This guy shouldn't be punished. He should be celebrated and be given multi-million dollars endorsement deals by the largest casinos (in addition to being defended by them against our overzealous government). Poker machines are marketed as puzzle boxes to be solved, or random boxes to be taken advantage of, if you're lucky or skillful enough.
Casinos will only benefit by his actions from the tens of thousands of people who will try to replicate what he did on their machines (of course, by now the flaw will have been fixed almost everywhere, but that won't stop many people from thinking that they may be able to find another similar flaw if they keep trying different variations and putting even more money in).
If Casinos are smart, they'll try to use this opportunity to reassure this particular segment of their customers, that what he did was fine and was within the rules, so that those patrons will try to do the same as he did (as hopeless as this endeavor may be for them).
I'm extremely left-eye dominant, to the the point where reading with my right eye alone is next to impossible. I can make out the scenery, but the center of my vision in that eye has the acuity of peripheral vision, and I can't parse complex shapes (ie text) with that eye alone. I hate to claim "I have a medical condition", but I do, and it's called amblyopia.
It must suck for you that the DMV tests the eyesight of each eye individually.
I can certainly see that as the kind of thing that will show up in version 2 or 3, but they would be a waste of money for me at this point.
Don't despair.
Google Glass would be a waste of money for almost anyone at this point (unless you're a developer wishing to develop on that emerging platform, or unless you're a billionaire looking for a fashion accessory and money is nothing to you right now).
PS: When I said returning the device a minimum of three times, I mean that they want you to return it a minimum of three times so that they can try repairing the problem instead of replacing the device.
I mean repeat offenders--with water-damaged phones and cracked screens. $15 a month or whatever it is may seem steep
Wow! You must really be a former Best Buy employee, because only a Best Buy employee would make a mistake like that. The $15 a month extended warranty at Best Buy does not cover water-damage. It never did.
The bottom line is I saw a lot of people get their money's worth.
Who were those people? Attractive people? Celebrities? Friends and relatives of your manager? Or just stories you heard?
The extended Warranty at Best Buy is even designed to make people think they have less rights than they usually do (at least for the people in California, where I'm from). For instance, take the clause about returning the device at least a minimum three times to Best Buy before being able to get a replacement for a defective product. That clause is utter nonsense.
If the product I purchased is defective within the Warranty period, by law the retailer must replace the device (even if it's just a manufacturers warranty). And of course, there is no nonsense about returning the device a minimum of three times, or being forced to ship the device back to the manufacturer (if one didn't get the extended Warranty).
This is a problematic piece because it's form of advertisement thinly veiled as a Slashdot article.
$125 a year (or more if I pay on a monthly basis) to replace my smartphone in case of an accident. Are they kidding me! The last problem I had with my Evo, Sprint replaced the screen free of charge (they didn't even charge me the $40 I had agreed to paid when I dropped it off). Please note, this is not an advertisement for Sprint (even if Sprint's customer service is fine, their 4G coverage is seriously getting degraded in areas where it used to be fine before).
I think everybody would be better off if they just set aside $125 a year in a piggy bank every time they buy a new device (whether it's a smartphone, a laptop, a TV, or whatever). It all adds up. If something ever goes wrong, they can just break the piggy bank. At least, after everything is repaired and the bills are settled, they'll have a few thousand dollars left over that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
I submit bug reports and feature requests, but they are ignored.
Hopefully he's also talking to him face-to-face, because using the issue tracker for filing a "his diagram is too big to fit on one page" would seem like overdoing it.
IMHO an iPhone 5 is starting to get a little too big. The larger samsungs are even worse.
Not if you like playing games.
And yes, tablets are better for games, but it's not like everyone is willing/able to carry one everywhere with them.
My prediction is that tablets won't die, larger screen phones won't die, and smaller screen phones will have a place in the market as well. It's not like everyone has the same needs regarding their devices.
adding that she has "no doubt that Tom will have an open door and an open mind, and that ultimately his decisions will be based on what he genuinely believes is best for the public interest, not any particular industry."
Seriously?
Of course, her quote is serious. Apparently, she's even able to predict the future (you do not want to mess with such a person, I can tell you that much).
The story hasn't even appeared in the Wall Street Journal yet, so it isn't even public knowledge yet. And yet, she seems to know all about what the Wall Street Journal is about to print before it prints it.
