If you were arrested at some point in the past and your face/mugshot winds up at the site, with a full (as possible) record of what happened to you? It's simply the truth. Now the ideal says that you paid your dues, did your time, etc. On the other hand, reality says you're not going to be able to bury such information anymore.
In spite of all that, I'm perfectly okay with such sites on these conditions:
1) a sunset period occurs where faces/records get automatically deleted after a period of years (5, 7, 10, whatever - maybe set one period for misdemeanors, a second for felonies, a lifetime for convictions involving pedophilia or death, etc).
2) a clear listing of what happened after the arrest must accompany the picture (dismissal, not guilty, fine, conviction, plea bargain, whatever). Some of these sites only list what the arrest was for.
IMHO? If I were ever arrested, and if it were my image on such sites? Fuck it - it would cost too much to chase down every two-bit operator with a web host and a bit of Perl scraping-script (seriously, there's like dozens of such sites out there. The reason why I know all this? I'll explain at the end...) Besides, it's not like a background check would miss such a thing in the first place unless the record was well and truly expunged.
(So, how do I know these things? I happened to find an ex-boss of mine on it after a friend of mine heard a rumor, and discovered the dude is currently in prison for doing things to his daughter that were way the hell wrong. Took four different sites before I found enough of the story to discover what happened. Pity - he seemed a really cool guy, and technically he's sharp as hell.)
I was with you right up until that sentence and your reasoning leading up to it. TBH, claiming that making a drug illegal is equivalent to murder is, in short, bullshit. There are numerous valid ideological reasons why drugs should not be banned by governmental edict, but that argument is not one of them.
This is why: In all honestly, it is not murder when someone willfully engages in the practice, knowing full well there are potentially fatal hazards involved (given the plethora of education on the subject, it's not like you can credibly claim a general ignorance here.) Long story short, while addiction is a tragedy, the participants are not exactly unwilling victims, either. Statistically, they all voluntarily jammed that needle into their arms (or smoked it, ate it, snorted it, whatever).
It's like claiming that making base jumping off of a building illegal is tantamount to murder, when the base jumpers are the ones willfully doing it themselves.
These "freedoms" and more are available... but they come at a price.
For instance? No problem...
The county where I live offers an anus-puckering discount on poor families wanting to buy a home (imagine this - being offered a decent home in a neighborhood full of $250k homes for a mere $27k at 0% interest. No, that's not a typo.) Only thing is, the county gets to stop by and make sure you're still poor during the 5-year 'mortgage' period, else the rates and total price rises accordingly. Oh, and CPS gets to check in on your kids any time they want, among other governmental visits that would otherwise demand a warrant.
Groceries? No problem, present an appropriate sob story and proof that you lack income, and most states will lavish you with an EBT card. 'course, unless you get creative about how you dodge it, there's an approved list of foods you can and cannot buy.
Car payments? Well, most metro areas do subsidize free mass transit if you make less than a certain income level... but really - it's mass transit. That means you're stuck with living within walking distance of it, and no further.
How does this relate to healthcare? Well, there are folks already demanding that people be forced to wear health activity monitors if they want that subsidized health-care... but you're forced to buy the subsidized plan if you cannot otherwise afford it on your own, so guess what happens if you have the misfortune to be impoverished? Yup - the government now owns your health.
Long story short, the "freedom"s are there, but the dependencies and (IMHO) conditions you subject yourself to in order to receive them are, well... about to become rather dehumanizing.
If you couple it with water/fluid recycling techniques, you stand a good change of doing well.
I find it strange that they would focus on just drinking water in the summary, when water will give you fuel and oxygen as well, and will likely be the greatest byproducts of this type of mining.
An F-16 can carry 4 2,000-lb bombs at the absolute most (and anything after two is risky on the wings).
It has 9 hard-points to hang ordinance on, but two of those (1 and 9) are wingtip rails, which means AIM-9 missiles. It will usually have 1-3 "bags" (fuel pods) hanging off of stations 4, 5 (centerline, under the fuselage), and 6. You'll need them in some combination to get any kind of real combat range (otherwise you're stuck with ~900lbs of internally-stored fuel, which ain't jack.) The big bombs would hang off of stations 3 and 7.
