current waves.
VA is important because the part of the power that isn't absorbed by a device is still actually going through your system, so it could damage something.
Here's a nice overview of the three kinds of power.
I think that content distribution channels would be a better place for this. Tucows, for instance, could include a "spyware" rating on the stuff they distribute. That would be a lot more impartial and likely to work than getting a certification that you pay for and then distributing it yourself.
Ultimately, my Litmus test for this will be whether or not Realplayer is considered spyware. If its not, then Yahoo has sold out, and I won't trust them for anything other software.
These are highly specialized things. The reason there's not a lot of free software in this area is that there's just not a lot of demand for it at all, in either the Windows world, or the free one.
I don't really see a problem, though. It seems reasonable to make an exception with open formats for those who need aid. We let seeing-eye dogs in where pets aren't allowed.
And as far as the public face goes - dissemination of info to the public, that is - that should really be in 508 compliant HTML, shouldn't it? Which means no Word, PDF, openoffice, etc. anyway.
Yeah, but they're still a lot of work for developers. You have to draw stuff.
Pure text adventures are a lot closer to actually writing stuff. You can make nice long ones that say what you want to say without the trouble of graphics.
You can even do it all completely alone.
Its why they can still hold an interactive fiction competition every year and have enough entries to make "top ten" a meaningful ranking.
This is all assuming you're talking about some kind of actual complexity in the interface. Obviously "find the spot on the screen that you can click on to make something happen" isn't a big deal, but making something like Myth is.
Man. Didn't even read your own link. They're illegal in California, land of the freak, home of the bravado. What California decides to do is absolutely no indication of what's happening in the rest of the country.
Fortunately, this time it looks like other states have followed California's example, but the number of states with anti-SLAPP laws is far short of fifty.
Either an interpreted language which does all the checking real time, which is painfully slow
You don't know what Java does, do you? Modern JVMs use JIT compiling. Think of it like compiling the parts that keep happening. Java is a match for C++ generated code now, and in certain circumstances - such as database business logic - Java usually wins the optimization race, because it can use profiling to figure out how to optimize (unlike something that optimizes at compile-time).
It does it all inside a sandbox, too. Don't get me wrong: I'm a big fan of C++. It does startup faster, and C++ code is necessarily smaller than java code. But this "its slower" FUD needs to go away.
I never had any problems with SQL server
Yeah? Lucky you! I certainly have.
If you're not using an MS language, you're going to probably be connecting to it using ODBC, which is slow and often buggy.
Also, my pet peeve about it is lack of a date type (as opposed to a DateTime type). This is part of the standard, so it should be in there. Its a pain to have to constantly cast your datetime into a date every single time you use it.
it has no predictive value
There is a long held belief in nearly all religions that hold that creation itself is evidence of a creator. The idea is that doing things the way that we see them is itself evidence of intelligence.
If this is true, then the properties of intelligence itself will give us a mechanism for predicting things, i.e. we can ask the question "how would an intelligent being design an X?" for any given thing in order to get a predictor.
There are predictors, be they ever so hard to use.
Intelligent Design proponents no more believe in their so-called theory than any other critically thinking human.
Okay, I'm getting a bit sick of this. "So-called theory" is charged language (flamebait); it's a theory. When we're not in the realm of pure math (and we're not), a theory is a conjecture used to explain a phenomenon. Testability is not a necessary condition for it to be a theory. AFAIK intelligent design isn't testable, but it does explain a phenomenon.
ID is simply fundamentalist's latest attempt into having evolution taught in highschool science classes. They have been knocked back time and time again on this issue,
You make ID sound like a new thing recently proposed by fundamentalist politicians. This is not the case; the idea has been around for as long as I can remember (admittedly, that's only about two decades, but still...), and has long been held as a possibility by Christian scientists (not to be confused with Christian Scientists who go around suing everybody).
