In fact, there is something nice about a Tesla or Prius's silence at idle
Unless you're blind, or happen to be looking the other way when the drunk in a prius bears down on you. Which is why some sort of fake engine noise will eventually be mandated (if it hasn't been already).
This is actually mandated now, but the rules are kind of mushy. It was signed into law in 2011 here in the US, and applies to 2012 models, but there weren't initially strict guidelines on the noises. So you'll find the 2011 Nissan Leaf has a 'silent' mode where it won't make the backing-up beep-beep alert or the turbine-like engine noise when driving, but the 2012 and later models cannot silence the engine noises.
Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the state of the current noise laws across the US, Japan, the EU, and the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I thought the standard was for each copy 'made available.' So if you count each song as multiple infringements on BitTorrent, by that logic, shouldn't every single hypothetical viewer of Glee be counted as a separate infringement?
According to TVByTheNumbers, last night's Glee viewership was 6.75 million viewers, and the fine's almost certainly more than $1 per infringement, so...;P
Except that, according to the article, that was exactly the problem: Google Maps would expire mid-next-year. Which meant either they'd have to sign another contract — and I would be *stunned* if, in such a situation, Google didn't demand Latitude be included or some other sort of data-collection concession — or have Maps go dark *during* iOS 6's lifetime, requiring Maps to be replaced in a point-release, rather than changing over at a major OS release.
Whether or not I think this was a great decision, I can totally see why they made the move now from a business aspect. Imagine if they had done this changeover in iOS 6.2...
Renault and Nissan came up with the Quick-Drop battery swapping system that another poster mentions in regard to the Fluence ZE, though Nissan doesn't use it for the LEAF platform; the LEAF battery packs *can* be swapped out fairly easily, but it's not set up for the Quick-Drop method. Tesla originally talked about offering battery swaps at their Supercharger locations, but I think that's fallen by the wayside.
Honestly, with so many different battery capacities — the LEAF has 24kWh worth of batteries, while the highest-end Model S has 80kWh — I think standardization would be hard. I mean, we can't even fully finalize on a quick-charging standard!
In Japan and France, they have a system called CHAdeMO, a large plug capable of delivering up to 62.5kW of charge and thus charging the LEAF from near-empty in about 25 minutes. Japanese EVs and a number of European ones use this as a charging connector.
Meanwhile, the US came up with SAE1772, a replacement for older charging standards, with a smaller plug but which is limited to about 6.6kW of charge at 220V, meaning they can be installed many more places but take hours to recharge. (These are the little stations in many parking lots, for 'charge while you shop' at a mall or whatever.) Given the differing standards, various cars released in the US — the LEAF, the MiEV, etc. — support J1772 for slower charging and CHAdeMO for fast charging. And so CHAdeMO quick chargers have been put in along freeways.
Now SAE has come up with a variant on SAE1772 — a bigger form of the plug with the original plug as a subset of the design — which could allow quick-charging. The idea being that you'd only need one plug; the new SAE1772 variant sockets could use the old plugs, so older charging stations would work, but you'd have to have new sockets for any new plugs. However, no one's committed to supporting that yet that I've heard.
Then Tesla, disgusted with everyone else, designed their own Supercharger system which charges at up to 100kW — heavier duty than CHAdeMO — so that they can charge the 80kW pack of a high-end Model S much faster. They made adapters to allow SAE1772 charging too, for all the little parking lot stations, but there's no easy way to convert CHAdeMO for those quick chargers.
Standardization among EVs is... well, we still have a way to go.
If I'm reading the news articles properly, available evidence actually indicates the protesters themselves were peaceful and the protests got used as cover for violence by extremists. Some articles suggested that this was a 9/11 'reminder' planned anyway, and the protests over the film just provided a convenient cover for them to get into place in a crowd.