Now anti-personnel and fragmentary bombs? You can pack a buttload of 'em on that, and add in two AIM-9 Air-Groung missles to do some damage (which is what most ground-attack configured F-16's carry).
I am curious if they can slave in a LANTIRN pod kit onto the things and use that to get all-weather capability... though I can't remember if they retrofitted any of the A/B model jets to carry those.
No, developers are the most visible part of a class of workers who need total concentration on a task for a long period to make progress. You need at least 15 minutes to fully pick up where you left off in any half-complex program.
If you've ever had to un-snarl a bad router config, a supremely wrong DNS replication failure, chase down a leak in your anti-spam setup, locate and rid yourself of a network intrusion, figure out why a huge web farm intermittently blinks out, or diagnose why your massive SAN cluster suddenly complains it's out of disk space when there was 30 spare TB loafing around in it just an hour ago...?
Trust me - developers have no monopoly on complexity.
I much prefer to work from home, provided I have a dedicated work area/machines.
Ditto - I found that I was way more productive when there wasn't a stream of folks interrupting, ambient noises, etc. As long as everyone at home knows to leave you be unless the house is on fire, working at home is awesome for productivity.
OTOH, it does make things harder for you in regards to office politics and all the intangible bits that can make or break your career...
I agree but for one bit: It all depends on the individual, and what's going on at the time. A project that is interesting will keep me happily occupied for 12-14 hours straight (yet only feels like a couple of hours). A task that is exceedingly difficult will likely require a couple extra hours to solve (or reach a good stopping point) - just to avoid having to re-familiarize yourself with the problem all over again come the next day (or worse, waking up at 2:00 am to write down ideas and things your restless brain came up with while asleep).
Each person, each project/task, and each skill level/familiarity is different. On the latter, if I'm actually learning something along the way, cool - I can hang around a couple extra hours to finish it down and absorb what I learned. If I already know it and I'm just pounding things out because of a looming deadline, then screw it - I'm going home to get some sleep, deadline be damned just because some asshat was a bottleneck for everyone for so damned long, etc.
It's an organic problem, really - and I mean that in both the figurative and literal sense (after all, you gotta sleep/decompress sometime...)
a schedule which is interrupted by meetings and other crap means a huge loss of productivity for me.
Dude - that's the case with anyone - developer or not. Well, the sales guys and such may find them helpful...
Meanwhile, something about those meetings (and especially the excess of them) brings up something: I find that a lack of good design is often covered-up by a mass of meetings. I get that some information can only be correlated/gathered by a meeting, but too many of them I think tends to just make a mess. If your organization is plagued with excess meetings (or individual scrums that drag on for hours), productivity is going to go down the toilet no matter what you do.
American taxpayers love the military. At least most of those I know.
Let's clear something up here (Disclosure: I am a military veteran):
Americans love the military solider, sailor, airman, coastie, and marine. They love the really bad-assed hardware (well, most guys do). They love the sense of self-testing, charater-forging and adventure that often accompanies service. Hell, nothing was more exciting to the 22-year-old kid I was than to tweak and tune a multi-million-dollar aircraft capable of doing heavy damage on anything that you care to point it at.
Now - that said: Americans (*especially* those who served in the military) most definitely do not love the chain-of-command, the privations, the suspension of rights required to serve, or the really fucked-up ways in which the aforementioned chain-of-command often expresses themselves.
TL;DR? "Loving" the military is too simplistic. Try something other.
Here's an idea: you go and stand for Congress on a pledge of giving $500,000,000,000 to NASA to put an astronaut on Mars. Let's see how it goes.
It's a mere question of priority. I'm willing to wager that if a comet were projected to slam into the Earth in 5 years, Congress would quickly spend 100x that sum, just to put as many people on Mars (and Moon, and orbital colonies, etc) as they humanly could.
BlackBerry bought The Astonishing Tribe (They designed the UI for the G1) to redesign the BlackBerry UI. They also bought QNX to be the base for the new BB OS 10. In fact they were quite aggressive in acquiring properties to bolster their brand.
