You just illustrate the problem with the war on drugs. You're taking acetaminophen. The only reason it is in the pills is to kill you if you dare to take too much. They could either prescribe the oxycodone on its own or in combination with a safer NSAID and it would only be safer and more effective.
Too many painkillers are designed with a LACK of safety being a design criterion - all because we'd rather kill people who get the dosing wrong rather than risk somebody getting high.
Well, you're describing what you do - but most doctors prescribe whatever the product circular tells them to, and most people take what is prescribed. If you're in a hospital they'll refuse to give it to you most likely if you won't take it as prescribed.
However, in terms of the dosage that is most likely to work for you, the chemistry works more-or-less as you describe. Weight should almost always be a considerating when prescribing medication.
The problem is that many drugs are only available in a few potencies, and most clinical trial data is just the average across the population at each potency. Maybe the manufacturer has more data on a mg/kg basis, but I doubt doctors have access to it.
My own wife is small and takes many medications - it is a bit of an empirical thing but I'm fairly confident that on average she gets prescribed more than she really needs. Prescription practices are based as much on tradition as science, except maybe if you're talking about chemotherapy or something like that.
Oh, and body weight isn't necessarily the best indicator of dosing. I'm not an expert, but I'd think that you'd also need to consider how the drug is partitioned in the body - if it is more lipid-soluble then body fat might matter more, and so on. As we all learned in physical chemistry chemicals distribute themselves in equilibrium between various phases as governed by their partition coefficients (once everything reaches steady state). Since drugs are engineered to target particular tissues/etc, I'd think that they'd be more sensitive to this than most. If the dissociation constant with its target is low enough, then binding might be near-stoichiometric so dosing might be based more on the total mass of the target in the body, and some organs don't scale with weight so much.
And again, I'm not an expert in such things - I just know a little chemistry...
I don't know what phone ADP is, but I was able to run Google Navigate on the MyTouch which is the second Android phone ever released.
The MyTouch was upgraded to Froyo I think - at least that's what Wikipedia says. The G1 and ADP never got past 1.6.
The ADP and the G1 were the first android phones. They were hardware-identical - the difference was that T-Mobile sold the G1 locked-down, and Google sold the ADP direct with an unlocked HBOOT. The jailbreaking instructions for the G1 typically involved flashing the ADP HBOOT onto the G1 - that's what the "engineering bootloader" was.
People tend not to count the ADP for whatever reason, but I'd consider it the first "Nexus" phone though it didn't use the name. It was sold direct by Google and was intended to be the platform showcase. It was "pure Google" as they say today.
In any case, I agree that the Nexus line is your best bet - I just can't say that we've arrived yet in terms of long-term support. Again, from my perspective I care more that I can jailbreak the phone and that lots of other FOSS-types buy it - that generally assures me of longer-term support. On the other hand, the bigger-name android developers get so many donations these days that they don't really have incentive to stick with older phones the way they had to with the G1. When you're given money for new phones every other month it is hard to give much attention to the phone you got a year ago.
Yup - if today's pundits were alive in 1990 they'd be talking about how college students talk on the phone and hang out at the lunch table - they have no familiarity with things like interoffice mail, documents, and email. Well, duh - they're college students, and the goals of a college student are a bit different from the goals of a business.
The only thing that gives the pundits traction today is that managers today do most of the same things as college students (indeed they may never have done much else if they didn't work their way up), and think that because they can hit reply to an email from a subordinate and type "No" or "Go ahead" on a tablet that their subordinate could do their job using one.
Unless all you do all day is read email and stuff other people send to you, you'll probably need something with a keyboard and a mouse.
All that said, if you could dock a tablet to a workstation then I could see the convergence.
It is if you were a 50 year old employee of WP holding a ton of stock and you subsequently died without leaving any heirs behind.
Instead of having a few 10s of millions of dollars to play with in early retirement you instead get nothing until after you're dead. No doubt somebody will donate some money to the Windows-for-schools charity in your name instead.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Look at it another way - if the court merely hands down a $1B verdict here, every CEO across the country will get the message loud and clear - do what MS did! Think about it, you get a boost in market share today and get to charge monopoly prices for a decade, at some risk that 17 years from now you might have to give back $1B. Well, you won't be CEO in 17 years for starters, and even if you are $1B in 17 years is worth $200M today at an interest rate of 10% (typical NPV rate to use). I'm sure MS's actions made them a LOT more than $200M.