Sadly, the lunatic fringe is often what a group gets judged by, which is hardly unique to Islam; many people also judge Christianity by groups like the Westboro Baptist Church or the Christian groups who bomb abortion clinics. Heck, the same is true of political parties or — to use a more Slashdot-relevant example — OS platform advocates. The loud lunatic ones end up being the voices outsiders notice the most readily, because they're shouting and starting fights.
As a result, the story many take from this becomes not, "Violent lunatics seize on convenient excuse to thinly justify their attacks" but "ZOMG YOU GUYS, MUSLIMS ARE CRAZY-VIOLENT." Which is unfortunate.
...that this would affect a lot more than just Apple if upheld. I understand Google's got a small interest in touch-based devices, too, and I seem to recall that Microsoft's considering maybe supporting some of this 'touch' stuff in Windows 8. (Sarcasm tag heavily implied there, which was hopefully clear.)
Seriously, I feel that patents have become sort of like nuclear weaponry; you either try to amass enough weapons in your patent portfolio that the other side won't launch, as with mutually assured destruction between the big companies, or else you get held hostage by patent-troll terrorists who get ahold of a weapon and threaten to take out everything they can unless you pay them. Maybe we need the patent law equivalent of Jack Bauer to deal with patent trolling.:P
I'm afraid that IBM beat you to this by several years, as they patented patent trolling back in 2007. Your technique is not precisely the same, but it would probably infringe on their patent...
No, Skyhook's definitely not the technology under the hood. In fact, Motorola replaced Google's built-in geolocation with Skyhook on their Android handsets, but Google pitched a fit about this. And so Motorola dropped Skyhook again and returned to Google's geolocation system, and Skyhook sued Google.
Japan never used to have power outages to speak of, but in the wake of the tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi being taken offline, outages are heavily on the mind of the average Japanese citizen. They had a ton of blackouts in March, and the Tokyo area in particular has been engaging in a ton of power-saving measures; the article from the summary even mentions a few (dimming subway station lights, to draw less power, for instance). Given that everyone's looking for ways to reduce their draw on the power grid at peak times, I'm not surprised that Nissan is looking into this possibility.
www.facebook.com's AAAA record resolves to 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::b -- however, most folks can't resolve it. According to posts on the ipv6-ops mailing list, Facebook is still doing IPv6 in a limited testing phase, so they have DNS whitelisting enabled to avoid folks other than Hurricane Electric IPv6 testers getting the AAAA record while the IPv6 version of the site is still not quite there yet.
Presumably they'll turn off the whitelisting and let it resolve universally for IPv6 Day.
No, Android stores the last 50 unique cell-derived locations (in cache.cell) and the last 200 unique wifi-derived locations (in cache.wifi). In other words, the file/is/ truncated, but based on quantity of data rather than age/time. Apple's logfile is not truncated, whether by design or programming error.
Conversely, Apple's log remains on the device only for Core Location caching; it's stored in iPhone backups, but isn't ever sent back to the mothership (at least so far as anyone has been able to tell). Google truncates the log, but does send the data when you hit a WiFi point and have a GPS signal; they use this to update their WiFi location database for GPS assist, as they use their own service rather than Skyhook. (If your base station advertises itself, open or otherwise, go to http://samy.pl/androidmap/ and enter your local router's MAC address; you can see where Google thinks that base station is, based on how Android devices have paired your station to their GPS data.)
Not to mention Apple retires OSes in just a few years after release but there's no outcry on here.
Some of that may be due to the fact that Apple charges a lot less -- a LOT less -- for OS upgrades than Microsoft does, and some of it may be due to the fact that OS X is a lot less likely to be heavily tied into some company's corporate network than XP was.
Either way, you're still correct that no company can be expected to support an older OS forever. As was noted elsewhere, RedHat's long since retired support for many versions of their software, and no longer roll RPMs to update various things based on older systems.
In fairness to Gates, he's willingly given away something like $39/billion/ dollars of his own money through philanthropic and charity efforts. Even as a stockholder in MS, I doubt he cares much about $1.2 million. But there were probably some chairs thrown in Ballmer's office...
