This is exactly what I mean. Nobody really has a CLUE what is going on right now in Iraq because the media is doing a horrible job depicting what's happening.
And guess whose fault that is. The military's! Know why? Because they won't let the media cover the "good stuff" like schools and businesses opening for fear that those schools and businesses will become insurgent targets.
Negativity sells, and they know that - especially when it comes to America and Bush and republicans.
You're appealing to the media's motivations as an argument that they are actually lying about Iraq. But I'm sorry, when hundreds of people die every other day in a car bomb, things are not under control. Furthermore, the media in this country isn't under any journalistic obligation to report about how "all is well". Do you know why the media doesn't tell us about all the people who weren't blown up by car bombs in Iraq on a given day? Because people aren't supposed to be killed by fucking car bombs. It's not some newsworthy event that a group of children was able to go to school without being ripped to shreds by a feces-filled IED on the side of the road. And if you think that it is somehow a newsworthy event, then you're admitting that it's atypical, which means you're admitting that Iraq is a clusterfuck.
If you were to watch any channel other than Fox News during the first part of the war, you would have thought that we were losing - that we were being driven out of the country. Then when the military LIBERATED Iraq from an evil dictator who had murdered thousands upon thousands of people during his life, all of the channels besides Fox News made it seem like we conquered them, like we were raping their women, like we were killing innocent people on purpose.
Apparently, they were. Or are you unfamiliar with Abu Ghraib? We put National Guardsmen in that meatgrinder with absolutely no training in urban warfare or knowledge about the local customs and people, and they snapped. Big surprise. This war has been a complete clusterfuck from day one. And all the blustering in the world about "liberal media bias" doesn't change that simple fact. What do you expect? We've been taking occupation tactics out of Israel's playbook.
For Christ's sake, we disbanded the Iraqi army and sent hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers out on their asses, telling them "You can't be a soldier in the new Iraq army." And now those people are the ones organizing the insurgency. So we've got the professional soldiers organizing the insurgency, and Iraq's security forces are now made up of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. How the hell do we expect the new Iraq army to fight off the old one without our help? "As they stand up, we stand down"? Empty platitudes and "good old fashioned elbow grease" aren't enough.
In order to show that the media has been disingenuous about Iraq, you must show that the successes in the occupation actually outweigh the failures and that the media deliberately underplays the successes. But the problem is that the administration has defined no useful criteria for success. They don't even want to operate on a timeline. How is the media supposed to know what a "success" is? It's easily predictable that, given the strategic decisions made by the administration, the Iraqi occupation would fail miserably. This isn't a surprise. And believe it or not, people were saying this well before the occupation. People in the first Bush administration. But where the media really failed was that they didn't call George W. Bush on his bullshit during the build-up to the Iraq invasion out of fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". So everyone just fell in line, not asking any tough questions and taking these crooks at their word. That was the media's failure.
Is there an onus on developers to actually write code that's aware of privileges? Absolutely. Windows developers have gotten a free ride with respect to access rights for a long time, but that party's over. But can Microsoft just throw up their hands and say "Okay guys, it's on you now"? Absolutely not. The reason developers have gotten away with this for so long is that Microsoft's own conventions and practices encouraged this. Users were set up with root-equivalent permissions by default, and there was no authentication mechanism in place (and there still isn't).
Microsoft should've deprecated UAC heuristics and put a time limit on them. They should've given developers a year (or so) to update their applications to be aware of privileges, and then simply remove the UAC heuristic features that "guess" whether an application needs privileges. So if you run an installer built for Windows XP, it doesn't get the right privileges without you explicitly launching it with admin rights.
What disturbs me more is that the term "open source" has been co-opted and soiled by the FSF. The FSF doesn't have a trademark on the term, and the basic meaning of "open source" can be intuitively discerned as "source code which is publicly viewable", implying absolutely nothing about the license under which it's published.
Because Steve Jobs paid for it. The Xerox execs didn't think the stuff being developed in PARC was going anywhere, so they were happy to sell it to him.
What is the method, exactly? How does putting up a fake elevation prompt accomplish anything? If it's a fake elevation prompt, by definition, it accomplishes nothing. To get elevated privileges, you have to go through UAC, and the actual elevation interface exists on a separate desktop to prevent scripts from faking a click on the "Allow" button. So how is this "attack" any different from just presenting a random button to the user that says "CLICK ME OMG PLEEEZE CLICK ME!!!"?