2.5 years? I don't know why people are so hell bent on a long term commitment. If your phone is 2 years old you're using an ancient brick and probably wouldn't be welcome in geek circles anyway. Hand in your card.
Perhaps I buy phones because they're useful - and not to impress other geeks? In any case, a cell phone contract is typically two years. Sure, you might be able to get a deal before then, but only with your current carrier (well, other carriers will offer you a deal, but you won't get out of any ETFs). Plus, it is two years from when you buy the phone, not two years from when the phone was first sold - so if they sell the phone for six months they should support it for 2.5 years from introduction.
I suspect that we'd see this practice change if people bothered to create Android worms (especially ones that really aimed to disrupt the mobile network - or better still jam as much spectrum as they can with the radio). Suddenly not offering security patches for two years would be something carriers wouldn't be too eager to do.
The DMCA does tell you how to act on a notice. No validation is required - merely a sworn affidavit by the alleged copyright holder. It appears that UMG did not issue one of these.
Oh, I doubt any court would do anything - they're far too beholden to big companies to uphold a copyright ruling on behalf of somebody small.
Then again, I'm sure that if you're willing to go through the trouble you could probably cost them many tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills litigating it all the way to the Supreme Court. Just litigate it pro se and do what all the big companies do - drag it all out.
The reason why Nexus One does not get ICS is because it has ridiculously small amount of internal memory, not enough to get ICS installed and still leave space for any third-party apps. It's not because update is being deliberately withheld from the device, as is the case with carriers.
It was their choice to make the OS take so much space. Apple manages to keep updating their older phones despite what must be similar constraints. It is just a matter of priorities.
I'm sure in a few months you'll see Cyanogenmod releasing ICS for the N1 and getting it to work out fine. Plus, you can always run external apps from SD.
If you can get Froyo working on a G1 (it performs at least as well as the stock version of 1.6), I'm sure you can get ICS to work on an N1. You just have to care enough to make the effort.
Interesting - I haven't been in one of their stores for a month or two, but I'd love to see this arrangement continue.
I do agree that phone providers should be required by law to separate phone sales from service sales. To ensure they really are separate anybody should be allowed to come in and get the best advertised deal on either without buying the other - so if they advertise a phone for $1 plus $1/month for 2 years then I should be able to walk in and buy 50 unlocked phones at that rate and walk out.
By all means offer whatever deals you want on the service, or on the phones, but don't couple them.
Of course, I'd go about 10 steps further and clean up the whole cell phone industry - splitting out the natural monopoly components of the industry and regulating the living daylights out of them. For starters I wouldn't let anybody offering cell phone service own a tower, or form any kind of exclusive deal from anybody who owns a tower. Then I wouldn't let anybody own more than 35% of the spectrum on any piece of land, or any spectrum at all on more than 30000 mi^2 of land. Tower operators would relay packets from service providers to phones, offering the same rates to anybody they do business with. Since there would be at least 3 in any area pricing would be kept in check. Since deals aren't exclusive anybody could start a phone company by working out deals with the various operators, getting the same rate as ATT/etc. Congestion in any area would solve itself as those operators could charge more money, creating incentive for others to build more towers to get in on the action.
Operators could still offer what appears like a seamlessly vertically-integrated experience to the consumer, but pricing would be protected by the fact that nobody gets market power and barriers to entry are much lower.
Hmm, for some reason I had the release date as March. So, they just barely eeked out 18 months from the release date, though not 18 months from the date the last one was sold (which I'd argue should be the benchmark).
Great to hear - glad one phone made it. Better update the wikipedia page as it suggests that it is still stuck on 2.2. You did mean that they updated it to Gingerbread, right?
Hey, I'll accept that as a chink in the iPhone's record. However, they're still WAY ahead right now in terms of long-term support. A year after they stopped selling the ADP I bet you couldn't run the free Google Navigate app on it (it never got past Donut, and I think Navigate required Elcair).