Yeah, Bones is really the worst offender out there for product placement. They don't even bother to try to disguise them most of the time.
As I noted in a different post, White Collar at least/tried/ to work it into the story and dialogue in a semi-natural way when they were showing off a hybrid car placement (during a high-speed car sequence) in a recent episode, by having Neal mock Diana for "not driving very green." Bones doesn't even bother with that much effort.
Bones has got to be the worst offender for this, which particularly bothers me because, honestly, if you rated what characters in television series were the least likely to bother showing off a new gadget to those around them, I would say Temperance Brennan should land somewhere in the top five. She just wouldn't care. But White Collar also earns an honorable mention lately; they seem to be trying to take the crown of Random Car Placements from Bones. Though at least they've tried to work it into the script through jokes, like covering the hybrid during a high-speed driving sequence.
Neal: Why is there a tree on your dashboard? Diana: It's a hybrid. It shows me how efficiently I'm driving. Neal: You're not driving very green. All the leaves are falling off. Diana: *annoyed* Do you want to catch this guy? Neal: I feel like I'm stuck in the Giving Tree. There's nothing left but a stump. Diana: *more annoyed* I'll grow a new one over the weekend!
That's the thing. Watching Castle and seeing that Rick Castle has an iPhone, or that Detective Beckett has a Palm Pre? Eh, whatever. They're probably going to have a cell phone, like most of the people in the US. As long as you're not throwing that device into my face really obnoxiously, I don't care what it is. It's just a prop, and I can focus on the story. Seeing that Shawn on 'Psych' carries an iPhone, again, not terribly jarring. None of them make a big deal about their phones, they just use them on screen.
But when I'm watching Bones and, say, Dr. Brennan feels a need to explain her new Windows Phone 7 device and show the Metro UI off to someone? Or on/any/ show where they feel the need to discuss the little tree on the dashboard (or demonstrate the Bluetooth capabilities) of certain hybrid cars? (White Collar, I'm looking at you as well here.) Those get annoying and jarring, because they feel like someone randomly regurgitated marketing into the middle of the script.
Be fair... for a while, the History channel made it seem as though all of human history boiled down to UFOs or Hitler. (Or sometimes UFOs and Hitler.) The Bible Sex and Mayan Apocalypse shows were at least a new form of irritant!
It used to be, network executives understood that sometimes it takes a couple of seasons for a show to really get its legs, for people to get interested in it and for its audience to build. Now, they evaluate everything on a week-by-week basis. Some shows last only two or three episodes. Very, very few last more than a season or two.
USA Network is apparently the exception to this; it seems like they'll give all their original programming at least two seasons to find its legs. Psych, Burn Notice, White Collar, In Plain Sight, Royal Pains... every one of them has been given sufficient time to find its legs and pick up an audience. And most of them have. I imagine their new series Fairly Legal will be given the same opportunity.
The real problem I have with the Xoom is that you have to sign up for the cellular data plan in order for the tablet to enable WiFi. No Verizon data plan? No WiFi for you, either. Sure, you can cancel after the WiFi's been activated, with a minimum of one month data service... but still, that's just outright extortion. And there's no release date on the WiFi-only Xoom yet, so it's the cellular-enabled Xoom or nothing.
Is there some sort of contractual obligation that precludes the developers from saying, "sorry, we haven't tested our app on this $130 non-flashable off-brand 7-inch Android tablet that you got from the local bedding supply store on clearance?"
Contractual, no, but there are practical considerations that make that difficult. The Android market gives you very little space to describe your app as it is; I doubt you could fit an entire compatibility list in there. And not many users will copy a link out of a marketplace description and open the Browser to see what a longer list of compatibility notes.
I think the problem is that most people are reading this as "apps are sending off the UDID" and going "eh, who cares" because the UDID doesn't have any real inherent useful meaning outside of iOS development provisioning. Even when they read that you can associate the UDID with a real name somehow (as in the Amazon and CBS apps), they still see UDID isn't really useful data. All you know is "this hexadecimal value -- which, for all practical purposes, may as well be random -- is Joe Public." If Amazon generated a blob of random binary data and used that to identify that device to the server instead of the UDID, but changed no other part of their protocol, you'd still be able to associate the random blob of data with Joe Public.