April 30, 2013 The Wall Street Journal and other sources are reporting that the President will nominate Tom Wheeler, Managing Director of Core Capital Partners, to replace outgoing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Perhaps her blog should just be renamed InsiderKnowledge.org instead, or ControllingTheNarrative.com. It's a well known PR techniques to try to control the narrative of a story before the news in question is actually given out to anyone else. This way, the breadcrumbs they lay out for others to find can be gobbled up by the journalists on tight deadlines who are eager to find relevant quotes for their articles.
This study is a piece of garbage though and falls into bad research, as the software wasn't used as intended in the car.
Before one can say the study is garbage, one has to ask if people really do use Siri (or vlingo) as those applications were designed to be used while driving. Personally, I can not say either way, I couldn't even use Siri (or vlingo, google voice search) while driving even if I wanted to. No application is capable of understanding my accent under any circumstance, let alone while driving.
Whatever happens, please do not force Siri to be used only when the car is stopped. I have a friend who's Prius built-in control panel only works for certain functions when the car is stopped, so she'll slow her car to less than 5 miles an hour on the freeway just so that *her* passenger can type in an address into the gps (thereby creating a dangerous situation where there shouldn't have been one to begin with).
And yes, a Prius is smart enough to detect if a passenger is in the passenger seat, because it does beep until such a passenger fastens his/her seat belt, but apparently, it's not smart enough to enable all the functions of the built-in computer panel while the car moving, even when such a passenger is present.
I was just citing a possible interpretation of this finding. I wasn't citing a fact.
I could have just gone the other way and suggested that religion possibly caused better mental health, but there were many people on slashdot doing that already and I didn't feel like joining in. In fact, I was only playing devil's advocate.
Statistics do not show that Christians, nor any other Religion for that matter, have a higher rate of illness (mental or physical) compared to atheists.
Rates of illness is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the propensity of someone in seeking and receiving medical/mental health services. Take the effect of genders for instance. It has been shown that men were less likely to seek treatment for heart disease. On the flip side of it, it has also been shown that doctors were more likely to discriminate against women showing signs of heart disease thereby not diagnosing them properly.
If you tell me that religion really doesn't play a possible factor in seeking medical/mental health services, then you'll really need to start citing your sources for me to take you seriously.
For starters, he mentioned taxpayers in the letter.
Taxpayers don't pay a dime to these people. In fact, a part of the money the patent office brought in used to go back into the bigger federal budget to fund other things.
That's a very naive way of looking at this. As far as I'm concerned, the patent office is just like the federal reserve. It enable others to conjure up money out of thin air (which others have to ultimately pay the bill for).
And without taxpayers to foot the bill for the police, the justice system, or the government to negotiate/enforce treaties with other countries, the pieces of papers the patent office grants would be completely worthless.
I'm highly suspicious that this is an actual patent lawyer.
That I agree with. I'm highly suspicious that this letter didn't come from the client himself. Usually, it's the inventor himself who is highly irrational about his/her invention, not the lawyer. Emotional investment into an idea can turn anyone into a real idiot, but to me, the surprising part is that this lawyer got emotional invested with this idea at all, since it's not even his name he placed on the patent application.
Or that christian people are just a bunch of hypercondriacs yearning to suffer clogging up all of our hospitals with fake ailments, or self-induced ailments, because they know they're sinners and they believe they deserve whatever disease their mind/body is conjuring up for them. In other words, religion could just be triggering a reverse-placebo effect which lasts a minimum of 40 days, and then suddenly magically disappears as if it was never even there in the first place.
The Amex charge was refunded to the employee. Nowhere does it say in the article that he was charged a second time (since the second time, an actual invoice was sent to the company).
The Amex charge is currently irrelevant in this case. It was only mentioned in the headline by IT World for click-baiting purposes. And when the Dice moderator saw the click-baiting going on, he/she just couldn't resist doing the same thing on Slashdot.
CK: If they have your gmail address, they can get in without your password. ST: What do you mean? How? CK: They're good!
What a stupid thing to say!
Hacking into gmail is considered a crime in the US (even if it's done by an allied country). A US government official shouldn't be praising criminal activity. Plus anyone can hack into gmail if they believe you're worth their attention: China, Israel, Anonymous, any hacker from Eastern Europe, etc. As far as I am concerned, my gmail is as secure as most US diplomatic cables, which means it's probably just wide-open to most hackers.
