This man was born in Thailand, and was treated as Thai citizen. Why on Earth would this idiot expect that also having a US passport would automatically exempt him from Thai laws (no matter how stupid and repressive they are) that other Thai citizens are subjected, when we was on Thai soil?
Consider the case of Iranian Canadian Hossein_Derakhshan who was thrown in jail because he visited Israel:
General Relativity does not have a speed of light constraint on the expansion of space itself. It is thought that during the inflationary period after the big bang that the universe went though a rapidly expansion phase where space expanded much faster than the speed of light.
Think of ants crawling at a fix speed, called "C" on the surface of a balloon, while someone is blowing up (inflating) that balloon so that the rate of increase in the circumference of that balloon is much faster than 2 x "C". During that inflationary period, two nearby ants would not be able to crawl to each other.
The latest VLC version 1.1.3 has the GPL version 2 licence. Although the GPLv3 has anti-DRM and anti-Tivo-ization measures, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't the GPLv2 licence allow Apple to distribute the software in the App Store with DRM, as long as the also provide a copy of the source code?
The WiFi-only version of the iPad and the iPod Touch are both missing one key feature present in the 3G iPad and iPhone, that I personally consider to be very important. And that is GPS! And that is a shame, since GPS maps look especially nice in the iPad's XGA and the retina display on the latest iPhone and iPod Touches.
But these are awkward to use, and in my experience, a lot of GPS software does not work with these hacks, as they do with Apple's built-in GPS receivers.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt, more than China needs the US to buy its goods, there isn't much the US can do.
Unless the US can get a collation of country blocks (like NAFTA, EU, OPEC, etc.), perhaps with a ruling by the WTO, to joint together in trade sanctions against China. Countries like Canada, Australia, and others that provide a lot of mineral and energy resources to China would have a lot more influence.
Remember that China does not produce sufficient mineral and energy resources, not to mention food, for its economy and to feed its population.
As a Canadian, I hope that our government demands guarantees that China not to restrict rare-earth shipments to Canada, or Canada will block all resource and food shipments to China.
Although it is good to make sure that any computer does not have any unnecessary personal/private data, and also good to have searching software that might help locate some or most of it. It is unrealistic to except to be able to insure that such data will be kept off all computers, especially when there might be some situations where there is a legitimate need to have access to such data offline.
The best solution is to use whole disk encryption with the free opensource TrueCrypt software.
Although it is a shame that TrueCrypt does not support whole disk encryption on the Mac yet. At least there are some less trust-worthy closed options like PGP Whole Disk Encryption, which would be better than nothing.
Seriously, why not take a *BSD or Linux OS release and do a full source code review on it? It will take a lot less effort than creating anything from scratch, plus they can submit bug reports and code fixes back to the corresponding opensource projects. (Everybody wins!!!) Any mature OS would not be plagued by bugs that commonly occur in large new code bases. After reviewing and approving the OS, they can simply track changes of future releases in order to maintain trust.
I am not much of a WIndows user, but for all of my friends, family, and colleagues that do run Windows, I install Sandboxie on their machines. SandBoxie allows their E-mail clients and Web Browsers to run within Virtual Machines that prevents direct disk access:
In addition, I also recommend installing FireFox with NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and Certificate Patrol addons on all platforms (Windows, MacOSX, Linux, *BSD, etc.) in order to minimize attack and spoofing vectors, which are typically JavaScript & Flash based.
Using SandBoxie, Firebox, and the above mentioned addons seems to be a just as good, if not a better solution, that the tool mentioned in the article. And they are all available now for free!
At least Liu Xiaobo did more to earn his Nobel Peace Prize then just not being Bush.
The Chinese state may not be happy about him winning now, but hopefully in the future, the Chinese will fondly remember him as their first Nobel price prize winner.
No matter how much the government thinks that they can hide that he won this year, the information is still leaking through the blocks.