Where this becomes a privacy concern is that since multiple services take the shortcut of using the UDID as their tracking token, if you had, say, both Amazon's tracking data and CBS's tracking data, you could take Amazon's realname data and combine it with the CBS program's demographic data, and have a bigger, badder demographic database. Because they both use the UDID as their tracking token, there's a shared bit of data you can use to combine those sorts of tracking databases. But that's not really presented as the problem here, so most people just think "why should I care that the UDID is being sent? Thats no different than any other random data-tracking cookie."
In contrast, I think why people reacted more vehemently to the Android article was that the TaintDroid folks reported that Android apps were not merely using device identifiers as tracking tokens, but were also reporting back the actual phone number, or in some cases the IMSI. While I don't care much about my UDID being sent off as a tracking token -- it's not meaningful data in and of itself -- I am going to be a lot more disturbed if I find some app is sending my cellular subscriber data to a server without a damned good reason, regardless of what data they're tracking.
That said, the growing popularity of smartphones means that privacy and malware/trojan prevention on mobile platforms/is/ going to become more and more of a real concern, I think. There are already security suites available for them, like Android Firewall on Android, or FirewallIP on iOS; they all require rooting/jailbreaking to use, but they're there as an option. But because of how much computing people do on their mobile devices, I think eventually we're going to see -- of necessity -- these sort of privacy/security tools for mobile platforms becoming more common and mainstream, whether Apple and Google open up the platform to allow third-party security tools or whether they start providing a higher level of security themselves,/something/ is going to change in time.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you're blind, or happen to be looking the other way when the drunk in a prius bears down on you. Which is why some sort of fake engine noise will eventually be mandated (if it hasn't been already).
This is actually mandated now, but the rules are kind of mushy. It was signed into law in 2011 here in the US, and applies to 2012 models, but there weren't initially strict guidelines on the noises. So you'll find the 2011 Nissan Leaf has a 'silent' mode where it won't make the backing-up beep-beep alert or the turbine-like engine noise when driving, but the 2012 and later models cannot silence the engine noises.
Wikipedia has a good breakdown of the state of the current noise laws across the US, Japan, the EU, and the UK: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I thought the standard was for each copy 'made available.' So if you count each song as multiple infringements on BitTorrent, by that logic, shouldn't every single hypothetical viewer of Glee be counted as a separate infringement?
According to TVByTheNumbers, last night's Glee viewership was 6.75 million viewers, and the fine's almost certainly more than $1 per infringement, so... ;P
Except that, according to the article, that was exactly the problem: Google Maps would expire mid-next-year. Which meant either they'd have to sign another contract — and I would be *stunned* if, in such a situation, Google didn't demand Latitude be included or some other sort of data-collection concession — or have Maps go dark *during* iOS 6's lifetime, requiring Maps to be replaced in a point-release, rather than changing over at a major OS release.
Whether or not I think this was a great decision, I can totally see why they made the move now from a business aspect. Imagine if they had done this changeover in iOS 6.2...
Renault and Nissan came up with the Quick-Drop battery swapping system that another poster mentions in regard to the Fluence ZE, though Nissan doesn't use it for the LEAF platform; the LEAF battery packs *can* be swapped out fairly easily, but it's not set up for the Quick-Drop method. Tesla originally talked about offering battery swaps at their Supercharger locations, but I think that's fallen by the wayside.
Honestly, with so many different battery capacities — the LEAF has 24kWh worth of batteries, while the highest-end Model S has 80kWh — I think standardization would be hard. I mean, we can't even fully finalize on a quick-charging standard!
In Japan and France, they have a system called CHAdeMO, a large plug capable of delivering up to 62.5kW of charge and thus charging the LEAF from near-empty in about 25 minutes. Japanese EVs and a number of European ones use this as a charging connector.