And even so, that my email can be hacked is no excuse for me to simply give up my password.
Subscriber? For all we know, it's the anonymous FBI who set up that web site and the FBI who anonymously donated most of the money to itself. It certainly wouldn't be that difficult for them to pressure an existing anonymous member to do their bidding, or to set up their own anonymous identity among other anonymous members just for a couple of months before volunteering to set the web site up.
Yes, they do, and I've even tried two different models at Google I/O, but they're not the same as this thing. This Indian device promises to be a thousand times better and cooler. See pictures here and here.
Unfortunately, it seems to be a concept-only device right now. No outsider was given the actual prototype to try in real life, and no one was even shown a demo in real life. So to me, that means it's a concept-only device.
I generally do not trust picture mockups and PR people, especially from a company that I've never heard of before (the company could be legit, but honestly, I just don't know that either way). So one hopes that this device does work and does behave as described, and that it will come out soon. Because for all we know, this could be just another flying car concept: a very cool and attractive concept, but one that doesn't really work as originally advertised or as originally promised.
Imagine the battery life on a device that never had to light up a display all the time.
Yes, imagine the battery life on a device that is using mechanical parts for display purposes. What used to be 6 hours battery life may now mean a 30 minutes battery life. Imagine all blind people fighting each other for the last electrical outlets at malls, conferences, and coffee shops.
I think you missed the point. Google has published the patches but the carriers have not distributed them.
Actually, may be they have. In the sources the ACLU is using for its FTC complaint, the most thorough and well researched article they're using to support their point, is purposefully not counting minor updates:
(Note that we define "update" as a major point release of Android—2.2 Froyo, 2.3 Gingerbread, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. More minor updates or firmware releases are not accounted for here.)
Now I understand Android users getting pissed off for not getting major updates, but if we're really talking about "security updates", minor versions should at least be counted. Gingerbread for instance is not going away anytime soon. All manufacturers for instance are still making the cheaper single processor Gingerbread phones, and they currently have no plans of ever stopping that (at least not for the lower end of the market). Does that mean that Gingerbread is insecure? Not in the least, Google is still making minor security updates for Gingerbread and will probably continue to do so for years to come.
And ACLU's Christopher Soghian, author/first signature of the two on the formal ACLU complaint, is quoting a Washington Post article which is only quoting himself, ACLU's Christopher Soghian, as the sole source. WTF? Why did he even feel the need to reference that article? Is his ego more important than the point he is trying to support?
Also, I can no longer find the reference, but the last time his name came up, someone on slashdot found his linkedin profile in which he immediately described himself as being an iPhone owner. And yes, I realize the irony of quoting a source I can no longer find, when I just complained about someone referencing an article in support of his point quoting himself as the sole source.
But assuming I'm telling the truth, or assuming you remember seeing what I saw, who would do that on their linkedin profile? Does he post that on his resume as well? I can think of more subtle ways to communicate one's membership in the iPhone owners club. And if anyone was coming to the rescue of Android users, I would prefer that person to be an Android user/owner himself (after all, there are so many), instead of a person who proudly wears his iPhone as some kind of badge of honor instead (again, that's assuming you think I'm even telling the truth about what I read from his linkedin profile, you may not even believe me of course).
when I came across one for Best Buy; on the front page, there was an ad for the Galaxy Tab II 10.1" tablet, and the Galaxy SIII phone; though the specs were almost identical (the SIII has a better processor, the Tab II has a 10 inch screen), the price difference was astronomical; the Tab II was listed for ~$350 and the SIII? Unsubsidized, the cost was $700!
There are no Samsung Galaxy Tab II 10.1 on Best Buy with 4G (or even 3G capabilities). I just checked. Besides, even if you could find one from a carrier store or something, a Tab II 10.1 wouldn't be able to make non-voip phone calls and wouldn't need to comply with the same exact FCC regulations that cell phones normally do (not to mention that it would probably be locked and subsidized as well).
Also please keep in mind that the resolution and the number of total pixels may be the same between the two devices, but it costs a lot more to fit that same total number of pixels in a smaller screen size (thereby guaranteeing that larger devices always have a smaller per inch density than equivalent phones). Take for instance the iPad, it took years for it to get to the retina display level that the iPhone had when it first came out.
