or strip H from fossil fuel (efficient, but bad news for the CO2) Provided you have an efficient process, that would be fine as long as you don't burn the remaining carbon-rich compound (heavy oils / solid carbon). Read: as long as you use only the hydrogen component as fuel, which gives pure water vapor when you burn it.
Hydrogen Filled Buckyball contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at. I'd quote this one as: "Do not look at Hydrogen Filled Buckyballs with remaining eye."
No prob. The issue here is finding an (energy-)efficient / easy way to make the buckyballs store and release hydrogen. But once the hydrogen is released, I can't imagine it would be hard to separate 2-atom hydrogen molecules from 60-atom buckyball molecules. Or find a way to do so.
Some hints: at room temperature, buckyball molecules may behave as solid or liquid-like material, or be dissolved in other liquids, while hydrogen is a thin gas. And buckyball molecules come in different sizes (number of C-atoms).
Summarized: the carbon here should be regarded as a carrier, not part of the fuel.
Like any true geek, I've often admired boy toys coming out of defense research projects (regardless of which country or organization produced them), for the technical feat or wow-factor. BUT...
At the same time it saddens me to know that so much effort is channeled into (in a sense, wasted) destroying other human beings. A stealth bomber is a magnificent machine, but it's basically a machine meant to go somewhere, destroy things and/or people, and get away undetected. In history there may be times when it seems necessary to do that (or show the capability), but imagine all the good things that could have been done if the budget for its development had been spent elsewhere (like in medical research).
Mankind has developed weapons that fit into a truck, and can kill 100.000 humans in minutes, but at the same time a significant portion of people on this planet doesn't have enough/clean drinking water, even though 2/3 of our planet is covered with water (and it's easy to separate water and salt). We do have a bomb that you can fire with a gun from miles away, and that will steer itself in mid-air using satellite-provided timing signals, to destroy a target much more accurately than before. Yet we still don't have a cheap way to produce solar cells, even though the basic compound is among the most common materials on the planet.
I have no doubt that if you would take any large country's defense budget and spend it on third world economic/technological development, cancer, malaria research or similar, much more human suffering would be prevented than the few terrorists stopped or soldiers saved in wars on foreign soil. Can mankind do it? It looks like not, which is sad knowing that we've wandered around this planet for many thousands of years.
This is probably the #1 reason I would never work on anything high tech, if it has *primarily* a military purpose. In that context, I'd consider sitting around, doing nothing and eating out of my nose a more productive way to spend my time.
When the shareholders come to vote on it, somehow the results won't be quite as expected... And rightly so. I mean: why shouldn't upstanding, hard working, law-abiding machines have a right to vote?
(..) however, it excludes the force of gravity, which is its shortcoming. Gravity - (arguably) the most important if not strongest force that makes our universe into what it is, given the distances over which it works, and it is NOT included in a theory that's supposed to explain same universe. That's no small shortcoming indeed!
Maybe I'm naive in this respect, but IMHO the best theories (on any subject matter) are simply the ones that describe what we can observe in real life (aka empirical evidence) with the simplest/smallest set of rules. In the case of (the structure of) our universe, that should definitely include gravity.
Did the russians have fun brushing the shavings and graphite dust out of the relays? Are you kidding? A Real Russian(TM) just hangs back and grabs the fire extinguisher every once in a while!
RE: First: How are they envisioning powering a device like this? by the picture of the lens I would say wires.
Yes, and judging from the picture: multiple wires. But why, really? Wouldn't a single wire be enough?
Place a contact pad elsewhere on the body, or use a conductive housing for the device connected to that single wire, and have it touch the body directly. That way you'd have the wire, and use the body/eyeball as return path for an electric current. Then superimpose a high frequency signal for data transmission.
Other options:
Short-wave electromagnetic waves (a la RFID)
Some sort of tranparent (non toxic!) materials layered in between to form a low-power battery
Shine infrared on the lens, use resulting temperature difference between outside and eye-side for thermo-electric power supply?
Does it even matter much? There's standards, there's de facto standards (which are usually more important, and may or may not match official ones), and there's compatibility with popular existing stuff.
Eg. DVD recording: you burn a disc, and the recording turns out bad. Is there a problem with your drive, or with the disc? Suppose you're manufacturing DVD discs. You make a batch, make recordings at various speeds using the 100 most popular drive types that are found in common PC's, or for sale right now.
Now, if after aging/environmental tests etc. all recordings turn out 100% readable with low error correction rates detected, then it was a good batch of discs, regardless of whether they are in spec or not. If half the discs turn out unreadable, then your batch was worthless, even if the discs were perfectly within specs.