Meanwhile, the US came up with SAE1772, a replacement for older charging standards, with a smaller plug but which is limited to about 6.6kW of charge at 220V, meaning they can be installed many more places but take hours to recharge. (These are the little stations in many parking lots, for 'charge while you shop' at a mall or whatever.) Given the differing standards, various cars released in the US — the LEAF, the MiEV, etc. — support J1772 for slower charging and CHAdeMO for fast charging. And so CHAdeMO quick chargers have been put in along freeways.
Now SAE has come up with a variant on SAE1772 — a bigger form of the plug with the original plug as a subset of the design — which could allow quick-charging. The idea being that you'd only need one plug; the new SAE1772 variant sockets could use the old plugs, so older charging stations would work, but you'd have to have new sockets for any new plugs. However, no one's committed to supporting that yet that I've heard.
Then Tesla, disgusted with everyone else, designed their own Supercharger system which charges at up to 100kW — heavier duty than CHAdeMO — so that they can charge the 80kW pack of a high-end Model S much faster. They made adapters to allow SAE1772 charging too, for all the little parking lot stations, but there's no easy way to convert CHAdeMO for those quick chargers.
Standardization among EVs is... well, we still have a way to go.
If I'm reading the news articles properly, available evidence actually indicates the protesters themselves were peaceful and the protests got used as cover for violence by extremists. Some articles suggested that this was a 9/11 'reminder' planned anyway, and the protests over the film just provided a convenient cover for them to get into place in a crowd.
Sadly, the lunatic fringe is often what a group gets judged by, which is hardly unique to Islam; many people also judge Christianity by groups like the Westboro Baptist Church or the Christian groups who bomb abortion clinics. Heck, the same is true of political parties or — to use a more Slashdot-relevant example — OS platform advocates. The loud lunatic ones end up being the voices outsiders notice the most readily, because they're shouting and starting fights.
As a result, the story many take from this becomes not, "Violent lunatics seize on convenient excuse to thinly justify their attacks" but "ZOMG YOU GUYS, MUSLIMS ARE CRAZY-VIOLENT." Which is unfortunate.
...that this would affect a lot more than just Apple if upheld. I understand Google's got a small interest in touch-based devices, too, and I seem to recall that Microsoft's considering maybe supporting some of this 'touch' stuff in Windows 8. (Sarcasm tag heavily implied there, which was hopefully clear.)
Seriously, I feel that patents have become sort of like nuclear weaponry; you either try to amass enough weapons in your patent portfolio that the other side won't launch, as with mutually assured destruction between the big companies, or else you get held hostage by patent-troll terrorists who get ahold of a weapon and threaten to take out everything they can unless you pay them. Maybe we need the patent law equivalent of Jack Bauer to deal with patent trolling. :P
I'm afraid that IBM beat you to this by several years, as they patented patent trolling back in 2007. Your technique is not precisely the same, but it would probably infringe on their patent...
No, Skyhook's definitely not the technology under the hood. In fact, Motorola replaced Google's built-in geolocation with Skyhook on their Android handsets, but Google pitched a fit about this. And so Motorola dropped Skyhook again and returned to Google's geolocation system, and Skyhook sued Google.
Japan never used to have power outages to speak of, but in the wake of the tsunami and Fukushima Dai-ichi being taken offline, outages are heavily on the mind of the average Japanese citizen. They had a ton of blackouts in March, and the Tokyo area in particular has been engaging in a ton of power-saving measures; the article from the summary even mentions a few (dimming subway station lights, to draw less power, for instance). Given that everyone's looking for ways to reduce their draw on the power grid at peak times, I'm not surprised that Nissan is looking into this possibility.
www.facebook.com's AAAA record resolves to 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::b -- however, most folks can't resolve it. According to posts on the ipv6-ops mailing list, Facebook is still doing IPv6 in a limited testing phase, so they have DNS whitelisting enabled to avoid folks other than Hurricane Electric IPv6 testers getting the AAAA record while the IPv6 version of the site is still not quite there yet.