And last but not least, I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung was indeed selling the Galaxy Tab II 10.1 at a loss just to get rid of its inventory. Many people nowadays are going toward the Tab Note II 10.1 or 7 inch models instead.
PS: Carriers are indeed ripping us off, but personally, I would give other reasons to demonstrate that they are doing so.
...or to interrupt the function of a caller id app right in the middle of a ringing phone call, just to ask for permission to my contacts.
By the way, does iOS even do that? I suppose it would just be easier for Apple to not have any third party-made caller id applications, just like it doesn't have any of the awesome third party-made keyboard apps Android has.
I'm a little surprised Android hasn't copied iOS's behavior, where it asks the user whether or not to grant permissions to a specific thing (e.g Contacts or Location) at the time the app tries to do so.
My old Nokia phone used to do that. It used to give me a modal security dialog warning to reject/accept/permanently accept the requests made by an application on my behalf (I do not remember if it had a 'permanently reject' option, may be it did?). In any case, this security behavior drove me absolutely nuts! I couldn't do a single thing without having my flow interrupted by another security dialog. Also since I was no longer in the context of the Ovi App Store when receiving the warning, I was also less likely to leave a comment about the permission in question and I would have been less likely to downgrade the visibility of the application and warn others through my negative rating.
I hope that iOS does it better. Give me usability ahead of privacy any day. After all, I let the pizza delivery guy and the postman know where I live, what's the big problem of letting a corporation/application of my own choosing know where I am.
If it's a battery issue, Android lets me know visually by showing the gps icon in the status bar and letting me know which applications are proportionally the biggest energy hogs. Android also lets me turn off gps location information to all applications if I ever have the need. This solution is not perfect by any means, but it's a far better solution than interrupting the function of a gps navigation right in the middle of my request, to ask for gps permission, or to interrupt the function of a caller id app right in the middle of a ringing phone call, just to ask for permission to my contacts.
Slashdot Mirror
ATMs are not the same as a Poker machines.
This guy shouldn't be punished. He should be celebrated and be given multi-million dollars endorsement deals by the largest casinos (in addition to being defended by them against our overzealous government). Poker machines are marketed as puzzle boxes to be solved, or random boxes to be taken advantage of, if you're lucky or skillful enough.
Casinos will only benefit by his actions from the tens of thousands of people who will try to replicate what he did on their machines (of course, by now the flaw will have been fixed almost everywhere, but that won't stop many people from thinking that they may be able to find another similar flaw if they keep trying different variations and putting even more money in).
If Casinos are smart, they'll try to use this opportunity to reassure this particular segment of their customers, that what he did was fine and was within the rules, so that those patrons will try to do the same as he did (as hopeless as this endeavor may be for them).
I'm extremely left-eye dominant, to the the point where reading with my right eye alone is next to impossible. I can make out the scenery, but the center of my vision in that eye has the acuity of peripheral vision, and I can't parse complex shapes (ie text) with that eye alone. I hate to claim "I have a medical condition", but I do, and it's called amblyopia.
It must suck for you that the DMV tests the eyesight of each eye individually.
I can certainly see that as the kind of thing that will show up in version 2 or 3, but they would be a waste of money for me at this point.
Don't despair.
Google Glass would be a waste of money for almost anyone at this point (unless you're a developer wishing to develop on that emerging platform, or unless you're a billionaire looking for a fashion accessory and money is nothing to you right now).
PS: When I said returning the device a minimum of three times, I mean that they want you to return it a minimum of three times so that they can try repairing the problem instead of replacing the device.
I mean repeat offenders--with water-damaged phones and cracked screens. $15 a month or whatever it is may seem steep
Wow! You must really be a former Best Buy employee, because only a Best Buy employee would make a mistake like that. The $15 a month extended warranty at Best Buy does not cover water-damage. It never did.
The bottom line is I saw a lot of people get their money's worth.
Who were those people? Attractive people? Celebrities? Friends and relatives of your manager? Or just stories you heard?
The extended Warranty at Best Buy is even designed to make people think they have less rights than they usually do (at least for the people in California, where I'm from). For instance, take the clause about returning the device at least a minimum three times to Best Buy before being able to get a replacement for a defective product. That clause is utter nonsense.