The fact that politicians are now making use of it is a new thing that has brought it to public attention. The fact that the theory has been around as long as it has leads me to believe that there are lots of people who believe it to be true. Otherwise it would have died out entirely. Is it possible that you are not fully versed on why they believe this? I'm willing to concede that point myself.
and now are trying to beat science at its own game
You're basically implying that Christian leaders have basically been ignoring science in the past, and are only just now seeing its usefulness. This is certainly not the case. Until recently, the majority of the scientists in the world were monks; science has always had a very high position in Christian theology.
No - the superlative is unclear as is the reason.
It should be this:
"netcat (nc) is the most bettererest than telnet at diagnostimicating"
The real question is what other things you can package with it, and if they give you a discount for buying a package. Obviously GPL insurance isn't enough.
For instance, do they sell giant robot attack insurance as well? I feel its important to be protected from the ever present threat of robots. And this is only one of the many kinds of insurance that I'll need from them.
I'm certianly also going to need spontaneous existence failure insurance for all my stuff, werewolf treatment insurance for if I get bit, and bunny attack insurance.
If they can't provide all this insurance to go along with my GPL compliance insurance, I don't think I can take them seriously.
I see a transition, not a death.
I live in Orlando, Florida. The local newspaper is called the Orlando Sentinel, a.k.a. the Slantinel. Their agenda-pushing sometimes makes our mud-slinging presidential candidates seem mild. In an internet full of freedom of choice, the Sentinel will most likely lose. People read it just because it's really the only local paper we've got.
When everyone gets all their written news online, it'll die because it's so bad. I doubt it will be the only paper like this, and I doubt it'll die willingly and quietly for that matter. I expect it'll be fairly ugly. Lots of "the internet can rape your children, steal your soul, and cause you to gain 50 pounds" type stories.
FTP. Works great. Integrates with the OS.
Unfortunately it isn't secure...
The moment Windows fixes its filesystem API so that you don't have to be a master of Windows kernel internals - only of your filesystem - is the moment that this will be easy.
And Exchange will die horribly like it should have five years ago.
of course multi-threading for stuff like audio playback is a no-brainer
Its also not something that's generally handled by the processor. There's a separate processor for that. On PCs they call them sound cards.
Even my PDA has one. You send it the location of the audio stream in fairly large chunks and it takes care of the rest by interacting with the bus and memory controller. Making a thread for just that is a braindead decision. The only reason you'd want to do that is if you keep all your audio compressed and decompress it constantly.
What does Microsoft call the people who pass through its program? Microsoft Certified Engineers...
I don't think that "Engineers" is nearly good enough.
How about "Nuclear Waste Disposal and Storage Engineers"?
Nowhere does it even imply your explanation, the general one seems to be that somehow a subspace field pushes the ship faster than light.
Pardon? I think not. While the math wasn't there, this is consistent with everything I've heard, read, or seen about Star Trek. I'm fairly certain that this is what the writers had in mind. Its not that hard to come up with once you know that gravity bends space.
I think you're confused: data is transmitted through subspace. They can use it the way we transmit radio signals now. Matter is carried along using a warp field. Its not as easy, and not the same thing. Or have you read something to the contrary that I'm not familiar with?
The general idea behind how this works predates the concept of subspace, which IIRC wasn't invented until TNG. Warp=>warp space
From that article, btw:
The on-board spaceship clock runs at the same speed as the clock of an external observer, and that observer will detect no increase in the mass of the moving ship, even when it travels at FTL speeds.
Despite all the inconsistencies, the bad physics, and the details added after the fact, there are a lot of bits from Star Trek that actually are very well thought out, and in many cases more complicated than things that have been thought up on other shows.
decided he didn't need to throw out Einstein
This is not a good comparison. Star Trek has an explaination for most of their phenomena in a way that fits in with current theory, and this is no exception. Its just that they'd never try to explain modern space-time theory in a 1-hour long episode that also has to have a plot.
But why don't we do it here? Warp drives are called that because they warp space by changing the mass of the ship. Generally speaking, the idea is that the distance between two points in space decreases as mass increases.