Don't get me wrong, I still prefer Android. However, I have no illusions about its weaknesses.
I think the more interesting legal theory would be that since UMG and Google are collectively not following the safe harbor structure of the DMCA, they become liable for not proactively removing content WITHOUT a DMCA takedown notice.
Go find something posted on youtube that you can argue that you have a copyright interest in, and sue both UMG and Google for failing to remove it proactively. Both had the ability to do so, and chose not to police their content. Their only defense would be the safe harbor clause of the DMCA, but sue them for discriminating against your copyright interests for not providing you the same access as UMG.
For bonus points be sure to seek an injuction against the continued operation of Youtube.:)
only a complete moron would have expected the banks to continue to leverage loans at a loss!
News flash - the world is full of complete morons. However, they still need someplace to live. By all means restrict their reproduction privileges, but unless we want them starving on the streets at some point we need to look out for them...
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor?
There are none. Most receive their last update before they're even done selling them. The Nexus One was the record holder until it got its last update on Sep 24th of this year - 1.5 years after the original announcement date. If somebody knows of a phone supported longer I'm all ears, but so far Android's best case is far behind Apple's worst case.
I don't mind rooting my phone, but I don't consider the willingness of phone owners to maintain their own phones a substitute for proper vendor support.
Perhaps one of these days somebody will release a virus targeting Froyo and we can watch the world's mobile networks collapse...
If you really want an alternative, stick to the Nexus series. I have had Nexus one and just upgraded to Galaxy Nexus.
You mean the Nexus One that received what is likely to be its last update one year and two months after they stopped selling it, and only one year and six months after it was first announced? That is the phone that is already one major version behind the current release?
The Nexus One is the longest-supported Android phone to date (certainly it received better support than the ADP which was the previous Google-branded phone and it stopped getting updates before they even stopped selling it). However, I'd hardly hold it up as an example of long-term commitment. I'll have to see what the Nexus S updates look like a year from today - I won't be holding my breath.
The guy you responded to was talking about updates 2.5 years after buying the phone. No android phone has gotten an official update 2.5 years after the phone was even publicly announced, let alone discontinued.
Your Nexus One is obsolete - Google said it themselves and they won't be porting ICS. If you bought it under contract, then you are still under contract since it isn't even two years old. Google doesn't even support their own phones for two years - the other carriers are just far worse.
I think so far all the iPhones have been kept on the latest release at least two years after they are no longer sold, and usually about three years after the introduction date.
The benchmark should be that the phone runs the latest major revision of the OS two years after the last day that it is sold. That's when the last customer to buy one is eligible for a replacement.
So, at least then I can buy a phone and know in advance what kind of experience I'm going to have. Right now it is anybody's guess whether one phone will have updates for a year, or if you're receiving it as-is for the rest of its life. About the only thing it seems you can count on is that no android phone will receive updates for your full contract length - Google is even abandoning the Nexus One and it isn't even two years old.
The problems the risk analysis team faced even in the 2000 era was such a tough nut to crack that they had to limit the complexity of the algorithms they used just because there wasn't hardware powerful enough.
Look, the problem here is the black swan. You can't model a black swan unless you can simulate the entire world economy down to the last neuron in some farmer's brain in a rural Chinese village. Right now we can't model a single human brain let alone all of them.
The world economy didn't melt down because some spreadsheet only calculated 12 decimal places when it should have calculated 325. It melted down because everybody decided to leverage themselves 100x on the bet that housing prices wouldn't ever go down, and they did. Now the world governments are starting to leverage themselves in small multiples on the bet that nobody would ever stop buying their bonds, mostly to bail out the bankers who bet on housing prices. I don't need arbitrary precision arithmetic to tell you where that is going to end up if it doesn't change FAST.
1. Malicious exit nodes can correlate your BT streams to your Tor web browsing, and learn your real IP.
How exactly can they do this? Why would your web browsing have any correlation to your BT streams?
3. Most popular BT clients send the tracker your IP anyway.
This is definitely a risk. It is probably best mitigated by ensuring that the client doesn't know your IP (NAT, no route to internet, etc).