If the product I purchased is defective within the Warranty period, by law the retailer must replace the device (even if it's just a manufacturers warranty). And of course, there is no nonsense about returning the device a minimum of three times, or being forced to ship the device back to the manufacturer (if one didn't get the extended Warranty).
This is a problematic piece because it's form of advertisement thinly veiled as a Slashdot article.
$125 a year (or more if I pay on a monthly basis) to replace my smartphone in case of an accident. Are they kidding me! The last problem I had with my Evo, Sprint replaced the screen free of charge (they didn't even charge me the $40 I had agreed to paid when I dropped it off). Please note, this is not an advertisement for Sprint (even if Sprint's customer service is fine, their 4G coverage is seriously getting degraded in areas where it used to be fine before).
I think everybody would be better off if they just set aside $125 a year in a piggy bank every time they buy a new device (whether it's a smartphone, a laptop, a TV, or whatever). It all adds up. If something ever goes wrong, they can just break the piggy bank. At least, after everything is repaired and the bills are settled, they'll have a few thousand dollars left over that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
I submit bug reports and feature requests, but they are ignored.
Hopefully he's also talking to him face-to-face, because using the issue tracker for filing a "his diagram is too big to fit on one page" would seem like overdoing it.
IMHO an iPhone 5 is starting to get a little too big. The larger samsungs are even worse.
Not if you like playing games.
And yes, tablets are better for games, but it's not like everyone is willing/able to carry one everywhere with them.
My prediction is that tablets won't die, larger screen phones won't die, and smaller screen phones will have a place in the market as well. It's not like everyone has the same needs regarding their devices.
adding that she has "no doubt that Tom will have an open door and an open mind, and that ultimately his decisions will be based on what he genuinely believes is best for the public interest, not any particular industry."
Seriously?
Of course, her quote is serious. Apparently, she's even able to predict the future (you do not want to mess with such a person, I can tell you that much).
The story hasn't even appeared in the Wall Street Journal yet, so it isn't even public knowledge yet. And yet, she seems to know all about what the Wall Street Journal is about to print before it prints it.
April 30, 2013
The Wall Street Journal and other sources are reporting that the President will nominate Tom Wheeler, Managing Director of Core Capital Partners, to replace outgoing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Perhaps her blog should just be renamed InsiderKnowledge.org instead, or ControllingTheNarrative.com. It's a well known PR techniques to try to control the narrative of a story before the news in question is actually given out to anyone else. This way, the breadcrumbs they lay out for others to find can be gobbled up by the journalists on tight deadlines who are eager to find relevant quotes for their articles.
This study is a piece of garbage though and falls into bad research, as the software wasn't used as intended in the car.
Before one can say the study is garbage, one has to ask if people really do use Siri (or vlingo) as those applications were designed to be used while driving. Personally, I can not say either way, I couldn't even use Siri (or vlingo, google voice search) while driving even if I wanted to. No application is capable of understanding my accent under any circumstance, let alone while driving.
Whatever happens, please do not force Siri to be used only when the car is stopped. I have a friend who's Prius built-in control panel only works for certain functions when the car is stopped, so she'll slow her car to less than 5 miles an hour on the freeway just so that *her* passenger can type in an address into the gps (thereby creating a dangerous situation where there shouldn't have been one to begin with).
And yes, a Prius is smart enough to detect if a passenger is in the passenger seat, because it does beep until such a passenger fastens his/her seat belt, but apparently, it's not smart enough to enable all the functions of the built-in computer panel while the car moving, even when such a passenger is present.
I was just citing a possible interpretation of this finding. I wasn't citing a fact.
I could have just gone the other way and suggested that religion possibly caused better mental health, but there were many people on slashdot doing that already and I didn't feel like joining in. In fact, I was only playing devil's advocate.
Statistics do not show that Christians, nor any other Religion for that matter, have a higher rate of illness (mental or physical) compared to atheists.
Rates of illness is not what I was talking about. I was talking about the propensity of someone in seeking and receiving medical/mental health services. Take the effect of genders for instance. It has been shown that men were less likely to seek treatment for heart disease. On the flip side of it, it has also been shown that doctors were more likely to discriminate against women showing signs of heart disease thereby not diagnosing them properly.
If you tell me that religion really doesn't play a possible factor in seeking medical/mental health services, then you'll really need to start citing your sources for me to take you seriously.
For starters, he mentioned taxpayers in the letter.