They is a large Chinese scientific community that follow the Nobel prizes each year, and most will notice that there will be omissions in the reporting this year.
... unless it gets in the way of making a huge profit on the backs of your underpaid employees, assisting with censorship, handing over political dissidents to tyrannical regimes, or releasing a mobile operating system that is open only to the carriers & manufacturers but not the users (who can't install binary apps outside of a java sandbox)!
Agreed, these cards would be invaluable if they had a one-time card number generator. But in practice, that is a lot harder to do then you would think.
Credit cards have 15-16 digits, but the top 6 reserved are for the BIN that identifies the issuer and corresponding VAP/MIP/... processing station in the credit card network that authorizations are sent to. The last digit is reserved for the mod10 checksum. So that means that you have only 7-8 digits available per BIN. Note that each BIN typically is used for 10's of thousands of individual cards.
When you use a one-time card number online, it is generated/provided by a centralize server and database in order to efficiently maximize that 7-8 digit pool for one-time use that is SHARED, coordinated, and distributed among the 10's of thousand of card holders.
But since these new computerized cards do not have any networking capabilities, and since of the 10's of thousand of card holders need to be identified individually, you would only have a 2-3 digital pool for the one-time use, which is not enough for security.
The only option for these new computerized cards would be to either add network capabilities, like a bluetooth connection to a mobile phone, or add a one-time passcode to another field in the magstripe, perhaps appended to the card holders name.
Even though a large percent of apps in the iTunes app store are location aware and require GPS to work properly, it is very disappointing that the new iPod Touch (and the current WiFi only iPad) does not have a GPS receiver yet. It is very useful to have turn-by-turn GPS navigation, current location weather forecasts, gas prices, and other services all running on an iPod Touch and WiFi iPad as well as they run on the iPhone and iPad 3G.
Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.
Everyone has to use English ASCII characters for top level domains (*.com, *.jp, *.cn,...) and protocols (http, https, ftp,...), so everyone online in every country has to continue to use ASCII whether they want to or not, even after these International domain names are in common use.
BTW, I never said that everything had to be in English ASCII, just something like a domain name or e-mail address that is used to identify a website or person should be.
The postal system in most countries allow one to mail a letter using romainized characters in addition to local language characters. For example, in Japan I can send a letter from one city to another (locally) using an address like "Akihabara 1-2-3-567, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 111-1111", in addition to Japanese.
However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web, and imposes regional barriers. Your mail client and mail server software might not be too happy with you trying to send an e-mail to "joe@.jp" or "joe@.jp-r14k153opxc" in punycode. (Crap, it looks like slashdot does not accept international characters in comment submission, so you can't read this: "日本人".)
Remember that very few people have rendering and fonts for every written language on the planet, so most people will be cut off from many websites.) With the current IPv4 shortage, one can no longer reliable just use an IP address to access a specific website, e-mail address, etc., since a single IP address can host many domain names.
Personally I think that the best compromise solution would be to only allow non-ascii characters for domain names in different languages if there are submitted with a paired up romainization version that can be equally accepted for the same domain. So using my previous example, one could equally specify ".jp" in Japanese Kanji, ".jp-yn9d427hcvb" in punycode, or "nihonjin.jp" in Romanji. That way you can still cater to a local/regional audience, and still allow everyone else in the planet to reach you.
For those that argue that it does not matter if a domain name is only specified in a foreign language, if all of the hosted content is in the same foreign language forget about all of current International collaboration in Mathematical, Scientific, Engineering, Programming, and other fields. (You can write an entire math proof or software program using only symbols without a single human word.)
Even for individual one-on-one e-mail communications between people in different countries that are able to communicate in a common language this would still be a problem, since a large percentage of e-mail accounts are hosted with a user's local ISP, that in future may leave them stuck with a non-ASCII e-mail address that would cut them off from the rest of the world.
Unfortunately time and again, women politicians have proven themselves to be just as incompetent and corrupt (especially with their favouritism towards big business and their contributions) as male politicians.