Its something like this:
1) Ship gets really massive - extending a gravity field (which we can do because in the Star Trek future we can use gravitons the way we use protons today) in the direction of travel, thus bending space there. Spatial locations get closer together
2) Ship moves
3) Ship gets less massive - removing the field. Spatial locations get further apart.
The result is faster than light travel (i.e. you get to a new spot faster than light does), but your velocity never actually exceeds light speed. The only time they ever actually did faster than light travel was that funky thing that Kirk did to go back in time, but I believe they came up with a reason for it. I believe they were fitting it into the theory based upon the fact that it resulted in time travel.
What's the point of this? Don't mess with the Trek. Star Trek has so many hardcore Sci-Fi fans that somebody has come up with a way to fit it into our current knowledge of the universe without calling it magic.
Firefly is only barely science fiction
Yeah...and the pope's only barely Catholic. Microsoft's only a little power hungry.
They've got a consistent mechanism powering the ships (spinning matter/energy converter things). They've got a complete future history that includes the mixing of all peoples (so that everyone now speaks the two widest used languages- Chinese and English), colonization of another galaxy, and a civil war. Then they deal with the results of this - including the law of supply and demand, and variations in society.
Heck, they even went so far as to explain (**MINOR SPOILER WARNING***) which part of the brain the people who experimented with River used to do it, and why.
If this isn't Sci-Fi, then what is? You don't have to explain things using the particle-of-the-week (like Star Trek: TNG) just for it to be Sci-Fi.
In all seriousness, I think you've hit upon the root of the problem. Its sort of hard to classify Sci-Fi because it means different things to different people.
I would personally consider Firefly/Serenity to be pure, uncut, and mainstream Sci-Fi. I'd go so far as to say that you could use it as an paragon example when someone asks "What is Sci-Fi?"
But I guess that's just me.
does linux support such specialized chips as used in mobile phones
Yes and no. In general, GCC supports nearly every chipset used by mobile phones. Also in general, linux supports nearly everything that GCC does. Getting Linux to work on whatever you've got, therefore, only requires tweaking the kernel.
A lot of the I/O type chips used in mobile phones are used elsewhere in drivers that you get from Linux. So you may not have to do anything as far as module development goes.
The big thing that you'd have to do is the bootloader and a lot of times the hardware interfaces between chips. These may also require you to tweak Linux - enough so that reversing things require some work on the part of your competitors.
thus making it available to the competition and allowing people to easily hack the phone.
I don't think manufacturers would mind that at all. Would you mind if a competing manufacturer bought your phone at retail only to change the OS and sell it at what they paid you+some profit?
You don't think that phone manufacturers don't know how their competition's phones work, do you? They all use commodity parts. The chips that they're using are well documented, and for DSPs, an assembly call can be almost as involved as a function call; reversing is fairly trivial (and serves almost no purpose since the chips are well documented).
What you really want to have an edge over the competition is the ability to swap out parts of your code base really fast to fit with whatever the latest chip to come along is so that you can beat your competitors to the market with the new models. With linux's support of many devices it is an ideal choice for this.
Of course, if you do foolishly decide to make some ASICs, you can write your own kernel module and install it alongside. Linux is quite compatible with that.
This confirms my long held suspicion that those pseudo-scientific explainations of the Oz effect (that hurricanes, cyclones, and other cyclonic weather phenomena can tear holes in our space-time continuum and send us to parallel earths or back in time) are all totally correct.
Its time to harness hurricanes to establish trade relations with dinosaurs, talking animals, and anything else we can get at through the dimensional rifts torn into existance.
I, for one welcome the chance to become a hurricane overlord.
Ah...doubt it. My small personal site gets most of its visitors from slashdot in times when I link to it.
Take a look at my stats.
Then again, maybe I don't get enough visitors for any kind of accuracy. I keep getting somebody from "cups.cs.cmu.edu," and I've got no idea who that is. They're visiting enough to be statistically significant, though.
All of the things you mention are part of creating a character.
If you think that making notes on a sheet is creating a character, then you're probably not a very good RPGer. Doing something and creating are one thing, just as writing a program and writing a program that does something are one.