All of those acquisitions do nothing (as in, bupkis) outside of the mobile device realm that Blackberry occupies. Nothing.
Find me something that can be used outside of that realm, and I'll be happy to concede.
Novell's acquisitions gave it reach into selling OSes (SuSE), email (GroupWise), and stuff well outside of their original directory/auth stuff. Hell, they even own UNIX (as in, SysV).
On top of that they have diversified the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Services) to secure iOS and Android devices.
Sure - way the hell after Microsoft beat them to it with ActiveSync, and by the time they even bothered, BlackBerry had a mere sliver of their former marketshare. Too little, too late - it was moot point by the time BES got that kind of feature set.
The problem BlackBerry has is mind share and they haven't got it anymore.
TBH, they never had it. Apps wasn't the big selling point with a Crackberry - Push email was front-and-center, and nothing else mattered. They only bothered with apps as a corporate focus (and email as secondary) after the iPhone stole its girlfriend, and Android stole its lunch-money.
RIM is only a half-step away from being a walking corpse. Barring a vortex that sucks up the towns of Cupertino and Mountain View, California? Nothing will change that.
Robots are useful in some mission parameters. I doubt you'll find anyone who will argue otherwise. OTOH, Manned exploration is preferable in other situations/parameters, for many of the reasons stated repeatedly on/. and in other forums.
As for the "score", that's a question of political will more than attempts.
Personally, I see room for both - the Solar System has enough resources to hold quite a few quadrillion human beings on a self-sustaining basis. Why not out it to work? Why not park factories and other massive pollution-generating facilities out there, where radiation and chemicals are no big deal... this would keep the Earth much cleaner, and less toxic overall.
Long story short, why not do *both*? Use the robots for the long-distance and dangerous stuff, and people for the missions which can portend future human habitation.
The two are not exclusive - they can be complementary.
1) The vast majority of smartphone thefts are 'smash and grab' jobs - that is, some dude gets his phone jerked out of his hand by some criminal already moving at a high rate of speed.
1a) Why? Because every second spent threatening the victim, watching him fumble through the unlock, etc, is another second more that the criminal can be identified, remembered, etc (not just by the victim, but by companions and passerby). It's also one more second for the victim (if suitably armed) to recover from the initial shock, and quietly reach for his own weapon. A $600 phone that one can fence for maybe $300-$400 at best isn't really worth those kinds of risks; most criminals are at least smart enough to know this (which is why most of them do the whole smash-and-grab thing in the first place.)
3) Great - you (the criminal) got the phone and it's unlocked. Now what if it takes some extraordinary measure to get the fingerprint ID changed on it (e.g. only the carrier or it's representative unlocks it, etc)?
Now yeah - if the reward for successfully stealing the phone and getting into it is great enough (e.g. the thing contains secret launch codes or some other fantastic nation-state-sized thing), *nothing* short of destroying the phone will stop you from finding a way into the device. However... this is a consumer device. It may have (at most) a banking app on it (which will require a password anyway), but is otherwise going to be largely useless. If it's used in BYOD (or even a full employer-provided phone) for work, ActiveSync (or whatever) will render at least that bit useless less than five minutes after the victim reaches another phone to call his/her employer and have it wiped.
Long story short? Yeah, it *can* be done, but the risks quickly outstrip the rewards.
==
As for TFA? Cool... now which finger? I never use an index finger for any biometric device... ever. That still leaves 8 to pick from if you want to lift my prints. If the thing locks solid after, say, 5 attempts? Well, your odds aren't exactly perfect, now are they?
To be fair, the Novell comparison doesn't exactly match up... Novell at least (to their credit) diversified a little, and went all-in to Linux (albeit too late).
Blackberry has done none of this, and (to extend the poker analogy) merely doubled-down on their own increasingly lousy hand.
That's well and good, until you realize that a typical email server usually has an MTA (postfix, courier, sendmail, whatever), some sort of spam trap/filter (in addition to external ones), maybe a means to more efficiently handle distie lists, SASL auth (postfix typically handles that nowadays, but...), and probably some sort of webmail thingy. That's way more than "one app".