Same here: if you're distributing some non-regular discs type, you should check it against popular drives out there. The manufacturer of these discs would have been better off if they had done more testing (and found this problem themselves) before mass distribution.
The up-side: if enough people get bitten, and the story gets published widely enough, almost every potential client will think twice before using these discs. Result: distribution runs dry, format dies. Market / darwinian selection at its best.
You're right, but you are talking about the Recording Industry Association of **America)). For any corporation in this litigation-happy country goes: if all you have is lawyers, then every problem looks like a lawsuit.
It is sort of a war, and (like in any other war) the fighting causes net loss for everyone. The only winners here are lawyers and P2P network capabilities.
Perhaps people should be more careful to use the word 'virtual' in an ICT sense. As if the 1's and 0's recorded on your harddrive don't exist, just because they represent imaginary worlds. That is nonsense.
At a critical moment, a miniscule group of electrons may ultimately determine whether a space shuttle makes it into earth orbit, or crashes into the ocean. A tiny magnetic area on your harddisk may determine whether you see a folder with your vacation pics on your desktop, or not. A single bit flipped in transit (due to some electromagnetic disturbance, or whatever) may cause an industrial robot to move a millimeter off the mark & junk the product passing underneath. What I'm trying to say: the environment may be imaginary for a great part, but these small groups of electrons, magnetic area's etc. are very real, and so is the effect they can have.
There's no such thing as a virtual meeting. With 10 participants, that's 10 people communicating with each other at the same time, like in any other real-world meeting. When you're dealing with bots, that's just you interacting with some company's ICT infrastructure, similar to shopping in a webstore or reading/.
Sure, the interface is radically different, but other than that it's just: communication. As creatures have done since the 1st braincell developed.
From the article:
In the two weeks since the temporary injunction was granted, T-Mobile sold the handsets without a network contract for 999 euros ($1,477; £719).
That price was a significant premium to the 399 euro cost for a phone with a two year T-Mobile contract.
A significant premium indeed, 600 Euro extra NOT to be locked into a T-Mobile contract. For that reason alone, you can be pretty sure that phones sold as unlocked, will stay that way (and functional). Consumer protections are pretty strong in Germany. If a firmware update would re-lock or brick those phones, Apple or T-Mobile would face a class-action lawsuit, and surely lose it.
Probably more interesting is how Apple will provide firmware updates for these unlocked phones, as compared to updating phones that are locked to a specific provider. If it works exactly the same for locked and unlocked phones, that should give clues for a reliable/safe hack (that doesn't risk bricking your phone with future updates). If the procedure is different, that should give good info as to what exactly makes the phone locked. Either way, the mere existence of legally unlocked phones should be a boon for hackers (thank Vodafone for this side-effect of the temporary injunction).
Although it's a nice piece of hardware, I'd rather throw my money at one of these OpenMoko phones (when they're released as consumer-ready).
Be careful what you wish for, dude. Those hookers will beg you to burn a copy for them, and once you've done that, they'll make you bend over and whip your ass in shape because you've done something... ehm, naughty.
This has a very large footprint for not having a place for an expansion slot graphics solution.
If you had read the article more closely, you'd have come across this passage:
And on the opposite side of the CPU you'll find the system's pair of expansion slots (a mini-DTX board would have only one slot). The design of the motherboard and chassis means only half-height cards can be used, basically because there is no room for a riser. The slots can be any combination of PCI Express or standard PCI slots, however.
The pictures show what looks like a PCI-Express and a legacy PCI slot, so you can throw in expansion cards. Half-height ofcourse means that any powerful graphics cards are out. Personally I think I like the Shuttle-style systems better, but for another reason: thermal management. Those cube model SFF's with their well thought out CPU heatpipe cooling integrated with case fan, together with room for fullsize graphic cards and optical drive, just feels like a better thought out design (and looks great, too). Having one, big, slow-moving fan on the back, with vents on the side, is a lot better that a cramped case where CPU heat is drawn in and leaves through a small/noisy powersupply. What I'd personally like would be a case where the optical drive is the laptop form factor, harddrive also (no space reserved for a full 3,5"), and packed in a Shuttle-like casing (a bit smaller). But by then you might as well look at one of those ITX cases.