Presumably they'll turn off the whitelisting and let it resolve universally for IPv6 Day.
No, Android stores the last 50 unique cell-derived locations (in cache.cell) and the last 200 unique wifi-derived locations (in cache.wifi). In other words, the file /is/ truncated, but based on quantity of data rather than age/time. Apple's logfile is not truncated, whether by design or programming error.
Conversely, Apple's log remains on the device only for Core Location caching; it's stored in iPhone backups, but isn't ever sent back to the mothership (at least so far as anyone has been able to tell). Google truncates the log, but does send the data when you hit a WiFi point and have a GPS signal; they use this to update their WiFi location database for GPS assist, as they use their own service rather than Skyhook. (If your base station advertises itself, open or otherwise, go to http://samy.pl/androidmap/ and enter your local router's MAC address; you can see where Google thinks that base station is, based on how Android devices have paired your station to their GPS data.)
Not to mention Apple retires OSes in just a few years after release but there's no outcry on here.
Some of that may be due to the fact that Apple charges a lot less -- a LOT less -- for OS upgrades than Microsoft does, and some of it may be due to the fact that OS X is a lot less likely to be heavily tied into some company's corporate network than XP was.
Either way, you're still correct that no company can be expected to support an older OS forever. As was noted elsewhere, RedHat's long since retired support for many versions of their software, and no longer roll RPMs to update various things based on older systems.
Honestly, "YourSQL" seems more accurate than "MySQL" given that apparently even the developers can't keep control of their own database. ;P
In fairness to Gates, he's willingly given away something like $39 /billion/ dollars of his own money through philanthropic and charity efforts. Even as a stockholder in MS, I doubt he cares much about $1.2 million. But there were probably some chairs thrown in Ballmer's office...
Yeah, Bones is really the worst offender out there for product placement. They don't even bother to try to disguise them most of the time.
As I noted in a different post, White Collar at least /tried/ to work it into the story and dialogue in a semi-natural way when they were showing off a hybrid car placement (during a high-speed car sequence) in a recent episode, by having Neal mock Diana for "not driving very green." Bones doesn't even bother with that much effort.
Bones has got to be the worst offender for this, which particularly bothers me because, honestly, if you rated what characters in television series were the least likely to bother showing off a new gadget to those around them, I would say Temperance Brennan should land somewhere in the top five. She just wouldn't care. But White Collar also earns an honorable mention lately; they seem to be trying to take the crown of Random Car Placements from Bones. Though at least they've tried to work it into the script through jokes, like covering the hybrid during a high-speed driving sequence.
Neal: Why is there a tree on your dashboard?
Diana: It's a hybrid. It shows me how efficiently I'm driving.
Neal: You're not driving very green. All the leaves are falling off.
Diana: *annoyed* Do you want to catch this guy?
Neal: I feel like I'm stuck in the Giving Tree. There's nothing left but a stump.
Diana: *more annoyed* I'll grow a new one over the weekend!
I didn't say they SUCCEEDED, but they tried.
That's the thing. Watching Castle and seeing that Rick Castle has an iPhone, or that Detective Beckett has a Palm Pre? Eh, whatever. They're probably going to have a cell phone, like most of the people in the US. As long as you're not throwing that device into my face really obnoxiously, I don't care what it is. It's just a prop, and I can focus on the story. Seeing that Shawn on 'Psych' carries an iPhone, again, not terribly jarring. None of them make a big deal about their phones, they just use them on screen.
But when I'm watching Bones and, say, Dr. Brennan feels a need to explain her new Windows Phone 7 device and show the Metro UI off to someone? Or on /any/ show where they feel the need to discuss the little tree on the dashboard (or demonstrate the Bluetooth capabilities) of certain hybrid cars? (White Collar, I'm looking at you as well here.) Those get annoying and jarring, because they feel like someone randomly regurgitated marketing into the middle of the script.