Yes, if I remember correctly, Arizona actually ran the numbers and concluded that enforcing the insane highway speed limits the federal government wanted would cost more than the amount they'd get from their federal highway funding. So they told the feds to go blow it out their asses. Why someone hasn't done similar math for the drinking age, I'll never understand. The "black market" for booze going to underage drinkers is plenty active, and there's a shitload of demand.
Guns in an environment where binge drinking is at least a bi-weekly occurrence among a population driven by hormones and pharmaceutical drugs. That's absolutely brilliant.
It's fool-proof for identifying which IP address an infringing file was sent to, but that's like saying, "I saw your car at the crime scene". You have to actually show that the person you're suing is the person who was using the computer at that time, in criminal court, at least. And that's where these cases should be if the RIAA wants criminal penalties such as jail time for violating their copyrights. (Which, if memory serves, is what they've lobbied for.)
When I say "parody", I don't mean "inspired by". I mean a spoof on the ads meant to make fun of them. Every one of the "Get a Mac" parodies I've seen that are meant to make fun of the originals has basically sucked.
You know, someone could make a funny parody of the "Get a Mac" commercials; it's just that no one has. It seems like all the parodies are made by geeks who are upset about the originals, not creative people who can put a funny spin on them. All the parodies are basically big rants about why geeks don't like the originals. There's no subtlety involved at all. You can't parody a 30-second spot by making a 4-minute rant about how much the source sucks. You actually have to be clever. That's what the geeks making these things don't get.
Novell's ads aren't as bad, but really, what do they say? "Hey, Linux exists too"? So? When I'm car shopping, I know that Fiat exists too. Doesn't mean I consider it a viable option.
Nothing is more strict than numbers. It's just pure objectivity. Sounds to me like you went to some liberal arts "Those mean hard science majors don't think my political science curriculum is as hard as those, but that's not fair!" school.
Sorry, but I've known kids who majored in political science and criminal justice. Their programs simply aren't as rigorous as a computer science or physics program. Being time-consuming by forcing students to write papers (which is what political science and criminal justice students spend their time doing) isn't the same thing as being rigorous.
And that degree usually comes in the form of criminal justice or political science, which don't even involve any sort of advanced math, just statistics, if that. Not exactly on the same level of learning or effort as computer science.
A doctorate in math or science is not good enough to qualify one to teach unless you can first endure a couple of semesters of mind numbing 'teaching' courses designed to both indoctrinate politically correct views and raise an artifical barrier to entry into the profession.
I don't know if teaching courses are designed to indoctrinate anyone, but they are decidedly insufficient for teaching subjects like math or science. The biggest problem is that the people who go into education are liberal arts people. I went to a university which has one of the best education programs in the country, and everyone I knew in that program was a liberal arts type. They had trouble with math and science, and plenty of them loathed math. They thought that trigonometry was really advanced stuff. How are these people supposed to be comfortable enough with even basic algebra to teach it effectively?
What actually ended up happening was that the physics department started its own teaching sequence. Physics teaching students took the same first two years of physics that physics majors would take, right up to and including quantum mechanics. They would, by requirement, also take the same math courses, up to and including differential equations. They would take the education department's course sequence as well. That program turns out people who are familiar with and specialize in math and hard science. Kids who just go through a regular education sequence don't get nearly enough exposure to either.
On the last point, any certification requires the attendance of boring courses. For instance, no matter how good of a programmer you are, it is difficult to get a job without a certification.
I don't have an ounce of certification in anything aside from my BS in computer science. As far as I know, neither do any of my co-workers. It never even came up during the interview. Certifications may be required for tech support jockies (A+ Certification) or network admins (Cisco and Novell Certifications, MCSE), but they certainly aren't required for software engineers. Hell I've never even heard of a "programmer certification". That's what the degree is for.
Let's be honest. Math and science are more important. Period. History is a very close second. We need kids who understand the basics of the scientific method and mathematics so that they know how to solve problems. We need kids who understand history so that the ones who become politicians don't end up fucking thing up as badly as the current crowd has. So yes, math and science teachers should be paid more than the art teachers. And football coaches should be paid less than art teachers.
But really, the problem with education isn't pay-grade differences. It's actually a situation where liberals and conservatives have both come together to fuck things up. The conservatives offer Christian fundamentalist parents to put pressure on school boards to teach creationism or similar frauds, uneducated morons sitting on education boards to decide what is and isn't science and a ridiculous philosophy that free-market capitalism actually applies to education in the form of "No Child Left Behind". Oh yeah, and they have a worrisome trust for standardized test scores as a benchmark for performance.