Same with Apache/Tomcat/Whatever - you've got the web engine underneath, the Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/JavaScript based "app" (or, multiple apps, if you're using some generic CMS as a framework base), the interpreters to handle them all, the DB (or some client-ish means to reach one, such as MQ, ODBC, whatever), openSSL (or some means of handling certs and encryption)... again, way more than just "one app."
Also, speaking of databases, if I can compromise the kernel on the server running that "one app", I can crawl through that "one app", get kernelspace, pop in a shadow app to do whatever I want (and bury it nice and deep - go ahead and sort it from all the other kernelspace files in there w/o a decent IDS)... and long story short, you'd never know I did it unless you paid very close attention to your monthly bandwidth bill.
At least with some separation, a compromised userspace-only "app" is as far as you get. You can pop PHP but not apache (on a properly-built box)... oh well - just have to fix/replace the content. Without that separation, a violated box may well have a keylogger (or similar stdio-copying setup) installed for the express purpose of capturing what you do when you do realize that box is compromised (or even if it you don't...)
Even moreso - I prefer my server OSes to have that kernel/userspace separation. Sometimes that's the last line of defense against a fully-compromised system (see also, say, the typical crappily-coded PHP "application" that has the typical great big security hole (or four) in it...)
I get the drive for making the OS as thin as possible, but sometimes folks need to stop and think it through a little before they commit to doing it at all costs.
Slashdot Mirror
Your solution would work if nobody was ever wrongly arrested.
...no, but it'll add one hell of a sum to the total lawsuit.
...what sibling said.
If you were arrested at some point in the past and your face/mugshot winds up at the site, with a full (as possible) record of what happened to you? It's simply the truth. Now the ideal says that you paid your dues, did your time, etc. On the other hand, reality says you're not going to be able to bury such information anymore.
In spite of all that, I'm perfectly okay with such sites on these conditions:
1) a sunset period occurs where faces/records get automatically deleted after a period of years (5, 7, 10, whatever - maybe set one period for misdemeanors, a second for felonies, a lifetime for convictions involving pedophilia or death, etc).
2) a clear listing of what happened after the arrest must accompany the picture (dismissal, not guilty, fine, conviction, plea bargain, whatever). Some of these sites only list what the arrest was for.
IMHO? If I were ever arrested, and if it were my image on such sites? Fuck it - it would cost too much to chase down every two-bit operator with a web host and a bit of Perl scraping-script (seriously, there's like dozens of such sites out there. The reason why I know all this? I'll explain at the end...) Besides, it's not like a background check would miss such a thing in the first place unless the record was well and truly expunged.
(So, how do I know these things? I happened to find an ex-boss of mine on it after a friend of mine heard a rumor, and discovered the dude is currently in prison for doing things to his daughter that were way the hell wrong. Took four different sites before I found enough of the story to discover what happened. Pity - he seemed a really cool guy, and technically he's sharp as hell.)
We don't look at the weather report to decide if we need an umbrella. We look at the calendar.
Same story here in Portland, Oregon... except the umbrella is sort of mandatory from October to April.
..speaking of which, does TFA bother to address what happens to costs once the start-up grows beyond 49 employees?
No worries - I just remember it because that's what we named our first VMWare farm installation. ;)
More precisely, the acronym is W.O.P.R
No one needs to walk in a forest.
Walking in a forest is not an inherently dangerous activity with well-known addictive effects. Sticking a needle full of heroin into your vein... is.
If base jumping were addictive you might have a point
*ahem*...
But, there's still the initial taking of the drug - or did you forget that part?
You know, drugs are not about being smart, these are about having a shot at it, feeling good, then getting addicted.
You know? One would almost think that this little drug is a eugenicist's wet dream...
Have fun sleeping tonight, murderer.
I was with you right up until that sentence and your reasoning leading up to it. TBH, claiming that making a drug illegal is equivalent to murder is, in short, bullshit. There are numerous valid ideological reasons why drugs should not be banned by governmental edict, but that argument is not one of them.
