Is a day someone commits to an Android phone for the next two years. If Apple waits too long to make iPhone available on Verizon, it may find itself struggling to compete for awhile after the initial launch on Verizon.
I fully believe that the main reason Verizon got so much behind Android-based phones, was that A) Blackberries are liked by some people, but not everyone, and B) Android seemed to be the only other platform which could potentially drive the kind of sales the iPhone was seeing. Basically, Apple forced Verizon to push their competitors (and still is today), so Verizon did.
Again, tick-tock, every day which passes, lots of people on Verizon are buying Droids and other android-powered phones, and will likely continue to use those for at least two years. Once they're using them, they might find that even if they like the iPhone a little more, they're already 'settled' with data on their Android phone, apps they're used to using on their Android phone, etc.
"Prof too ethically incompetent to realize that punishing the ones who did right along with the guilty is an act more despicable than the original cheating? Check."
Is it unfair? Sure. Is it unfair that every U.S. taxpayer has to make up Billions in losses because of unethical Business Management practices at large corporations? Check.
Life isn't fair - people often end up paying for the mistakes and unethical conduct of others. It's quite a valuable lesson for the future captains of industry to learn, I'd say.
I want to see every opportunity taken by business schools to pound ethics and consequences into the heads of their graduates, because it's mostly business school graduates who've cause a lot of the economic problems of the past 3 years (and who knows how long into the future).
Right, because The Founders who wrote the Constitution realized that Terrorists could hijack airplanes full of highly volatile hydrocarbon fuels, and dive-bomb them into things, or blow them up, resulting in the deaths of lots of people.
Granted, The Founders were pretty forward thinking, but I don't think they could envision exactly the type of world we'd be living in 200 years later and the new types of threat present. The State-of-the-Art in weaponry when the Constitution was ratified were single-shot, manually loaded muskets, and large steel cannons.
"Here's the thing. This is exactly the terrorists' plan."
So, if I start punching you, you shouldn't try to block my blows - that's *exactly* my plan. Silly you - you're playing right into my schemes, You Fool! The Police shouldn't even bother to show up at a robbery - that's playing exactly into the plans of the robbers.
I for one can't accept the notion that we shouldn't *try* to secure air travel. You either have to accept that all security is a waste of time - and thereby accept a substantially high number of highjackings and bombs, or you make a best-effort approach. I'm not naive enough to think that we can stop all terrorist plans, but all we really have to do is make it hard enough that we substantially reduce the frequency at which they are successful. If we didn't try security at all, highjackings and bombings would probably happen on a weekly basis. As it stands, while I'm sure at some point another terrorist attack could and probably will succeed at some point in the future, we seem to be keeping it to something like a once-or-twice-a-decade success rate.
As for the Constitution: there's no Constitutional right to fly. Flying is a privilege. If you want that privilege, you have to agree to the rules, that's just how it works. You don't *have* to fly.
Reading the slashdot summary, my first thought was, "This has setup written all over it". I mean, the kid is throwing a tantrum, and the parent doesn't order the kid to be quite and walk "over there" (i.e. through the scanner) and you'll get your teddy bear back. Then, the parent "just happens" to be a reporter.
I'd almost be willing to stake money that the reporter set this situation up, perhaps even *coached* his 3-year old, to create the situation he wanted so he could get the video he wanted.
I'd also just like to echo the sentiment that someone else posted - if you accept that such searching is legitimate for *anyone*, then you must accept it for *everyone*. You cannot make exceptions, because as soon as you do, "The Terrorists" will figure it out and use a member of whatever 'exempted' groups you allow to pass screening. It doesn't matter if someone is an 80 year old white person, or a 3 year old baby, they can be exploited. In the case of babies, it not be completely implausible that a terrorist might use their own babies to smuggle something in through screening (after all, they don't have to put their baby on the plane that they're gonna blow up - they just need to get material in through screening; I wouldn't even completely put it past a real hard-line terrorist to sacrifice their own kid, although I'd find that scenario less likely than just using the baby as a mule in the airport).
As for anyone who is older, anyone could potentially be exploited - say a terrorist group kidnaps some old white church-lady-from-Ohio's (who you wouldn't suspect of ever being involved in terror) granddaughter, then tells the grandmother that unless she does exactly what she's told, her granddaughter will disappear forever and become a sex slave who's beaten every day for the rest of her short life, or murdered. I suppose some people might have the courage to resist the terrorists in that case, and tip off the TSA, but I bet there are some people who'd decide to try to 'protect' their granddaughter, even if that means other people die.