Taxpayers don't pay a dime to these people. In fact, a part of the money the patent office brought in used to go back into the bigger federal budget to fund other things.
That's a very naive way of looking at this. As far as I'm concerned, the patent office is just like the federal reserve. It enable others to conjure up money out of thin air (which others have to ultimately pay the bill for).
And without taxpayers to foot the bill for the police, the justice system, or the government to negotiate/enforce treaties with other countries, the pieces of papers the patent office grants would be completely worthless.
I'm highly suspicious that this is an actual patent lawyer.
That I agree with. I'm highly suspicious that this letter didn't come from the client himself. Usually, it's the inventor himself who is highly irrational about his/her invention, not the lawyer. Emotional investment into an idea can turn anyone into a real idiot, but to me, the surprising part is that this lawyer got emotional invested with this idea at all, since it's not even his name he placed on the patent application.
You guys really need to mod me down instead of up. I was totally wrong. I didn't read the second page.
Or that christian people are just a bunch of hypercondriacs yearning to suffer clogging up all of our hospitals with fake ailments, or self-induced ailments, because they know they're sinners and they believe they deserve whatever disease their mind/body is conjuring up for them. In other words, religion could just be triggering a reverse-placebo effect which lasts a minimum of 40 days, and then suddenly magically disappears as if it was never even there in the first place.
Are those detectors at least useful for their original purpose? Detecting golf balls. Or is that a scam too?
Yes, my bad. I do suck in this case.
The Amex charge was refunded to the employee. Nowhere does it say in the article that he was charged a second time (since the second time, an actual invoice was sent to the company).
The Amex charge is currently irrelevant in this case. It was only mentioned in the headline by IT World for click-baiting purposes. And when the Dice moderator saw the click-baiting going on, he/she just couldn't resist doing the same thing on Slashdot.
Click-baiting is essentially the real story here.
CK: If they have your gmail address, they can get in without your password.
ST: What do you mean? How?
CK: They're good!
What a stupid thing to say!
Hacking into gmail is considered a crime in the US (even if it's done by an allied country). A US government official shouldn't be praising criminal activity. Plus anyone can hack into gmail if they believe you're worth their attention: China, Israel, Anonymous, any hacker from Eastern Europe, etc. As far as I am concerned, my gmail is as secure as most US diplomatic cables, which means it's probably just wide-open to most hackers.
And even so, that my email can be hacked is no excuse for me to simply give up my password.
Technically, diplomats _are_ politicians.
Subscriber? For all we know, it's the anonymous FBI who set up that web site and the FBI who anonymously donated most of the money to itself. It certainly wouldn't be that difficult for them to pressure an existing anonymous member to do their bidding, or to set up their own anonymous identity among other anonymous members just for a couple of months before volunteering to set the web site up.
These things already exist.
Yes, they do, and I've even tried two different models at Google I/O, but they're not the same as this thing. This Indian device promises to be a thousand times better and cooler. See pictures here and here.
Unfortunately, it seems to be a concept-only device right now. No outsider was given the actual prototype to try in real life, and no one was even shown a demo in real life. So to me, that means it's a concept-only device.
I generally do not trust picture mockups and PR people, especially from a company that I've never heard of before (the company could be legit, but honestly, I just don't know that either way). So one hopes that this device does work and does behave as described, and that it will come out soon. Because for all we know, this could be just another flying car concept: a very cool and attractive concept, but one that doesn't really work as originally advertised or as originally promised.
Imagine the battery life on a device that never had to light up a display all the time.
Yes, imagine the battery life on a device that is using mechanical parts for display purposes. What used to be 6 hours battery life may now mean a 30 minutes battery life. Imagine all blind people fighting each other for the last electrical outlets at malls, conferences, and coffee shops.
It will be very interesting to say the least.
I think you missed the point. Google has published the patches but the carriers have not distributed them.
Actually, may be they have. In the sources the ACLU is using for its FTC complaint, the most thorough and well researched article they're using to support their point, is purposefully not counting minor updates:
(Note that we define "update" as a major point release of Android—2.2 Froyo, 2.3 Gingerbread, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. More minor updates or firmware releases are not accounted for here.)