If you want anonymous P2P, then I2P is a much better option.
Assuming you don't want to actually download anything. What is actually available on I2P? How does its library compare with any of the trackers on the internet at large? The reason people use tor isn't because it is more secure, but because it lets you browse the internet that you already use.
Sure, it does create more traffic on the network, but most of its other problems are really not much different than the sorts of problems people can run into using a browser with tor.
So far I've owned two android phones - the G1 and the G2. The first cost me I think around $100-200 or so - an iPhone at the time would have been a LOT higher (wasn't it still like $450 or something with a contract back then?). The second was free despite being nearly brand new, while an iPhone would probably have been around $300. So, the price differences were about 100% and ERROR-Div0%.
Sure, some people will pay $300 for an Android phone, but I don't think that is the reason they're clobbering the market. On some carriers Apple isn't even an option.
Personally the thing I like about Android is the variety, which some consider its weakness. I tend not to like the same things as everybody else, so the fact that "everybody else" likes something doesn't really sway me much. I wanted a keyboard on my current phone, and to Steve Jobs that just means I don't know what I'm doing. Whatever - he's entitled to an opinion...
Wasn't intending to point fingers. My sense however in many fields (probably including the medical field) is that an error of commission tends to be punished more heavily than an error of omission. That tends to lead to a bias towards inaction.
You don't even need a group - I can create as many facebook accounts as I care to. I'm sure if they get logins to 300 accounts from one IP they'll catch on, but are they really going to look for every IP associated wtih 20 accounts and investigate it to see if it is a NAT?
I think the big issue with metrics is the "heisenburg effect" that results in distortions in behavior.
If you passively collect data and periodically evaluate it for the sake of trying to make general improvements, you'll probably be successful.
If you systematically try to control some metric and use it (even indirectly) as the basis for performance differentiation then the organization will pull out all the stops and will micro-optimize that metric. Usually that will result in problems for the organization, but likely success for anybody who can get themselves congratulated and promoted out of harms way.
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You just illustrate the problem with the war on drugs. You're taking acetaminophen. The only reason it is in the pills is to kill you if you dare to take too much. They could either prescribe the oxycodone on its own or in combination with a safer NSAID and it would only be safer and more effective.
Too many painkillers are designed with a LACK of safety being a design criterion - all because we'd rather kill people who get the dosing wrong rather than risk somebody getting high.
Well, you're describing what you do - but most doctors prescribe whatever the product circular tells them to, and most people take what is prescribed. If you're in a hospital they'll refuse to give it to you most likely if you won't take it as prescribed.
However, in terms of the dosage that is most likely to work for you, the chemistry works more-or-less as you describe. Weight should almost always be a considerating when prescribing medication.
The problem is that many drugs are only available in a few potencies, and most clinical trial data is just the average across the population at each potency. Maybe the manufacturer has more data on a mg/kg basis, but I doubt doctors have access to it.
My own wife is small and takes many medications - it is a bit of an empirical thing but I'm fairly confident that on average she gets prescribed more than she really needs. Prescription practices are based as much on tradition as science, except maybe if you're talking about chemotherapy or something like that.
Oh, and body weight isn't necessarily the best indicator of dosing. I'm not an expert, but I'd think that you'd also need to consider how the drug is partitioned in the body - if it is more lipid-soluble then body fat might matter more, and so on. As we all learned in physical chemistry chemicals distribute themselves in equilibrium between various phases as governed by their partition coefficients (once everything reaches steady state). Since drugs are engineered to target particular tissues/etc, I'd think that they'd be more sensitive to this than most. If the dissociation constant with its target is low enough, then binding might be near-stoichiometric so dosing might be based more on the total mass of the target in the body, and some organs don't scale with weight so much.
And again, I'm not an expert in such things - I just know a little chemistry...
I don't know what phone ADP is, but I was able to run Google Navigate on the MyTouch which is the second Android phone ever released.
The MyTouch was upgraded to Froyo I think - at least that's what Wikipedia says. The G1 and ADP never got past 1.6.