The liberals, on the other hand, offer hideously overpowered teacher's unions that keep shitty teachers employed, an inane attitude that no kid should ever fail and an unreasonable expectation that every kid should go to college. Really, when did becoming a plumber or electrician become something so terrible? You can make a good, honest living doing plenty of trade jobs. But not every kid belongs in college, and filling colleges with kids who don't belong there sucks resources from actual higher education and diverts it to joke majors like "park and recreation management". And since every kid has to go to college now, they have to have enough majors for everyone!
The sad part is that, for every one of you (a person with formal education and credentials in computer science), there are ten other guys out there who got into web development from a designing web sites. These people write terrible code and have no notion of good software engineering practices. And how would they know? They never went to school for computer science or software engineering.
One of my co-workers is a truly brilliant CS guy, and he does a ton of work in scripting languages and web development. When you let someone like that loose on web development, you can get some truly amazing results. Sadly, it's not the norm.
This guy just doesn't quit. He claims that Apple confirmed that the vulnerability leads to remote code execution, which is bullshit. The description says "may be able to..." There's a world of difference there. Not every buffer overflow can be exploited to inject malicious code. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually find out whether it's practical to write an exploit, a lot more time and effort than simply patching the problem and being done with it. So why bother finding out for sure when you can just patch it and be sure that it won't get exploited?
The fact that he will only demonstrate a crasher just seals the deal that he's full of shit. If he's had a working AirPort exploit for all this time, why not just demo it and put this issue to rest? That's what any sane person would do. But instead he's carefully misrepresenting Apple's release notes to make them seem as if they support his claim, further destroying his credibility.
I think the most likely scenario here is that he originally found exploits for various third-party wireless drivers and saw an opportunity. With a cursory look at the AirPort drivers, he figured, "Yeah, I could write an exploit for them too". So he made a big announcement. He hated the "smug" Mac users, so now he could really stick it to them. But there was a problem. For whatever reason, he couldn't get his code to inject into the AirPort drivers. All he could do was KP the box. Well this wasn't what he initially promised. So when it came time to put-up or shut-up, he used a third-party card with drivers that he had been able to exploit. And of course, he knew that people would ask questions. Questions like, "Who cares? That card doesn't ship with Macs, and Macs have built-in wireless, so why would any Mac user ever need to buy this card?"
Ah, but clever him. He knew that Apple had a reputation for being secretive and releasing the legal hounds. So he could just say, "Apple threatened me with legal action if I demoed the exploit on their drivers" and voila! He's now a victim of The Evil Corporation! The Slashdot crowd would definitely believe him. After all, geeks don't like Apple because they're secretive, and this would be just another validation for them. They'd buy it without question. Even if Apple issued a statement saying that Maynor was lying, that wouldn't matter, because Apple is the one who tried to muzzle Maynor in the first place! See how the logic goes round and round?
The thing is, what sets Star Trek apart from other sci-fi shows is exactly that it isn't gritty and believable. It is sci-fi in a near-perfect universe. The ships are clean inside and out, and the uniforms are pressed immaculately (unless the bridge is already on fire). When an entire starship blows up, the crew of the Enterprise take it stoically. Whole wars go on, yet the main characters are mostly unaffected either physically or emotionally. Poverty is eliminated. Medical science can cure almost anything.
Which makes it utterly boring. It's a universe designed by nerds. Notice how there is basically never any mention of team sports in TNG. I remember when I liked the show, but it has not aged well. Watching TNG episodes now is like watching paint dry. They're boring and predictable. Even with talent like Patrick Stewart, there's only so much that can be done. At least the new Star Wars trilogy had action and a non-utopian atmosphere to go along with the shitty acting. TNG just has uninspired space battles (where ships sit, unmoving about a kilometer apart and fire at each other), a world that is so perfect that you want to gag and puke and actors that were made to be wooden boards for their duration on-screen.
The good Star Treks have always been the ones that don't focus on how perfect everything is and do actually focus on plausible situations which create drama. In Star Trek II, Khan killed people. In the bloody fashion, not the sanitized "OMG they vaporized!" nonsense that TNG has. In Star Trek VI, Kirk has to come to grips with and overcome his own racism and prejudice. In TNG, there's no such thing as racism! (Except from one non-human species to another, of course. Humans are "enlightened", by and large.) In Star Trek: First Contact, Picard has to deal with his hatred for and desire for revenge against the Borg, which his own society frowns upon like a disappointed parent.