As a women, I have yet to notice any women president or prime-minister leading a western country that has put any additional emphasis over their male counterparts in the same political party on women's only issues: gender discrimination, reproductive rights, healthcare inequalities, etc. So seeing a women as head of state no longer inspires me.
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
If I was in charge of Nintendo, I would put a big chunk of flash in the 3DS, and include a browser, e-mail client, and media player. And also make a smart phone version as well.
Do they really think that people want to carry a separate portable gaming device, media player, and pda or smart phone in this day and age? Especially when you consider that you can buy a low end Zune or iPod Touch 8GB in the same price range as a Nintendo DSi.
The last time, despite having it in their hands, Gizmodo was not able to get the specific resolution of the iPhone 4G prototype display. As an iPhone developer, it would be nice to have a heads up about the new resolution, so we can modify our current and future apps to support it.
My wish would be to have it match the iPad's XGA (1024x768) resolution, so that it can run iPad apps, but I doubt it in the iPhone's form factor. The 960x640 resolution suggested would also be unlikely, since there aren't really any off-the-shelf LCD's with that native resolution. My bet would be something like 800x480, like the HTC HD2 phone, since there are already existing LCD's that support it.
Both Apple and news media organizations (press/newspapers, radio, television, etc.) were interested in the possibilities of the iPad (and other similar devices) as a news consumption device. This is especially true for newspapers that have been suffering due to falling revenue, especially from classifieds because of Craig's List and eBay, and a public less interested in reading news on dead trees.
But Apple's censorship of a Pulitzer winning cartoonist send chills down the spines of all of the news media organizations, since they suddenly realize how vulnerable their content is to the arbitrary and inconsistent censorship whims of companies like Apple, Amazon, Sony, etc. which have total control over the applications and media on their devices.
Imagine if Sony blocked all news publications on its Sony's Reader Store which have published accident and recall information about Toyotas in order not to harm or offend a fellow Japanese companies. Imagine if this was 60 years ago and each electronics company only sold TV's which would only receive programming from their affiliated stations.
Apple hoped that by allowing Mark Fiorre's app, they could do damage control, but I think that it is too late, since this incident really drove home how bad the censorship situation is with these locked down platforms.
At the end of the day, consumers pressure is not enough to be able to force companies to open up their platforms. In the growing mobile phone, media players, e-reader, and game console markets, not one of the major platforms is fully open for the consumer and are full of DRM that restricts options and allow censorship. (Yes that includes Google Android devices which are being locked down by many carriers!)
Governments need to step in and force all hardware and operating system manufactories and distributers to have an application and data distribution and execution model that is fully open to all. If you buy the device, it should be yours to do with as you see fit, as long as it does not interfere with others.
Android is only open for carriers, not users.
Basically this idiot is saying that he prefers that end-users and developers be walled within a slow Java VM (Virtual Machine) ghetto on the Android platform, verses having end-user and developers walled within a ghetto of limited, but fast natively compiled and executed, selection of iTunes Apps that Apple approves at their sole discretion. Keep in mind that many of Android's prebundled apps/utilities are compiled into machine code, since the Java VM is nothing more than 3rd party app ghetto . I will only believe that the Android VM Java is decent and not an app ghetto, when all of the Android core applications, including the phone app, are solely written in it.
Gee, I miss those days when computer operating systems use to have an open execution model that allowed anyone to write, distribute, and install applications as compiled machine code without any restrictions.
Unfortunately, wireless carriers and regulators want to put restrictions on the radio and other mobile smart phone functionality. The common solution on single processor devices is to run third party applications in a sandbox, like Android's Java VM, and require application signing.
Virtualization can be a provide a less restrictive common environment sandbox, that is not tied to a specific programming language, that can meet the desires of the carrier on cheaper (single processor) hardware, and still protect a software radio, DRM, and other functions from third party apps running in a VM.