This is why: In all honestly, it is not murder when someone willfully engages in the practice, knowing full well there are potentially fatal hazards involved (given the plethora of education on the subject, it's not like you can credibly claim a general ignorance here.) Long story short, while addiction is a tragedy, the participants are not exactly unwilling victims, either. Statistically, they all voluntarily jammed that needle into their arms (or smoked it, ate it, snorted it, whatever).
It's like claiming that making base jumping off of a building illegal is tantamount to murder, when the base jumpers are the ones willfully doing it themselves.
These "freedoms" and more are available... but they come at a price.
For instance? No problem...
The county where I live offers an anus-puckering discount on poor families wanting to buy a home (imagine this - being offered a decent home in a neighborhood full of $250k homes for a mere $27k at 0% interest. No, that's not a typo.) Only thing is, the county gets to stop by and make sure you're still poor during the 5-year 'mortgage' period, else the rates and total price rises accordingly. Oh, and CPS gets to check in on your kids any time they want, among other governmental visits that would otherwise demand a warrant.
Groceries? No problem, present an appropriate sob story and proof that you lack income, and most states will lavish you with an EBT card. 'course, unless you get creative about how you dodge it, there's an approved list of foods you can and cannot buy.
Car payments? Well, most metro areas do subsidize free mass transit if you make less than a certain income level... but really - it's mass transit. That means you're stuck with living within walking distance of it, and no further.
How does this relate to healthcare? Well, there are folks already demanding that people be forced to wear health activity monitors if they want that subsidized health-care... but you're forced to buy the subsidized plan if you cannot otherwise afford it on your own, so guess what happens if you have the misfortune to be impoverished? Yup - the government now owns your health.
Long story short, the "freedom"s are there, but the dependencies and (IMHO) conditions you subject yourself to in order to receive them are, well... about to become rather dehumanizing.
If you couple it with water/fluid recycling techniques, you stand a good change of doing well.
I find it strange that they would focus on just drinking water in the summary, when water will give you fuel and oxygen as well, and will likely be the greatest byproducts of this type of mining.
An F-16 can carry 4 2,000-lb bombs at the absolute most (and anything after two is risky on the wings).
It has 9 hard-points to hang ordinance on, but two of those (1 and 9) are wingtip rails, which means AIM-9 missiles. It will usually have 1-3 "bags" (fuel pods) hanging off of stations 4, 5 (centerline, under the fuselage), and 6. You'll need them in some combination to get any kind of real combat range (otherwise you're stuck with ~900lbs of internally-stored fuel, which ain't jack.) The big bombs would hang off of stations 3 and 7.
Now anti-personnel and fragmentary bombs? You can pack a buttload of 'em on that, and add in two AIM-9 Air-Groung missles to do some damage (which is what most ground-attack configured F-16's carry).
I am curious if they can slave in a LANTIRN pod kit onto the things and use that to get all-weather capability... though I can't remember if they retrofitted any of the A/B model jets to carry those.
IIRC, wasn't StarScream an F-15/F-14-ish looking variant? The F-16 only has one engine.
(Man - I feel *old* - I remember working on the F-16 A/B models )
No, developers are the most visible part of a class of workers who need total concentration on a task for a long period to make progress. You need at least 15 minutes to fully pick up where you left off in any half-complex program.
If you've ever had to un-snarl a bad router config, a supremely wrong DNS replication failure, chase down a leak in your anti-spam setup, locate and rid yourself of a network intrusion, figure out why a huge web farm intermittently blinks out, or diagnose why your massive SAN cluster suddenly complains it's out of disk space when there was 30 spare TB loafing around in it just an hour ago...?
Trust me - developers have no monopoly on complexity.
I much prefer to work from home, provided I have a dedicated work area/machines.
Ditto - I found that I was way more productive when there wasn't a stream of folks interrupting, ambient noises, etc. As long as everyone at home knows to leave you be unless the house is on fire, working at home is awesome for productivity.
OTOH, it does make things harder for you in regards to office politics and all the intangible bits that can make or break your career...