So don't: just follow the news, get feedback from your slaves, count the # of eggs thrown at your limousine and the # of stones and RPG's thrown at your armored vehicle. Lock up some opposition leaders, and torture them long enough to get some real answers about your position in the political arena. Finally, have some of your drones calculate the statistical probability of you winning the election, and (when it's up in the high 90's) HAVE an election. Next, proclaim your statistical calculated guesstimate as the official outcome of the election. But (for fair results) whatever you do, DON'T LOOK AT THE ACTUAL VOTES!
These dictator types are way ahead of us old-fashioned democracies!
There were two flaws: One in Firefox, one in ShellExecute. Excellent point.
Microsoft cannot and did not fix the flaw in Firefox (..) Ehmm... wrong. Since Firefox is an open source project, ANYONE has the option to contribute patches, and Microsoft surely has the knowledge and resources to do so. Any decently managed open source project should accept patches from anyone, IF it provides a correct fix for a problem, and licensing of the patch is acceptable (like, licensed the same as the rest of the project).
Though I can't think of a reason why Microsoft would WANT to fix a problem in Firefox, unless IE's market share has dropped below 1%;-)
While the planet is grateful for the lack of uPnP and DCOM/RPC worms of late, it also means that "things that have to do with email or web browsing" are among the least safe things you can ask a computer to do.
Which is really ridiculous, that normal users have come to expect (or should expect) that there are exploit-ridden websites which you should never visit, or else your system may get exploited and spyware/other crap gets installed behind the user's back.
One could pass a web-server ANYTHING as a URI, and the server basically returns you a 'page', consisting of a number of elements which are then rendered for your viewing pleasure. From a conceptual point of view, that's pretty much a READ action, and (imho) users should not be wrong to think this is always safe, and has no chance of screwing up your system. That this is not true in real life doesn't mean users behave unwise or stupid, but that current popular OS'es are BROKEN. Regardless of where in those OS'es (or the applications on it) the cause lies.
Now, for another point of view on these URI handling troubles: a) there exist malformed URI's, and b) pretty much everyone agrees they should not fsck up your system, but simply be handled. Either 'fixed' to be a valid URI, or simply be rejected as invalid. Now if you need to fix it anyway, where would be the best place to do so? In every application that handles URI's, or in 1 place where all those URI's pass through at some point in time anyway? Apart from the question of whether it would be the OS'es responsibility, I'd say inside the OS would be the easiest place to fix the 'malformed URI' problem as a whole. Also, if the OS isn't bothered by a malformed URI, and just returns an error to indicate the problem, applications (and through them) users are informed of that fact. Which would tell a user that a site he's browsing is either trying to screw him, hijack his system, or that the site maintainers are incompetent.
If the OS doesn't accept malformed URI's period, then the system as a whole becomes safer to use, regardless of whether applications do their own URI validation or not. So fixing this in the Windows URI handler would seem like the most general, AND the easiest way to prevent malformed URI from doing any damage.
Apart from that I think the article was well written and reasoned, claiming that input validation is really a shared responsibility, that both OS vendors AND 3rd party application developers should care about.
The amount awarded per song ($9250) is downright ridiculous Not many people know this, but that's the price they originally wanted to charge per song on iTunes.
More exactly: they still want to charge that price per song, especially given the number of downloads on iTunes these days.
The hardest part about being in IT is trying to protect users (and our systems) from themselves.
There's a number of separate issues here:
1) IMHO, it's impossible to protect users from messing with their own data, IF you want to make systems useful. A good option could be a versioned filesystem on a remote server (outside direct control of the user), where old versions of his/her files could always be retrieved. Without that, a user that says: "delete file XYZ on my local drive" will just do so, regardless of whether that was the intended or sensible thing to do.
2) It's next to impossible to make the complex software systems of today 100% bug-free. So you always have the chance that some program fucks up (remotely triggered, on purpose or otherwise), and screws up user data. A sensible (automated?) backup strategy should protect you from this one though.
3) And then there's the OS kernel, core libraries, hardware drivers, bootup files etc. This should be the easiest part IMO. It should be possible to have systems where users can fuck up their own data, and sometimes get hit by crappy/malicious programs, but where the base of the system remains functional and reliable, regardless what happens to everything running on top of it. When I consider it's about 25 years ago I first got familiar with the concept of a personal computer, I am really *AMAZED* the IT industry hasn't even reached this point. Is it really *THAT* hard to design software systems where users can add & remove 3rd party packages or update non-essential components, without endangering the core functionality of the system? That's not a user friendliness vs. security, but an overall system design issue.
Personally I think this latest verdict will do little to nothing in the real word, and most of its value lies in the precedent it sets.