However, it would not surprise me if practice future cellphones have an evolved hypervisor that provides different levels of VM based on functionality, with the lower VM levels restricted to carrier sign apps that can do almost anything; middle VM levels for manufacture signed apps that can access networking, gps, SMS, storage, camera, video/audio playback, etc.; and top crippled VM levels for unsigned apps that can't do much.
Unfortunately, history has taught us that the more control designers can put on a system, the more likely that control will be used to restrict the public at the expense of corporate and government interests.
I would gladly pay for any app that would let me run something similar to the Pokemon DS/DSi games on the iPhone. I had high hopes for the DS emulator on the iPhone, but it did not allow one to run any real DS game roms on it, and Apple immediately yanked it off the app store soon after it was released.
Maybe, the authors of the DS emulator would eventually consider putting a non-crippled version of their DS emulator onto the Cydia store. Or better yet, maybe Nintendo might release their games to the iPhone/iTouch platform, since they are no longer interested in making any non-trival (DS, DS Lite, DSi,...) changes to their existing outdated handheld gaming platform in more than 5 years since the original DS was launched in Nov 2004.
Definitely worth a few bucks to avoid having to carry separate Nintendo game and Apple phone devices for my Pokemon fix.
Finally! It's about time that international police and anti-crime resources put the same effort in stopping online cross border crime that they do for offline!
Kudos to Microsoft for helping. Heck, I would accept help from Satan himself, if it reduce the spam and online crime.
Slashdot Mirror
This man was born in Thailand, and was treated as Thai citizen. Why on Earth would this idiot expect that also having a US passport would automatically exempt him from Thai laws (no matter how stupid and repressive they are) that other Thai citizens are subjected, when we was on Thai soil?
Consider the case of Iranian Canadian Hossein_Derakhshan who was thrown in jail because he visited Israel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hossein_Derakhshan
At least in both cases, these individuals had at least some minor assistance from their foreign embassies, which locals do not get.
Pressure needs to be applied globally to force *ALL* countries to support human rights, privacy, freedom of speech + movement, etc.!
General Relativity does not have a speed of light constraint on the expansion of space itself. It is thought that during the inflationary period after the big bang that the universe went though a rapidly expansion phase where space expanded much faster than the speed of light.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)
Think of ants crawling at a fix speed, called "C" on the surface of a balloon, while someone is blowing up (inflating) that balloon so that the rate of increase in the circumference of that balloon is much faster than 2 x "C". During that inflationary period, two nearby ants would not be able to crawl to each other.
The latest VLC version 1.1.3 has the GPL version 2 licence. Although the GPLv3 has anti-DRM and anti-Tivo-ization measures, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't the GPLv2 licence allow Apple to distribute the software in the App Store with DRM, as long as the also provide a copy of the source code?
There are external GPS hacks on iOS devices like:
But these are awkward to use, and in my experience, a lot of GPS software does not work with these hacks, as they do with Apple's built-in GPS receivers.
Considering that the US needs China to buy its public debt, more than China needs the US to buy its goods, there isn't much the US can do.
Unless the US can get a collation of country blocks (like NAFTA, EU, OPEC, etc.), perhaps with a ruling by the WTO, to joint together in trade sanctions against China. Countries like Canada, Australia, and others that provide a lot of mineral and energy resources to China would have a lot more influence.
Remember that China does not produce sufficient mineral and energy resources, not to mention food, for its economy and to feed its population.
As a Canadian, I hope that our government demands guarantees that China not to restrict rare-earth shipments to Canada, or Canada will block all resource and food shipments to China.
Although it is good to make sure that any computer does not have any unnecessary personal/private data, and also good to have searching software that might help locate some or most of it. It is unrealistic to except to be able to insure that such data will be kept off all computers, especially when there might be some situations where there is a legitimate need to have access to such data offline.
The best solution is to use whole disk encryption with the free opensource TrueCrypt software.