I agree but for one bit: It all depends on the individual, and what's going on at the time. A project that is interesting will keep me happily occupied for 12-14 hours straight (yet only feels like a couple of hours). A task that is exceedingly difficult will likely require a couple extra hours to solve (or reach a good stopping point) - just to avoid having to re-familiarize yourself with the problem all over again come the next day (or worse, waking up at 2:00 am to write down ideas and things your restless brain came up with while asleep).
Each person, each project/task, and each skill level/familiarity is different. On the latter, if I'm actually learning something along the way, cool - I can hang around a couple extra hours to finish it down and absorb what I learned. If I already know it and I'm just pounding things out because of a looming deadline, then screw it - I'm going home to get some sleep, deadline be damned just because some asshat was a bottleneck for everyone for so damned long, etc.
It's an organic problem, really - and I mean that in both the figurative and literal sense (after all, you gotta sleep/decompress sometime...)
a schedule which is interrupted by meetings and other crap means a huge loss of productivity for me.
Dude - that's the case with anyone - developer or not. Well, the sales guys and such may find them helpful...
Meanwhile, something about those meetings (and especially the excess of them) brings up something: I find that a lack of good design is often covered-up by a mass of meetings. I get that some information can only be correlated/gathered by a meeting, but too many of them I think tends to just make a mess. If your organization is plagued with excess meetings (or individual scrums that drag on for hours), productivity is going to go down the toilet no matter what you do.
American taxpayers love the military. At least most of those I know.
Let's clear something up here (Disclosure: I am a military veteran):
Americans love the military solider, sailor, airman, coastie, and marine. They love the really bad-assed hardware (well, most guys do). They love the sense of self-testing, charater-forging and adventure that often accompanies service. Hell, nothing was more exciting to the 22-year-old kid I was than to tweak and tune a multi-million-dollar aircraft capable of doing heavy damage on anything that you care to point it at.
Now - that said: Americans (*especially* those who served in the military) most definitely do not love the chain-of-command, the privations, the suspension of rights required to serve, or the really fucked-up ways in which the aforementioned chain-of-command often expresses themselves.
TL;DR? "Loving" the military is too simplistic. Try something other.
Here's an idea: you go and stand for Congress on a pledge of giving $500,000,000,000 to NASA to put an astronaut on Mars. Let's see how it goes.
It's a mere question of priority. I'm willing to wager that if a comet were projected to slam into the Earth in 5 years, Congress would quickly spend 100x that sum, just to put as many people on Mars (and Moon, and orbital colonies, etc) as they humanly could.
BlackBerry bought The Astonishing Tribe (They designed the UI for the G1) to redesign the BlackBerry UI.
They also bought QNX to be the base for the new BB OS 10.
In fact they were quite aggressive in acquiring properties to bolster their brand.
All of those acquisitions do nothing (as in, bupkis) outside of the mobile device realm that Blackberry occupies. Nothing.
Find me something that can be used outside of that realm, and I'll be happy to concede.
Novell's acquisitions gave it reach into selling OSes (SuSE), email (GroupWise), and stuff well outside of their original directory/auth stuff. Hell, they even own UNIX (as in, SysV).
On top of that they have diversified the BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Services) to secure iOS and Android devices.
Sure - way the hell after Microsoft beat them to it with ActiveSync, and by the time they even bothered, BlackBerry had a mere sliver of their former marketshare. Too little, too late - it was moot point by the time BES got that kind of feature set.
The problem BlackBerry has is mind share and they haven't got it anymore.
TBH, they never had it. Apps wasn't the big selling point with a Crackberry - Push email was front-and-center, and nothing else mattered. They only bothered with apps as a corporate focus (and email as secondary) after the iPhone stole its girlfriend, and Android stole its lunch-money.
RIM is only a half-step away from being a walking corpse. Barring a vortex that sucks up the towns of Cupertino and Mountain View, California? Nothing will change that.
Robots are useful in some mission parameters. I doubt you'll find anyone who will argue otherwise. /. and in other forums.
OTOH, Manned exploration is preferable in other situations/parameters, for many of the reasons stated repeatedly on
As for the "score", that's a question of political will more than attempts.