Microsoft is a huge company, with deep pockets, good lawyers and used to dealing with lawsuits. If they get hammered, get fined, appeal, and lose again, then any company is subject to the same if they break anti-competitive rules. It also re-affirms that EU courts at least have the power to kick ass if need be. For all that, this verdict is very significant.
Other than that, I'd just like to congratulate mrs. Neelie Kroes for a long, hard job well done. She was always known in my country (the Netherlands) for being the exact opposite of a push-over (and many disliked her for that very reason), but where she is now, you need someone with exactly that personality.
So Neelie Kroes: we congratulate you, and bow to you! Bring out the champagne! (hey, if nothing else, pulling several 100 millions from Microsoft's pockets isn't a bad thing;-)
Slashdot Mirror
No prob. The issue here is finding an (energy-)efficient / easy way to make the buckyballs store and release hydrogen. But once the hydrogen is released, I can't imagine it would be hard to separate 2-atom hydrogen molecules from 60-atom buckyball molecules. Or find a way to do so.
Some hints: at room temperature, buckyball molecules may behave as solid or liquid-like material, or be dissolved in other liquids, while hydrogen is a thin gas. And buckyball molecules come in different sizes (number of C-atoms).
Summarized: the carbon here should be regarded as a carrier, not part of the fuel.
Like any true geek, I've often admired boy toys coming out of defense research projects (regardless of which country or organization produced them), for the technical feat or wow-factor. BUT...
At the same time it saddens me to know that so much effort is channeled into (in a sense, wasted) destroying other human beings. A stealth bomber is a magnificent machine, but it's basically a machine meant to go somewhere, destroy things and/or people, and get away undetected. In history there may be times when it seems necessary to do that (or show the capability), but imagine all the good things that could have been done if the budget for its development had been spent elsewhere (like in medical research).
Mankind has developed weapons that fit into a truck, and can kill 100.000 humans in minutes, but at the same time a significant portion of people on this planet doesn't have enough/clean drinking water, even though 2/3 of our planet is covered with water (and it's easy to separate water and salt). We do have a bomb that you can fire with a gun from miles away, and that will steer itself in mid-air using satellite-provided timing signals, to destroy a target much more accurately than before. Yet we still don't have a cheap way to produce solar cells, even though the basic compound is among the most common materials on the planet.
I have no doubt that if you would take any large country's defense budget and spend it on third world economic/technological development, cancer, malaria research or similar, much more human suffering would be prevented than the few terrorists stopped or soldiers saved in wars on foreign soil. Can mankind do it? It looks like not, which is sad knowing that we've wandered around this planet for many thousands of years.
This is probably the #1 reason I would never work on anything high tech, if it has *primarily* a military purpose. In that context, I'd consider sitting around, doing nothing and eating out of my nose a more productive way to spend my time.
From the summary of the TFA (The Flimsy Article):
(..) however, it excludes the force of gravity, which is its shortcoming. Gravity - (arguably) the most important if not strongest force that makes our universe into what it is, given the distances over which it works, and it is NOT included in a theory that's supposed to explain same universe. That's no small shortcoming indeed!Maybe I'm naive in this respect, but IMHO the best theories (on any subject matter) are simply the ones that describe what we can observe in real life (aka empirical evidence) with the simplest/smallest set of rules. In the case of (the structure of) our universe, that should definitely include gravity.
Yes, and judging from the picture: multiple wires. But why, really? Wouldn't a single wire be enough? Place a contact pad elsewhere on the body, or use a conductive housing for the device connected to that single wire, and have it touch the body directly. That way you'd have the wire, and use the body/eyeball as return path for an electric current. Then superimpose a high frequency signal for data transmission.
Other options:- Short-wave electromagnetic waves (a la RFID)
- Some sort of tranparent (non toxic!) materials layered in between to form a low-power battery
- Shine infrared on the lens, use resulting temperature difference between outside and eye-side for thermo-electric power supply?
Just fantasizing offcourse...Does it even matter much? There's standards, there's de facto standards (which are usually more important, and may or may not match official ones), and there's compatibility with popular existing stuff.
Eg. DVD recording: you burn a disc, and the recording turns out bad. Is there a problem with your drive, or with the disc? Suppose you're manufacturing DVD discs. You make a batch, make recordings at various speeds using the 100 most popular drive types that are found in common PC's, or for sale right now.
Now, if after aging/environmental tests etc. all recordings turn out 100% readable with low error correction rates detected, then it was a good batch of discs, regardless of whether they are in spec or not. If half the discs turn out unreadable, then your batch was worthless, even if the discs were perfectly within specs.