The ADP and the G1 were the first android phones. They were hardware-identical - the difference was that T-Mobile sold the G1 locked-down, and Google sold the ADP direct with an unlocked HBOOT. The jailbreaking instructions for the G1 typically involved flashing the ADP HBOOT onto the G1 - that's what the "engineering bootloader" was.
People tend not to count the ADP for whatever reason, but I'd consider it the first "Nexus" phone though it didn't use the name. It was sold direct by Google and was intended to be the platform showcase. It was "pure Google" as they say today.
In any case, I agree that the Nexus line is your best bet - I just can't say that we've arrived yet in terms of long-term support. Again, from my perspective I care more that I can jailbreak the phone and that lots of other FOSS-types buy it - that generally assures me of longer-term support. On the other hand, the bigger-name android developers get so many donations these days that they don't really have incentive to stick with older phones the way they had to with the G1. When you're given money for new phones every other month it is hard to give much attention to the phone you got a year ago.
Yup - if today's pundits were alive in 1990 they'd be talking about how college students talk on the phone and hang out at the lunch table - they have no familiarity with things like interoffice mail, documents, and email. Well, duh - they're college students, and the goals of a college student are a bit different from the goals of a business.
The only thing that gives the pundits traction today is that managers today do most of the same things as college students (indeed they may never have done much else if they didn't work their way up), and think that because they can hit reply to an email from a subordinate and type "No" or "Go ahead" on a tablet that their subordinate could do their job using one.
Unless all you do all day is read email and stuff other people send to you, you'll probably need something with a keyboard and a mouse.
All that said, if you could dock a tablet to a workstation then I could see the convergence.
It is if you were a 50 year old employee of WP holding a ton of stock and you subsequently died without leaving any heirs behind.
Instead of having a few 10s of millions of dollars to play with in early retirement you instead get nothing until after you're dead. No doubt somebody will donate some money to the Windows-for-schools charity in your name instead.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
Look at it another way - if the court merely hands down a $1B verdict here, every CEO across the country will get the message loud and clear - do what MS did! Think about it, you get a boost in market share today and get to charge monopoly prices for a decade, at some risk that 17 years from now you might have to give back $1B. Well, you won't be CEO in 17 years for starters, and even if you are $1B in 17 years is worth $200M today at an interest rate of 10% (typical NPV rate to use). I'm sure MS's actions made them a LOT more than $200M.
2.5 years? I don't know why people are so hell bent on a long term commitment. If your phone is 2 years old you're using an ancient brick and probably wouldn't be welcome in geek circles anyway. Hand in your card.
Perhaps I buy phones because they're useful - and not to impress other geeks? In any case, a cell phone contract is typically two years. Sure, you might be able to get a deal before then, but only with your current carrier (well, other carriers will offer you a deal, but you won't get out of any ETFs). Plus, it is two years from when you buy the phone, not two years from when the phone was first sold - so if they sell the phone for six months they should support it for 2.5 years from introduction.
I suspect that we'd see this practice change if people bothered to create Android worms (especially ones that really aimed to disrupt the mobile network - or better still jam as much spectrum as they can with the radio). Suddenly not offering security patches for two years would be something carriers wouldn't be too eager to do.
The DMCA does tell you how to act on a notice. No validation is required - merely a sworn affidavit by the alleged copyright holder. It appears that UMG did not issue one of these.
Oh, I doubt any court would do anything - they're far too beholden to big companies to uphold a copyright ruling on behalf of somebody small.
Then again, I'm sure that if you're willing to go through the trouble you could probably cost them many tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills litigating it all the way to the Supreme Court. Just litigate it pro se and do what all the big companies do - drag it all out.
The reason why Nexus One does not get ICS is because it has ridiculously small amount of internal memory, not enough to get ICS installed and still leave space for any third-party apps. It's not because update is being deliberately withheld from the device, as is the case with carriers.
It was their choice to make the OS take so much space. Apple manages to keep updating their older phones despite what must be similar constraints. It is just a matter of priorities.
I'm sure in a few months you'll see Cyanogenmod releasing ICS for the N1 and getting it to work out fine. Plus, you can always run external apps from SD.
If you can get Froyo working on a G1 (it performs at least as well as the stock version of 1.6), I'm sure you can get ICS to work on an N1. You just have to care enough to make the effort.