Although it is a shame that TrueCrypt does not support whole disk encryption on the Mac yet. At least there are some less trust-worthy closed options like PGP Whole Disk Encryption, which would be better than nothing.
I know this is obvious, but come on...
Seriously, why not take a *BSD or Linux OS release and do a full source code review on it? It will take a lot less effort than creating anything from scratch, plus they can submit bug reports and code fixes back to the corresponding opensource projects. (Everybody wins!!!) Any mature OS would not be plagued by bugs that commonly occur in large new code bases. After reviewing and approving the OS, they can simply track changes of future releases in order to maintain trust.
I am not much of a WIndows user, but for all of my friends, family, and colleagues that do run Windows, I install Sandboxie on their machines. SandBoxie allows their E-mail clients and Web Browsers to run within Virtual Machines that prevents direct disk access:
http://www.sandboxie.com/
In addition, I also recommend installing FireFox with NoScript, AdBlock Plus, and Certificate Patrol addons on all platforms (Windows, MacOSX, Linux, *BSD, etc.) in order to minimize attack and spoofing vectors, which are typically JavaScript & Flash based.
Using SandBoxie, Firebox, and the above mentioned addons seems to be a just as good, if not a better solution, that the tool mentioned in the article. And they are all available now for free!
At least Liu Xiaobo did more to earn his Nobel Peace Prize then just not being Bush.
The Chinese state may not be happy about him winning now, but hopefully in the future, the Chinese will fondly remember him as their first Nobel price prize winner.
No matter how much the government thinks that they can hide that he won this year, the information is still leaking through the blocks.
They is a large Chinese scientific community that follow the Nobel prizes each year, and most will notice that there will be omissions in the reporting this year.
Don't be evil ...
... unless it gets in the way of making a huge profit on the backs of your underpaid employees, assisting with censorship, handing over political dissidents to tyrannical regimes, or releasing a mobile operating system that is open only to the carriers & manufacturers but not the users (who can't install binary apps outside of a java sandbox)!
Agreed, these cards would be invaluable if they had a one-time card number generator. But in practice, that is a lot harder to do then you would think.
Credit cards have 15-16 digits, but the top 6 reserved are for the BIN that identifies the issuer and corresponding VAP/MIP/... processing station in the credit card network that authorizations are sent to. The last digit is reserved for the mod10 checksum. So that means that you have only 7-8 digits available per BIN. Note that each BIN typically is used for 10's of thousands of individual cards.
When you use a one-time card number online, it is generated/provided by a centralize server and database in order to efficiently maximize that 7-8 digit pool for one-time use that is SHARED, coordinated, and distributed among the 10's of thousand of card holders.
But since these new computerized cards do not have any networking capabilities, and since of the 10's of thousand of card holders need to be identified individually, you would only have a 2-3 digital pool for the one-time use, which is not enough for security.
The only option for these new computerized cards would be to either add network capabilities, like a bluetooth connection to a mobile phone, or add a one-time passcode to another field in the magstripe, perhaps appended to the card holders name.
Even though a large percent of apps in the iTunes app store are location aware and require GPS to work properly, it is very disappointing that the new iPod Touch (and the current WiFi only iPad) does not have a GPS receiver yet. It is very useful to have turn-by-turn GPS navigation, current location weather forecasts, gas prices, and other services all running on an iPod Touch and WiFi iPad as well as they run on the iPhone and iPad 3G.
Requiring everything to be ASCII breaks with the whole international nature of the web by forcing everyone to use English alphabet characters.
Everyone has to use English ASCII characters for top level domains (*.com, *.jp, *.cn, ...) and protocols (http, https, ftp, ...), so everyone online in every country has to continue to use ASCII whether they want to or not, even after these International domain names are in common use.
BTW, I never said that everything had to be in English ASCII, just something like a domain name or e-mail address that is used to identify a website or person should be.