There have been Star Treks which dealt with actual real-life problems in an actual, real-life way. And they were all very good. It's the shit ones that are different. And different, in this case, is not better.
Could the web "programmers" please get over themselves? HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I don't know why this misconception is so widespread (you'll often see resumés of computer science graduates with HTML, CSS and XML listed under "Programming Languages"), but HTML and CSS aren't programming or scripting languages. HTML is a markup language, hence the "ML" part of the acronym. You can't implement algorithms in them, so knowing them doesn't make you a programmer. It makes you a guy who knows a markup/layout language.
And by the way, SQL isn't a programming language either. It's a query language, hence the "QL". Knowing it doesn't make you a programmer; it makes you a guy who knows a query language.
JavaScript is a scripting language, but the differentiation between programming and scripting these days is getting pretty blurry. But chances are that if you're writing JavaScript, you're writing indecipherable code, since so many JavaScript programmers don't actually have any formal education in computer science; they're over-worked guys who know markup, layout and query languages.
Yeah I'm sure Apple could get Cingular to modify their network for something like random-access voicemail by selling an unlocked phone. Apple signed an exclusive contract. Cingular wasn't looking for "exclusive yet still able to be bypassed".
How did I "spin" anything? He said that Apple said something they didn't. People spin something when they want to duck the facts, and that's precisely what you're doing here.
Slashdot Mirror
For Christ's sake, we disbanded the Iraqi army and sent hundreds of thousands of trained soldiers out on their asses, telling them "You can't be a soldier in the new Iraq army." And now those people are the ones organizing the insurgency. So we've got the professional soldiers organizing the insurgency, and Iraq's security forces are now made up of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. How the hell do we expect the new Iraq army to fight off the old one without our help? "As they stand up, we stand down"? Empty platitudes and "good old fashioned elbow grease" aren't enough.
In order to show that the media has been disingenuous about Iraq, you must show that the successes in the occupation actually outweigh the failures and that the media deliberately underplays the successes. But the problem is that the administration has defined no useful criteria for success. They don't even want to operate on a timeline. How is the media supposed to know what a "success" is? It's easily predictable that, given the strategic decisions made by the administration, the Iraqi occupation would fail miserably. This isn't a surprise. And believe it or not, people were saying this well before the occupation. People in the first Bush administration. But where the media really failed was that they didn't call George W. Bush on his bullshit during the build-up to the Iraq invasion out of fear of being labeled "unpatriotic". So everyone just fell in line, not asking any tough questions and taking these crooks at their word. That was the media's failure.
Is there an onus on developers to actually write code that's aware of privileges? Absolutely. Windows developers have gotten a free ride with respect to access rights for a long time, but that party's over. But can Microsoft just throw up their hands and say "Okay guys, it's on you now"? Absolutely not. The reason developers have gotten away with this for so long is that Microsoft's own conventions and practices encouraged this. Users were set up with root-equivalent permissions by default, and there was no authentication mechanism in place (and there still isn't).
Microsoft should've deprecated UAC heuristics and put a time limit on them. They should've given developers a year (or so) to update their applications to be aware of privileges, and then simply remove the UAC heuristic features that "guess" whether an application needs privileges. So if you run an installer built for Windows XP, it doesn't get the right privileges without you explicitly launching it with admin rights.
What disturbs me more is that the term "open source" has been co-opted and soiled by the FSF. The FSF doesn't have a trademark on the term, and the basic meaning of "open source" can be intuitively discerned as "source code which is publicly viewable", implying absolutely nothing about the license under which it's published.
Because Steve Jobs paid for it. The Xerox execs didn't think the stuff being developed in PARC was going anywhere, so they were happy to sell it to him.
What is the method, exactly? How does putting up a fake elevation prompt accomplish anything? If it's a fake elevation prompt, by definition, it accomplishes nothing. To get elevated privileges, you have to go through UAC, and the actual elevation interface exists on a separate desktop to prevent scripts from faking a click on the "Allow" button. So how is this "attack" any different from just presenting a random button to the user that says "CLICK ME OMG PLEEEZE CLICK ME!!!"?