Same here: if you're distributing some non-regular discs type, you should check it against popular drives out there. The manufacturer of these discs would have been better off if they had done more testing (and found this problem themselves) before mass distribution.
The up-side: if enough people get bitten, and the story gets published widely enough, almost every potential client will think twice before using these discs. Result: distribution runs dry, format dies. Market / darwinian selection at its best.
You're right, but you are talking about the Recording Industry Association of **America)). For any corporation in this litigation-happy country goes: if all you have is lawyers, then every problem looks like a lawsuit.
It is sort of a war, and (like in any other war) the fighting causes net loss for everyone. The only winners here are lawyers and P2P network capabilities.
Perhaps people should be more careful to use the word 'virtual' in an ICT sense. As if the 1's and 0's recorded on your harddrive don't exist, just because they represent imaginary worlds. That is nonsense.
At a critical moment, a miniscule group of electrons may ultimately determine whether a space shuttle makes it into earth orbit, or crashes into the ocean. A tiny magnetic area on your harddisk may determine whether you see a folder with your vacation pics on your desktop, or not. A single bit flipped in transit (due to some electromagnetic disturbance, or whatever) may cause an industrial robot to move a millimeter off the mark & junk the product passing underneath. What I'm trying to say: the environment may be imaginary for a great part, but these small groups of electrons, magnetic area's etc. are very real, and so is the effect they can have.
There's no such thing as a virtual meeting. With 10 participants, that's 10 people communicating with each other at the same time, like in any other real-world meeting. When you're dealing with bots, that's just you interacting with some company's ICT infrastructure, similar to shopping in a webstore or reading /.
Sure, the interface is radically different, but other than that it's just: communication. As creatures have done since the 1st braincell developed.
here
A significant premium indeed, 600 Euro extra NOT to be locked into a T-Mobile contract. For that reason alone, you can be pretty sure that phones sold as unlocked, will stay that way (and functional). Consumer protections are pretty strong in Germany. If a firmware update would re-lock or brick those phones, Apple or T-Mobile would face a class-action lawsuit, and surely lose it.
Probably more interesting is how Apple will provide firmware updates for these unlocked phones, as compared to updating phones that are locked to a specific provider. If it works exactly the same for locked and unlocked phones, that should give clues for a reliable/safe hack (that doesn't risk bricking your phone with future updates). If the procedure is different, that should give good info as to what exactly makes the phone locked. Either way, the mere existence of legally unlocked phones should be a boon for hackers (thank Vodafone for this side-effect of the temporary injunction).
Although it's a nice piece of hardware, I'd rather throw my money at one of these OpenMoko phones (when they're released as consumer-ready).
Be careful what you wish for, dude. Those hookers will beg you to burn a copy for them, and once you've done that, they'll make you bend over and whip your ass in shape because you've done something... ehm, naughty.
Oh wait, where's that party at again?If you had read the article more closely, you'd have come across this passage:
And on the opposite side of the CPU you'll find the system's pair of expansion slots (a mini-DTX board would have only one slot). The design of the motherboard and chassis means only half-height cards can be used, basically because there is no room for a riser. The slots can be any combination of PCI Express or standard PCI slots, however.The pictures show what looks like a PCI-Express and a legacy PCI slot, so you can throw in expansion cards. Half-height ofcourse means that any powerful graphics cards are out. Personally I think I like the Shuttle-style systems better, but for another reason: thermal management. Those cube model SFF's with their well thought out CPU heatpipe cooling integrated with case fan, together with room for fullsize graphic cards and optical drive, just feels like a better thought out design (and looks great, too). Having one, big, slow-moving fan on the back, with vents on the side, is a lot better that a cramped case where CPU heat is drawn in and leaves through a small/noisy powersupply. What I'd personally like would be a case where the optical drive is the laptop form factor, harddrive also (no space reserved for a full 3,5"), and packed in a Shuttle-like casing (a bit smaller). But by then you might as well look at one of those ITX cases.
So don't: just follow the news, get feedback from your slaves, count the # of eggs thrown at your limousine and the # of stones and RPG's thrown at your armored vehicle. Lock up some opposition leaders, and torture them long enough to get some real answers about your position in the political arena. Finally, have some of your drones calculate the statistical probability of you winning the election, and (when it's up in the high 90's) HAVE an election. Next, proclaim your statistical calculated guesstimate as the official outcome of the election. But (for fair results) whatever you do, DON'T LOOK AT THE ACTUAL VOTES!