The postal system in most countries allow one to mail a letter using romainized characters in addition to local language characters. For example, in Japan I can send a letter from one city to another (locally) using an address like "Akihabara 1-2-3-567, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 111-1111", in addition to Japanese.
Looks like the domain names will be encoded using punycode instead of the cleaner UTF8 encoding:
.jp" in Romanji. That way you can still cater to a local/regional audience, and still allow everyone else in the planet to reach you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
However, my biggest concern is that the use of non-ascii characters in domain names breaks the whole International nature of the web, and imposes regional barriers. Your mail client and mail server software might not be too happy with you trying to send an e-mail to "joe@.jp" or "joe@.jp-r14k153opxc" in punycode. (Crap, it looks like slashdot does not accept international characters in comment submission, so you can't read this: "日本人".)
Remember that very few people have rendering and fonts for every written language on the planet, so most people will be cut off from many websites.) With the current IPv4 shortage, one can no longer reliable just use an IP address to access a specific website, e-mail address, etc., since a single IP address can host many domain names.
Personally I think that the best compromise solution would be to only allow non-ascii characters for domain names in different languages if there are submitted with a paired up romainization version that can be equally accepted for the same domain. So using my previous example, one could equally specify ".jp" in Japanese Kanji, ".jp-yn9d427hcvb" in punycode, or "nihonjin
For those that argue that it does not matter if a domain name is only specified in a foreign language, if all of the hosted content is in the same foreign language forget about all of current International collaboration in Mathematical, Scientific, Engineering, Programming, and other fields. (You can write an entire math proof or software program using only symbols without a single human word.)
Even for individual one-on-one e-mail communications between people in different countries that are able to communicate in a common language this would still be a problem, since a large percentage of e-mail accounts are hosted with a user's local ISP, that in future may leave them stuck with a non-ASCII e-mail address that would cut them off from the rest of the world.
Unfortunately time and again, women politicians have proven themselves to be just as incompetent and corrupt (especially with their favouritism towards big business and their contributions) as male politicians.
As a women, I have yet to notice any women president or prime-minister leading a western country that has put any additional emphasis over their male counterparts in the same political party on women's only issues: gender discrimination, reproductive rights, healthcare inequalities, etc. So seeing a women as head of state no longer inspires me.
Why buy a dedicated handheld gaming device, when you can get smart phone, pda, or tablet like the iPhone/iTouch/iPad, Zune/WM7, Android, or WebOS device that is just as portable, will do a decent job playing games, plus let you surf the net, do your e-mail, and hold your media (music, videos, etc.)?
If I was in charge of Nintendo, I would put a big chunk of flash in the 3DS, and include a browser, e-mail client, and media player. And also make a smart phone version as well.
Do they really think that people want to carry a separate portable gaming device, media player, and pda or smart phone in this day and age? Especially when you consider that you can buy a low end Zune or iPod Touch 8GB in the same price range as a Nintendo DSi.
When I said free, I mean purely advertisement supported, since nothing Google does is really free.
Now that Google has all that StreetView WiFi data, maybe they can put together a free WiFi geo-location service alternative to Skyhook:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_Wireless
With regards to privacy, Skyhook has already let the cat out of the bag.
No doubt that he is small enough to have done it.
The last time, despite having it in their hands, Gizmodo was not able to get the specific resolution of the iPhone 4G prototype display. As an iPhone developer, it would be nice to have a heads up about the new resolution, so we can modify our current and future apps to support it.
My wish would be to have it match the iPad's XGA (1024x768) resolution, so that it can run iPad apps, but I doubt it in the iPhone's form factor. The 960x640 resolution suggested would also be unlikely, since there aren't really any off-the-shelf LCD's with that native resolution. My bet would be something like 800x480, like the HTC HD2 phone, since there are already existing LCD's that support it.
Both Apple and news media organizations (press/newspapers, radio, television, etc.) were interested in the possibilities of the iPad (and other similar devices) as a news consumption device. This is especially true for newspapers that have been suffering due to falling revenue, especially from classifieds because of Craig's List and eBay, and a public less interested in reading news on dead trees.