Interesting - I haven't been in one of their stores for a month or two, but I'd love to see this arrangement continue.
I do agree that phone providers should be required by law to separate phone sales from service sales. To ensure they really are separate anybody should be allowed to come in and get the best advertised deal on either without buying the other - so if they advertise a phone for $1 plus $1/month for 2 years then I should be able to walk in and buy 50 unlocked phones at that rate and walk out.
By all means offer whatever deals you want on the service, or on the phones, but don't couple them.
Of course, I'd go about 10 steps further and clean up the whole cell phone industry - splitting out the natural monopoly components of the industry and regulating the living daylights out of them. For starters I wouldn't let anybody offering cell phone service own a tower, or form any kind of exclusive deal from anybody who owns a tower. Then I wouldn't let anybody own more than 35% of the spectrum on any piece of land, or any spectrum at all on more than 30000 mi^2 of land. Tower operators would relay packets from service providers to phones, offering the same rates to anybody they do business with. Since there would be at least 3 in any area pricing would be kept in check. Since deals aren't exclusive anybody could start a phone company by working out deals with the various operators, getting the same rate as ATT/etc. Congestion in any area would solve itself as those operators could charge more money, creating incentive for others to build more towers to get in on the action.
Operators could still offer what appears like a seamlessly vertically-integrated experience to the consumer, but pricing would be protected by the fact that nobody gets market power and barriers to entry are much lower.
Hmm, for some reason I had the release date as March. So, they just barely eeked out 18 months from the release date, though not 18 months from the date the last one was sold (which I'd argue should be the benchmark).
Great to hear - glad one phone made it. Better update the wikipedia page as it suggests that it is still stuck on 2.2. You did mean that they updated it to Gingerbread, right?
Hey, I'll accept that as a chink in the iPhone's record. However, they're still WAY ahead right now in terms of long-term support. A year after they stopped selling the ADP I bet you couldn't run the free Google Navigate app on it (it never got past Donut, and I think Navigate required Elcair).
Don't get me wrong, I still prefer Android. However, I have no illusions about its weaknesses.
I think the more interesting legal theory would be that since UMG and Google are collectively not following the safe harbor structure of the DMCA, they become liable for not proactively removing content WITHOUT a DMCA takedown notice.
Go find something posted on youtube that you can argue that you have a copyright interest in, and sue both UMG and Google for failing to remove it proactively. Both had the ability to do so, and chose not to police their content. Their only defense would be the safe harbor clause of the DMCA, but sue them for discriminating against your copyright interests for not providing you the same access as UMG.
For bonus points be sure to seek an injuction against the continued operation of Youtube. :)
only a complete moron would have expected the banks to continue to leverage loans at a loss!
News flash - the world is full of complete morons. However, they still need someplace to live. By all means restrict their reproduction privileges, but unless we want them starving on the streets at some point we need to look out for them...
Can someone tell me if any Android-based phone of that age is still supported by any vendor?
There are none. Most receive their last update before they're even done selling them. The Nexus One was the record holder until it got its last update on Sep 24th of this year - 1.5 years after the original announcement date. If somebody knows of a phone supported longer I'm all ears, but so far Android's best case is far behind Apple's worst case.
I don't mind rooting my phone, but I don't consider the willingness of phone owners to maintain their own phones a substitute for proper vendor support.
Perhaps one of these days somebody will release a virus targeting Froyo and we can watch the world's mobile networks collapse...
Perhaps because they didn't support the Nexus One for 18 months, so what makes anybody think the Galaxy Nexus will fare better?
If you really want an alternative, stick to the Nexus series. I have had Nexus one and just upgraded to Galaxy Nexus.
You mean the Nexus One that received what is likely to be its last update one year and two months after they stopped selling it, and only one year and six months after it was first announced? That is the phone that is already one major version behind the current release?
The Nexus One is the longest-supported Android phone to date (certainly it received better support than the ADP which was the previous Google-branded phone and it stopped getting updates before they even stopped selling it). However, I'd hardly hold it up as an example of long-term commitment. I'll have to see what the Nexus S updates look like a year from today - I won't be holding my breath.