By the way, just by making the *decision* to exempt any group, you give the terrorists an incentive to specifically target that group. By not exempting anyone, you are protecting everyone to some degree.
. ..as the same arrogant attitude is still there. "I think I did a nice job for you"? I couldn't believe it when I read that; apparently she still thinks the original author should be grateful that her work was plagarized?
While I don't totally disagree with your assessment, I think in that particular bit you quoted, she is referring to the fact that, as she stated earlier in the ramble, that she worked out a deal with the author and payed her a royalty.
I do think the Cooks' Source owner/editor/publisher tried to make things right in the end, it sounds like, but people won't leave her alone about this. While I think the owner was in the wrong, both in lifting the article without securing permission beforehand, and then to tell the other person that posting something on the web releases it "into the public domain", I do think it sad that this small business is going out of business because of one mistake, which she tried to make amends for.
Oh well, she'll probably relaunch it in a few months under a new name. *grin*
. ..justify each and every individual decision to screen someone. As soon as you give the TSA discretion to 'skip over' people they think don't fit 'the profile' of 'suspicious/possibly dangerous', everyone else will bitch about being targetted.
Nobody can claim discrimination or prejudice if everyone is screened.
Also, the second you exempt a group, people will start trying to claim other groups *should* be exempt - you'll get the muslims saying muslim grandmothers in full head-to-toe Burkas should just be passed through - that you shouldn't just exempt 'white' grandmothers.
There's also the small possiblity that someone in a group you would otherwise never expect to be terrorists (e.g. an elderly white person), might have converted to a radicalized form of some ideology or another, and are used as a mule exactly because everyone knows they won't be screened. Or maybe, "The Terrorists" do something like kidnapping their grandchild and telling them if they don't do what they're told, their grandkid is gonna get a bullet in the back of the head, or tortured. From that standpoint, no exempting them is protecting them - if no group is exempted from screening, then there's no particular incentive to target a member of any particular group.
It's not like they're high resolution photographs which show a lot of detail. What's presented on the linked sites are very blocky/pixelly images with almost no contrast - there's really nothing to see. If that's all there is, people need to move on and quit worrying about. Of course, if they increase the resolution and contrast in the future, then there might be a valid reason to worry, but I for one honestly wouldn't give a crap if someone posted a crappy blocky no contrast 'naked' picture of me somewhere - there's not even enough detail to identify who you're looking at in those.
At least, it isn't 'ionizing radiation', which is the radiation most people think of when they hear the word 'radiation' - e.g. the type that can give you radiation sickness, cancer, etc. "Millimeter wave" scanners are just radio waves. We live in a constant ocean of radio waves. 24 hours a day radio waves are passing through you (at least, at some frequencies), and bouncing off you (at other frequencies). If they *must* scan people, I'd rather it be with radio waves than X-Rays, which *are* radiation in the 'ionizing radiation' sense of the word.
Who's saying we should build an atmosphere on Mars? I thought the proposals were based on the idea of having sealed, underground habitats (underground because it's warmer, and the soil would provide some additional shielding from radiation, etc), with their own 'closed' atmospheric system?
Honestly, I'd have to see a closed atmospheric system working in a sealed, underground habitat on Earth that runs reliably for a couple decades, before trying something like that on Mars.
At least on Mars, the heat and pressure aren't so bad it would require a lot of extra engineering to deal with. On Mars, they could probably do EVAs in spacesuits - on Venus, well, perhaps, but the spacesuit needs to withstand 92 atmospheres of pressure, plus high temperature.
Probably because they are less likely to survive the trip? I dunno, but I'd think for such missions, you'd want to start with the strongest, healthiest people you can just so that they hopefully survive long enough to actually land on Mars, and do whatever scientific mission they are tasked with. Someone who is terminally ill might die in week 3 or 6 of the trip, before ever getting to Mars. Or, they might just be too physically weakened to survive atmospheric entry and landing, or too weak to do anything useful when they get there.
Or just use death row convicts. "Well, you can face certain death in 10 years when your appeals run out, and you will die a murder/rapist, or you can go to Mars, advance mankind's understanding of science, and die with (some) honor, in about 10 years, and get a chance to fly in space and play with cool technology in the meantime".