Yes, if I remember correctly, Arizona actually ran the numbers and concluded that enforcing the insane highway speed limits the federal government wanted would cost more than the amount they'd get from their federal highway funding. So they told the feds to go blow it out their asses. Why someone hasn't done similar math for the drinking age, I'll never understand. The "black market" for booze going to underage drinkers is plenty active, and there's a shitload of demand.
Guns in an environment where binge drinking is at least a bi-weekly occurrence among a population driven by hormones and pharmaceutical drugs. That's absolutely brilliant.
It's fool-proof for identifying which IP address an infringing file was sent to, but that's like saying, "I saw your car at the crime scene". You have to actually show that the person you're suing is the person who was using the computer at that time, in criminal court, at least. And that's where these cases should be if the RIAA wants criminal penalties such as jail time for violating their copyrights. (Which, if memory serves, is what they've lobbied for.)
When I say "parody", I don't mean "inspired by". I mean a spoof on the ads meant to make fun of them. Every one of the "Get a Mac" parodies I've seen that are meant to make fun of the originals has basically sucked.
You know, someone could make a funny parody of the "Get a Mac" commercials; it's just that no one has. It seems like all the parodies are made by geeks who are upset about the originals, not creative people who can put a funny spin on them. All the parodies are basically big rants about why geeks don't like the originals. There's no subtlety involved at all. You can't parody a 30-second spot by making a 4-minute rant about how much the source sucks. You actually have to be clever. That's what the geeks making these things don't get.
Novell's ads aren't as bad, but really, what do they say? "Hey, Linux exists too"? So? When I'm car shopping, I know that Fiat exists too. Doesn't mean I consider it a viable option.
This is a myth. There is no dongle embedded in Intel Macs. Newly shipping Macs have no TPM chip, and the ones that did didn't use it for anything.
Sorry, but I've known kids who majored in political science and criminal justice. Their programs simply aren't as rigorous as a computer science or physics program. Being time-consuming by forcing students to write papers (which is what political science and criminal justice students spend their time doing) isn't the same thing as being rigorous.
And that degree usually comes in the form of criminal justice or political science, which don't even involve any sort of advanced math, just statistics, if that. Not exactly on the same level of learning or effort as computer science.
What actually ended up happening was that the physics department started its own teaching sequence. Physics teaching students took the same first two years of physics that physics majors would take, right up to and including quantum mechanics. They would, by requirement, also take the same math courses, up to and including differential equations. They would take the education department's course sequence as well. That program turns out people who are familiar with and specialize in math and hard science. Kids who just go through a regular education sequence don't get nearly enough exposure to either.
Let's be honest. Math and science are more important. Period. History is a very close second. We need kids who understand the basics of the scientific method and mathematics so that they know how to solve problems. We need kids who understand history so that the ones who become politicians don't end up fucking thing up as badly as the current crowd has. So yes, math and science teachers should be paid more than the art teachers. And football coaches should be paid less than art teachers.
But really, the problem with education isn't pay-grade differences. It's actually a situation where liberals and conservatives have both come together to fuck things up. The conservatives offer Christian fundamentalist parents to put pressure on school boards to teach creationism or similar frauds, uneducated morons sitting on education boards to decide what is and isn't science and a ridiculous philosophy that free-market capitalism actually applies to education in the form of "No Child Left Behind". Oh yeah, and they have a worrisome trust for standardized test scores as a benchmark for performance.
The liberals, on the other hand, offer hideously overpowered teacher's unions that keep shitty teachers employed, an inane attitude that no kid should ever fail and an unreasonable expectation that every kid should go to college. Really, when did becoming a plumber or electrician become something so terrible? You can make a good, honest living doing plenty of trade jobs. But not every kid belongs in college, and filling colleges with kids who don't belong there sucks resources from actual higher education and diverts it to joke majors like "park and recreation management". And since every kid has to go to college now, they have to have enough majors for everyone!
The sad part is that, for every one of you (a person with formal education and credentials in computer science), there are ten other guys out there who got into web development from a designing web sites. These people write terrible code and have no notion of good software engineering practices. And how would they know? They never went to school for computer science or software engineering.
One of my co-workers is a truly brilliant CS guy, and he does a ton of work in scripting languages and web development. When you let someone like that loose on web development, you can get some truly amazing results. Sadly, it's not the norm.
Buy a Mac with Parallels and run Safari and IE on the same machine. Problem solved.
Thank you.