Be fair... for a while, the History channel made it seem as though all of human history boiled down to UFOs or Hitler. (Or sometimes UFOs and Hitler.) The Bible Sex and Mayan Apocalypse shows were at least a new form of irritant!
It used to be, network executives understood that sometimes it takes a couple of seasons for a show to really get its legs, for people to get interested in it and for its audience to build. Now, they evaluate everything on a week-by-week basis. Some shows last only two or three episodes. Very, very few last more than a season or two.
USA Network is apparently the exception to this; it seems like they'll give all their original programming at least two seasons to find its legs. Psych, Burn Notice, White Collar, In Plain Sight, Royal Pains... every one of them has been given sufficient time to find its legs and pick up an audience. And most of them have. I imagine their new series Fairly Legal will be given the same opportunity.
King County already has a vote-by-mail system in place. In fact, the last King County elections were handled entirely by mail.
The real problem I have with the Xoom is that you have to sign up for the cellular data plan in order for the tablet to enable WiFi. No Verizon data plan? No WiFi for you, either. Sure, you can cancel after the WiFi's been activated, with a minimum of one month data service... but still, that's just outright extortion. And there's no release date on the WiFi-only Xoom yet, so it's the cellular-enabled Xoom or nothing.
Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.
To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.
Does anyone else think of "Doctor Dinosaur" from Atomic Robo when reading this article?
http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/07/24/free-comic-book-day-2009/
Is there some sort of contractual obligation that precludes the developers from saying, "sorry, we haven't tested our app on this $130 non-flashable off-brand 7-inch Android tablet that you got from the local bedding supply store on clearance?"
Contractual, no, but there are practical considerations that make that difficult. The Android market gives you very little space to describe your app as it is; I doubt you could fit an entire compatibility list in there. And not many users will copy a link out of a marketplace description and open the Browser to see what a longer list of compatibility notes.
I think the problem is that most people are reading this as "apps are sending off the UDID" and going "eh, who cares" because the UDID doesn't have any real inherent useful meaning outside of iOS development provisioning. Even when they read that you can associate the UDID with a real name somehow (as in the Amazon and CBS apps), they still see UDID isn't really useful data. All you know is "this hexadecimal value -- which, for all practical purposes, may as well be random -- is Joe Public." If Amazon generated a blob of random binary data and used that to identify that device to the server instead of the UDID, but changed no other part of their protocol, you'd still be able to associate the random blob of data with Joe Public.
Where this becomes a privacy concern is that since multiple services take the shortcut of using the UDID as their tracking token, if you had, say, both Amazon's tracking data and CBS's tracking data, you could take Amazon's realname data and combine it with the CBS program's demographic data, and have a bigger, badder demographic database. Because they both use the UDID as their tracking token, there's a shared bit of data you can use to combine those sorts of tracking databases. But that's not really presented as the problem here, so most people just think "why should I care that the UDID is being sent? Thats no different than any other random data-tracking cookie."
In contrast, I think why people reacted more vehemently to the Android article was that the TaintDroid folks reported that Android apps were not merely using device identifiers as tracking tokens, but were also reporting back the actual phone number, or in some cases the IMSI. While I don't care much about my UDID being sent off as a tracking token -- it's not meaningful data in and of itself -- I am going to be a lot more disturbed if I find some app is sending my cellular subscriber data to a server without a damned good reason, regardless of what data they're tracking.
That said, the growing popularity of smartphones means that privacy and malware/trojan prevention on mobile platforms /is/ going to become more and more of a real concern, I think. There are already security suites available for them, like Android Firewall on Android, or FirewallIP on iOS; they all require rooting/jailbreaking to use, but they're there as an option. But because of how much computing people do on their mobile devices, I think eventually we're going to see -- of necessity -- these sort of privacy/security tools for mobile platforms becoming more common and mainstream, whether Apple and Google open up the platform to allow third-party security tools or whether they start providing a higher level of security themselves, /something/ is going to change in time.