Now I understand Android users getting pissed off for not getting major updates, but if we're really talking about "security updates", minor versions should at least be counted. Gingerbread for instance is not going away anytime soon. All manufacturers for instance are still making the cheaper single processor Gingerbread phones, and they currently have no plans of ever stopping that (at least not for the lower end of the market). Does that mean that Gingerbread is insecure? Not in the least, Google is still making minor security updates for Gingerbread and will probably continue to do so for years to come.
And ACLU's Christopher Soghian, author/first signature of the two on the formal ACLU complaint, is quoting a Washington Post article which is only quoting himself, ACLU's Christopher Soghian, as the sole source. WTF? Why did he even feel the need to reference that article? Is his ego more important than the point he is trying to support?
Also, I can no longer find the reference, but the last time his name came up, someone on slashdot found his linkedin profile in which he immediately described himself as being an iPhone owner. And yes, I realize the irony of quoting a source I can no longer find, when I just complained about someone referencing an article in support of his point quoting himself as the sole source.
But assuming I'm telling the truth, or assuming you remember seeing what I saw, who would do that on their linkedin profile? Does he post that on his resume as well? I can think of more subtle ways to communicate one's membership in the iPhone owners club. And if anyone was coming to the rescue of Android users, I would prefer that person to be an Android user/owner himself (after all, there are so many), instead of a person who proudly wears his iPhone as some kind of badge of honor instead (again, that's assuming you think I'm even telling the truth about what I read from his linkedin profile, you may not even believe me of course).
when I came across one for Best Buy; on the front page, there was an ad for the Galaxy Tab II 10.1" tablet, and the Galaxy SIII phone; though the specs were almost identical (the SIII has a better processor, the Tab II has a 10 inch screen), the price difference was astronomical; the Tab II was listed for ~$350 and the SIII? Unsubsidized, the cost was $700!
There are no Samsung Galaxy Tab II 10.1 on Best Buy with 4G (or even 3G capabilities). I just checked. Besides, even if you could find one from a carrier store or something, a Tab II 10.1 wouldn't be able to make non-voip phone calls and wouldn't need to comply with the same exact FCC regulations that cell phones normally do (not to mention that it would probably be locked and subsidized as well).
Also please keep in mind that the resolution and the number of total pixels may be the same between the two devices, but it costs a lot more to fit that same total number of pixels in a smaller screen size (thereby guaranteeing that larger devices always have a smaller per inch density than equivalent phones). Take for instance the iPad, it took years for it to get to the retina display level that the iPhone had when it first came out.
And last but not least, I wouldn't be surprised if Samsung was indeed selling the Galaxy Tab II 10.1 at a loss just to get rid of its inventory. Many people nowadays are going toward the Tab Note II 10.1 or 7 inch models instead.
PS: Carriers are indeed ripping us off, but personally, I would give other reasons to demonstrate that they are doing so.
...or to interrupt the function of a caller id app right in the middle of a ringing phone call, just to ask for permission to my contacts.
By the way, does iOS even do that? I suppose it would just be easier for Apple to not have any third party-made caller id applications, just like it doesn't have any of the awesome third party-made keyboard apps Android has.
I'm a little surprised Android hasn't copied iOS's behavior, where it asks the user whether or not to grant permissions to a specific thing (e.g Contacts or Location) at the time the app tries to do so.
My old Nokia phone used to do that. It used to give me a modal security dialog warning to reject/accept/permanently accept the requests made by an application on my behalf (I do not remember if it had a 'permanently reject' option, may be it did?). In any case, this security behavior drove me absolutely nuts! I couldn't do a single thing without having my flow interrupted by another security dialog. Also since I was no longer in the context of the Ovi App Store when receiving the warning, I was also less likely to leave a comment about the permission in question and I would have been less likely to downgrade the visibility of the application and warn others through my negative rating.
I hope that iOS does it better. Give me usability ahead of privacy any day. After all, I let the pizza delivery guy and the postman know where I live, what's the big problem of letting a corporation/application of my own choosing know where I am.
If it's a battery issue, Android lets me know visually by showing the gps icon in the status bar and letting me know which applications are proportionally the biggest energy hogs. Android also lets me turn off gps location information to all applications if I ever have the need. This solution is not perfect by any means, but it's a far better solution than interrupting the function of a gps navigation right in the middle of my request, to ask for gps permission, or to interrupt the function of a caller id app right in the middle of a ringing phone call, just to ask for permission to my contacts.