This guy just doesn't quit. He claims that Apple confirmed that the vulnerability leads to remote code execution, which is bullshit. The description says "may be able to..." There's a world of difference there. Not every buffer overflow can be exploited to inject malicious code. It takes a lot of time and effort to actually find out whether it's practical to write an exploit, a lot more time and effort than simply patching the problem and being done with it. So why bother finding out for sure when you can just patch it and be sure that it won't get exploited?
The fact that he will only demonstrate a crasher just seals the deal that he's full of shit. If he's had a working AirPort exploit for all this time, why not just demo it and put this issue to rest? That's what any sane person would do. But instead he's carefully misrepresenting Apple's release notes to make them seem as if they support his claim, further destroying his credibility.
I think the most likely scenario here is that he originally found exploits for various third-party wireless drivers and saw an opportunity. With a cursory look at the AirPort drivers, he figured, "Yeah, I could write an exploit for them too". So he made a big announcement. He hated the "smug" Mac users, so now he could really stick it to them. But there was a problem. For whatever reason, he couldn't get his code to inject into the AirPort drivers. All he could do was KP the box. Well this wasn't what he initially promised. So when it came time to put-up or shut-up, he used a third-party card with drivers that he had been able to exploit. And of course, he knew that people would ask questions. Questions like, "Who cares? That card doesn't ship with Macs, and Macs have built-in wireless, so why would any Mac user ever need to buy this card?"
Ah, but clever him. He knew that Apple had a reputation for being secretive and releasing the legal hounds. So he could just say, "Apple threatened me with legal action if I demoed the exploit on their drivers" and voila! He's now a victim of The Evil Corporation! The Slashdot crowd would definitely believe him. After all, geeks don't like Apple because they're secretive, and this would be just another validation for them. They'd buy it without question. Even if Apple issued a statement saying that Maynor was lying, that wouldn't matter, because Apple is the one who tried to muzzle Maynor in the first place! See how the logic goes round and round?
Which makes it utterly boring. It's a universe designed by nerds. Notice how there is basically never any mention of team sports in TNG. I remember when I liked the show, but it has not aged well. Watching TNG episodes now is like watching paint dry. They're boring and predictable. Even with talent like Patrick Stewart, there's only so much that can be done. At least the new Star Wars trilogy had action and a non-utopian atmosphere to go along with the shitty acting. TNG just has uninspired space battles (where ships sit, unmoving about a kilometer apart and fire at each other), a world that is so perfect that you want to gag and puke and actors that were made to be wooden boards for their duration on-screen.
The good Star Treks have always been the ones that don't focus on how perfect everything is and do actually focus on plausible situations which create drama. In Star Trek II, Khan killed people. In the bloody fashion, not the sanitized "OMG they vaporized!" nonsense that TNG has. In Star Trek VI, Kirk has to come to grips with and overcome his own racism and prejudice. In TNG, there's no such thing as racism! (Except from one non-human species to another, of course. Humans are "enlightened", by and large.) In Star Trek: First Contact, Picard has to deal with his hatred for and desire for revenge against the Borg, which his own society frowns upon like a disappointed parent.
There have been Star Treks which dealt with actual real-life problems in an actual, real-life way. And they were all very good. It's the shit ones that are different. And different, in this case, is not better.
Could the web "programmers" please get over themselves? HTML and CSS are not programming languages. I don't know why this misconception is so widespread (you'll often see resumés of computer science graduates with HTML, CSS and XML listed under "Programming Languages"), but HTML and CSS aren't programming or scripting languages. HTML is a markup language, hence the "ML" part of the acronym. You can't implement algorithms in them, so knowing them doesn't make you a programmer. It makes you a guy who knows a markup/layout language.
And by the way, SQL isn't a programming language either. It's a query language, hence the "QL". Knowing it doesn't make you a programmer; it makes you a guy who knows a query language.
JavaScript is a scripting language, but the differentiation between programming and scripting these days is getting pretty blurry. But chances are that if you're writing JavaScript, you're writing indecipherable code, since so many JavaScript programmers don't actually have any formal education in computer science; they're over-worked guys who know markup, layout and query languages.
Yeah I'm sure Apple could get Cingular to modify their network for something like random-access voicemail by selling an unlocked phone. Apple signed an exclusive contract. Cingular wasn't looking for "exclusive yet still able to be bypassed".
How did I "spin" anything? He said that Apple said something they didn't. People spin something when they want to duck the facts, and that's precisely what you're doing here.