Personally, I see room for both - the Solar System has enough resources to hold quite a few quadrillion human beings on a self-sustaining basis. Why not out it to work? Why not park factories and other massive pollution-generating facilities out there, where radiation and chemicals are no big deal... this would keep the Earth much cleaner, and less toxic overall.
Long story short, why not do *both*? Use the robots for the long-distance and dangerous stuff, and people for the missions which can portend future human habitation.
The two are not exclusive - they can be complementary.
Err, some thoughts here:
1) The vast majority of smartphone thefts are 'smash and grab' jobs - that is, some dude gets his phone jerked out of his hand by some criminal already moving at a high rate of speed.
1a) Why? Because every second spent threatening the victim, watching him fumble through the unlock, etc, is another second more that the criminal can be identified, remembered, etc (not just by the victim, but by companions and passerby). It's also one more second for the victim (if suitably armed) to recover from the initial shock, and quietly reach for his own weapon. A $600 phone that one can fence for maybe $300-$400 at best isn't really worth those kinds of risks; most criminals are at least smart enough to know this (which is why most of them do the whole smash-and-grab thing in the first place.)
3) Great - you (the criminal) got the phone and it's unlocked. Now what if it takes some extraordinary measure to get the fingerprint ID changed on it (e.g. only the carrier or it's representative unlocks it, etc)?
Now yeah - if the reward for successfully stealing the phone and getting into it is great enough (e.g. the thing contains secret launch codes or some other fantastic nation-state-sized thing), *nothing* short of destroying the phone will stop you from finding a way into the device. However... this is a consumer device. It may have (at most) a banking app on it (which will require a password anyway), but is otherwise going to be largely useless. If it's used in BYOD (or even a full employer-provided phone) for work, ActiveSync (or whatever) will render at least that bit useless less than five minutes after the victim reaches another phone to call his/her employer and have it wiped.
Long story short? Yeah, it *can* be done, but the risks quickly outstrip the rewards.
==
As for TFA? Cool... now which finger? I never use an index finger for any biometric device... ever. That still leaves 8 to pick from if you want to lift my prints. If the thing locks solid after, say, 5 attempts? Well, your odds aren't exactly perfect, now are they?
To be fair, the Novell comparison doesn't exactly match up... Novell at least (to their credit) diversified a little, and went all-in to Linux (albeit too late).
Blackberry has done none of this, and (to extend the poker analogy) merely doubled-down on their own increasingly lousy hand.
That's well and good, until you realize that a typical email server usually has an MTA (postfix, courier, sendmail, whatever), some sort of spam trap/filter (in addition to external ones), maybe a means to more efficiently handle distie lists, SASL auth (postfix typically handles that nowadays, but...), and probably some sort of webmail thingy. That's way more than "one app".
Same with Apache/Tomcat/Whatever - you've got the web engine underneath, the Perl/PHP/Ruby/Python/Java/JavaScript based "app" (or, multiple apps, if you're using some generic CMS as a framework base), the interpreters to handle them all, the DB (or some client-ish means to reach one, such as MQ, ODBC, whatever), openSSL (or some means of handling certs and encryption)... again, way more than just "one app."
Also, speaking of databases, if I can compromise the kernel on the server running that "one app", I can crawl through that "one app", get kernelspace, pop in a shadow app to do whatever I want (and bury it nice and deep - go ahead and sort it from all the other kernelspace files in there w/o a decent IDS)... and long story short, you'd never know I did it unless you paid very close attention to your monthly bandwidth bill.
At least with some separation, a compromised userspace-only "app" is as far as you get. You can pop PHP but not apache (on a properly-built box)... oh well - just have to fix/replace the content. Without that separation, a violated box may well have a keylogger (or similar stdio-copying setup) installed for the express purpose of capturing what you do when you do realize that box is compromised (or even if it you don't...)
I'll take my server OS tried-and-tested, thanks.
Even moreso - I prefer my server OSes to have that kernel/userspace separation. Sometimes that's the last line of defense against a fully-compromised system (see also, say, the typical crappily-coded PHP "application" that has the typical great big security hole (or four) in it...)
I get the drive for making the OS as thin as possible, but sometimes folks need to stop and think it through a little before they commit to doing it at all costs.