The guy you responded to was talking about updates 2.5 years after buying the phone. No android phone has gotten an official update 2.5 years after the phone was even publicly announced, let alone discontinued.
Your Nexus One is obsolete - Google said it themselves and they won't be porting ICS. If you bought it under contract, then you are still under contract since it isn't even two years old. Google doesn't even support their own phones for two years - the other carriers are just far worse.
I think so far all the iPhones have been kept on the latest release at least two years after they are no longer sold, and usually about three years after the introduction date.
The benchmark should be that the phone runs the latest major revision of the OS two years after the last day that it is sold. That's when the last customer to buy one is eligible for a replacement.
Then they won't use the trademark. So what?
So, at least then I can buy a phone and know in advance what kind of experience I'm going to have. Right now it is anybody's guess whether one phone will have updates for a year, or if you're receiving it as-is for the rest of its life. About the only thing it seems you can count on is that no android phone will receive updates for your full contract length - Google is even abandoning the Nexus One and it isn't even two years old.
The problems the risk analysis team faced even in the 2000 era was such a tough nut to crack that they had to limit the complexity of the algorithms they used just because there wasn't hardware powerful enough.
Look, the problem here is the black swan. You can't model a black swan unless you can simulate the entire world economy down to the last neuron in some farmer's brain in a rural Chinese village. Right now we can't model a single human brain let alone all of them.
The world economy didn't melt down because some spreadsheet only calculated 12 decimal places when it should have calculated 325. It melted down because everybody decided to leverage themselves 100x on the bet that housing prices wouldn't ever go down, and they did. Now the world governments are starting to leverage themselves in small multiples on the bet that nobody would ever stop buying their bonds, mostly to bail out the bankers who bet on housing prices. I don't need arbitrary precision arithmetic to tell you where that is going to end up if it doesn't change FAST.
1. Malicious exit nodes can correlate your BT streams to your Tor web browsing, and learn your real IP.
How exactly can they do this? Why would your web browsing have any correlation to your BT streams?
3. Most popular BT clients send the tracker your IP anyway.
This is definitely a risk. It is probably best mitigated by ensuring that the client doesn't know your IP (NAT, no route to internet, etc).
If you want anonymous P2P, then I2P is a much better option.
Assuming you don't want to actually download anything. What is actually available on I2P? How does its library compare with any of the trackers on the internet at large? The reason people use tor isn't because it is more secure, but because it lets you browse the internet that you already use.
Sure, it does create more traffic on the network, but most of its other problems are really not much different than the sorts of problems people can run into using a browser with tor.
So far I've owned two android phones - the G1 and the G2. The first cost me I think around $100-200 or so - an iPhone at the time would have been a LOT higher (wasn't it still like $450 or something with a contract back then?). The second was free despite being nearly brand new, while an iPhone would probably have been around $300. So, the price differences were about 100% and ERROR-Div0%.
Sure, some people will pay $300 for an Android phone, but I don't think that is the reason they're clobbering the market. On some carriers Apple isn't even an option.
Personally the thing I like about Android is the variety, which some consider its weakness. I tend not to like the same things as everybody else, so the fact that "everybody else" likes something doesn't really sway me much. I wanted a keyboard on my current phone, and to Steve Jobs that just means I don't know what I'm doing. Whatever - he's entitled to an opinion...
Wasn't intending to point fingers. My sense however in many fields (probably including the medical field) is that an error of commission tends to be punished more heavily than an error of omission. That tends to lead to a bias towards inaction.
You don't even need a group - I can create as many facebook accounts as I care to. I'm sure if they get logins to 300 accounts from one IP they'll catch on, but are they really going to look for every IP associated wtih 20 accounts and investigate it to see if it is a NAT?
I think the big issue with metrics is the "heisenburg effect" that results in distortions in behavior.
If you passively collect data and periodically evaluate it for the sake of trying to make general improvements, you'll probably be successful.
If you systematically try to control some metric and use it (even indirectly) as the basis for performance differentiation then the organization will pull out all the stops and will micro-optimize that metric. Usually that will result in problems for the organization, but likely success for anybody who can get themselves congratulated and promoted out of harms way.
People WILL game any system you come up with.