These dictator types are way ahead of us old-fashioned democracies!
Though I can't think of a reason why Microsoft would WANT to fix a problem in Firefox, unless IE's market share has dropped below 1% ;-)
Which is really ridiculous, that normal users have come to expect (or should expect) that there are exploit-ridden websites which you should never visit, or else your system may get exploited and spyware/other crap gets installed behind the user's back.
One could pass a web-server ANYTHING as a URI, and the server basically returns you a 'page', consisting of a number of elements which are then rendered for your viewing pleasure. From a conceptual point of view, that's pretty much a READ action, and (imho) users should not be wrong to think this is always safe, and has no chance of screwing up your system. That this is not true in real life doesn't mean users behave unwise or stupid, but that current popular OS'es are BROKEN. Regardless of where in those OS'es (or the applications on it) the cause lies.
Now, for another point of view on these URI handling troubles: a) there exist malformed URI's, and b) pretty much everyone agrees they should not fsck up your system, but simply be handled. Either 'fixed' to be a valid URI, or simply be rejected as invalid. Now if you need to fix it anyway, where would be the best place to do so? In every application that handles URI's, or in 1 place where all those URI's pass through at some point in time anyway? Apart from the question of whether it would be the OS'es responsibility, I'd say inside the OS would be the easiest place to fix the 'malformed URI' problem as a whole. Also, if the OS isn't bothered by a malformed URI, and just returns an error to indicate the problem, applications (and through them) users are informed of that fact. Which would tell a user that a site he's browsing is either trying to screw him, hijack his system, or that the site maintainers are incompetent.
If the OS doesn't accept malformed URI's period, then the system as a whole becomes safer to use, regardless of whether applications do their own URI validation or not. So fixing this in the Windows URI handler would seem like the most general, AND the easiest way to prevent malformed URI from doing any damage.
Apart from that I think the article was well written and reasoned, claiming that input validation is really a shared responsibility, that both OS vendors AND 3rd party application developers should care about.
That was just CowboyNeal thinking out loud.
More exactly: they still want to charge that price per song, especially given the number of downloads on iTunes these days.
There's a number of separate issues here:
1) IMHO, it's impossible to protect users from messing with their own data, IF you want to make systems useful. A good option could be a versioned filesystem on a remote server (outside direct control of the user), where old versions of his/her files could always be retrieved. Without that, a user that says: "delete file XYZ on my local drive" will just do so, regardless of whether that was the intended or sensible thing to do.
2) It's next to impossible to make the complex software systems of today 100% bug-free. So you always have the chance that some program fucks up (remotely triggered, on purpose or otherwise), and screws up user data. A sensible (automated?) backup strategy should protect you from this one though.
3) And then there's the OS kernel, core libraries, hardware drivers, bootup files etc. This should be the easiest part IMO. It should be possible to have systems where users can fuck up their own data, and sometimes get hit by crappy/malicious programs, but where the base of the system remains functional and reliable, regardless what happens to everything running on top of it. When I consider it's about 25 years ago I first got familiar with the concept of a personal computer, I am really *AMAZED* the IT industry hasn't even reached this point. Is it really *THAT* hard to design software systems where users can add & remove 3rd party packages or update non-essential components, without endangering the core functionality of the system? That's not a user friendliness vs. security, but an overall system design issue.
You haven't seen what's on the other side, have you? Besides, this isn't one worm hole but many, spread all over the f**king place.
Well, I don't have an iPhone myself yet, but there's 1 feature, that (like its predecessor) it MUST have:
It should blend!! (fragile souls: please don't go there)
I mean, how else are you gonna make money off it, reselling it on eBay?
Personally I think this latest verdict will do little to nothing in the real word, and most of its value lies in the precedent it sets. Microsoft is a huge company, with deep pockets, good lawyers and used to dealing with lawsuits. If they get hammered, get fined, appeal, and lose again, then any company is subject to the same if they break anti-competitive rules. It also re-affirms that EU courts at least have the power to kick ass if need be. For all that, this verdict is very significant.
Other than that, I'd just like to congratulate mrs. Neelie Kroes for a long, hard job well done. She was always known in my country (the Netherlands) for being the exact opposite of a push-over (and many disliked her for that very reason), but where she is now, you need someone with exactly that personality.
So Neelie Kroes: we congratulate you, and bow to you! Bring out the champagne! (hey, if nothing else, pulling several 100 millions from Microsoft's pockets isn't a bad thing ;-)