But Apple's censorship of a Pulitzer winning cartoonist send chills down the spines of all of the news media organizations, since they suddenly realize how vulnerable their content is to the arbitrary and inconsistent censorship whims of companies like Apple, Amazon, Sony, etc. which have total control over the applications and media on their devices.
Imagine if Sony blocked all news publications on its Sony's Reader Store which have published accident and recall information about Toyotas in order not to harm or offend a fellow Japanese companies. Imagine if this was 60 years ago and each electronics company only sold TV's which would only receive programming from their affiliated stations.
Apple hoped that by allowing Mark Fiorre's app, they could do damage control, but I think that it is too late, since this incident really drove home how bad the censorship situation is with these locked down platforms.
At the end of the day, consumers pressure is not enough to be able to force companies to open up their platforms. In the growing mobile phone, media players, e-reader, and game console markets, not one of the major platforms is fully open for the consumer and are full of DRM that restricts options and allow censorship. (Yes that includes Google Android devices which are being locked down by many carriers!)
Governments need to step in and force all hardware and operating system manufactories and distributers to have an application and data distribution and execution model that is fully open to all. If you buy the device, it should be yours to do with as you see fit, as long as it does not interfere with others.
Android is only open for carriers, not users. Basically this idiot is saying that he prefers that end-users and developers be walled within a slow Java VM (Virtual Machine) ghetto on the Android platform, verses having end-user and developers walled within a ghetto of limited, but fast natively compiled and executed, selection of iTunes Apps that Apple approves at their sole discretion. Keep in mind that many of Android's prebundled apps/utilities are compiled into machine code, since the Java VM is nothing more than 3rd party app ghetto . I will only believe that the Android VM Java is decent and not an app ghetto, when all of the Android core applications, including the phone app, are solely written in it. Gee, I miss those days when computer operating systems use to have an open execution model that allowed anyone to write, distribute, and install applications as compiled machine code without any restrictions.
Unfortunately, wireless carriers and regulators want to put restrictions on the radio and other mobile smart phone functionality. The common solution on single processor devices is to run third party applications in a sandbox, like Android's Java VM, and require application signing.
Virtualization can be a provide a less restrictive common environment sandbox, that is not tied to a specific programming language, that can meet the desires of the carrier on cheaper (single processor) hardware, and still protect a software radio, DRM, and other functions from third party apps running in a VM.
However, it would not surprise me if practice future cellphones have an evolved hypervisor that provides different levels of VM based on functionality, with the lower VM levels restricted to carrier sign apps that can do almost anything; middle VM levels for manufacture signed apps that can access networking, gps, SMS, storage, camera, video/audio playback, etc.; and top crippled VM levels for unsigned apps that can't do much.
Unfortunately, history has taught us that the more control designers can put on a system, the more likely that control will be used to restrict the public at the expense of corporate and government interests.
I would gladly pay for any app that would let me run something similar to the Pokemon DS/DSi games on the iPhone. I had high hopes for the DS emulator on the iPhone, but it did not allow one to run any real DS game roms on it, and Apple immediately yanked it off the app store soon after it was released.
Maybe, the authors of the DS emulator would eventually consider putting a non-crippled version of their DS emulator onto the Cydia store. Or better yet, maybe Nintendo might release their games to the iPhone/iTouch platform, since they are no longer interested in making any non-trival (DS, DS Lite, DSi, ...) changes to their existing outdated handheld gaming platform in more than 5 years since the original DS was launched in Nov 2004.
Definitely worth a few bucks to avoid having to carry separate Nintendo game and Apple phone devices for my Pokemon fix.
Finally! It's about time that international police and anti-crime resources put the same effort in stopping online cross border crime that they do for offline!
Kudos to Microsoft for helping. Heck, I would accept help from Satan himself, if it reduce the spam and online crime.