I'm just trying to figure out why this would fall into the Idle category? I thought Idle was supposed to be for *completely* useless, completely *offtopic* stuff which wouldn't fit anywhere else on slashdot?
Information about WSJ articles on privacy and cookies seems pretty on-topic compared to most of the stuff in Idle.
Unfortunately, the linked article is a bit light on details, apparently because Microsoft isn't being forthcoming with any real technical info, but it's possible no encryption is being used. Perhaps WP7 is reformatting the SD Cards with some new, undocumented, unstandardized filesystem. Perhaps it adds an incompatible 'extension' to an existing filesystem (because, you know, Microsoft *never* adds poorly documented, incompatible, unstandardized extensions to standardized technologies). Although it certainly is possible some sort of encryption is being used, we can't assume that.
. . . to finish the Ares Heavy Lifter. I mean, what's the point of having the Space Telescope ready for launch if there's no launch vehicle to put it in orbit?
I wondered the same thing - if these debug features are useful to developers debugging their own software, why not market this as a feature? The only thing that occurred to me, is that, maybe there is some sort of security problem with this debug functionality? Does anyone know - could these debug features be used to do something like break Operating System security models, leading to privilege escalation issues, or for other nefarious purposes?
Another fabulous slashdot article summary - comparing the sales on the first day of the WP7 phone with 6 months of sales for the G1? Seriously? I'm no Microsoft fanboy (I've got a G1 sitting on my desk 8 inches from me right now), but c'mon. It would be much more interesting to know how many G1's were sold the first day, the first week, and the first month, and compare that to WP7.
I'm confused. Nobody can succeed with the whole world as your enemy. Maybe I'm missing something, but from where I sit, it doesn't look like Oracle has many friends to begin with, and is losing more every day. Oracle and Microsoft have basically been enemies forever, but Oracle had other companies which were it's friends, of sorts, like Sun, IBM, and some others. It just looks to me that Oracle is going to make everyone into their enemy, and how can any company succeed, long term, with that situation?
I accept that the G1 can't do all the things that phones with faster CPUs, more RAM, and more flash memory can. I'm not talking about updates to the latest-greatest version of Android. I mean simply fixes for things like this exploit - Google might say that upgrading the entire OS might fix the problem, but they should also be prepared to offer *small* OTA fixes for older versions of Android to address problems just like this, and the carriers need to get those fixes out to the handset owners. Fix the kernel, if it needs it, or.so libraries, or dalvik class files which have specific problems.
I just want my phone to be able to keep working at the level it was originally sold at, but an exploit like the one discussed in this article could potentially brick my phone (or, if my phone becomes 'owned' and I can't clean it, I'll be forced to stop using it even if it technically still works, so it would *effectively* be bricked, from my standpoint).
I wonder if there is any law which covers this sort of situation. The original G1 was only released like 3 years ago - not really very old, but T-Mobile has completely abandoned owners/users of the G1 and is not providing any additional updates.
Honestly, I blame Google. From day 1, it should have been mandatory that OS updates would come from Google, forever. Carriers don't give a crap about keeping users in updated code once the phone is sold. To them, it's just a device which comes in a box, gets sold, and if it becomes 'obsolete' within 2 years, well that's just another box they can sell you in 2 years.
It's absolutely inexcusable that a programmable, Internet enabled device of the complexity of a G1 should not have guaranteed security updates for the included software, for a minimum of 10 years.
The Solution for the ITU, FCC, et al., is to abandon the term '4G' - it's already out in the wild. I don't think they can really enforce this - basically, Sprint, etc. are 'grandfathered'. Back when 2G, or 3G were being considered, an appropriate standards body like the ITU should have Trademarked the term 4G, so this could never have happened. But it has, too bad.
So the answer is to create a new, catchy trademarked term, which people can only use the trademark if they *actually conform to the standard*. Something similar in concept to the "Wifi" trademark - I may be wrong, but I believe you cannot call your product "Wifi" if it actually isn't fully conforming, because it's a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and you need permission from the trademark holder. The problem with "4G" was that companies started using it before anyone had trademarked it, so if it's demonstrably better than '3G', and there's no definition of '4G', I suppose you can't really say it's *not* 4G. Someone else can't come along after the fact and define 4G after someone's already started using it.
I think we can all understand why the RIAA wants the amount to be so high, but I don't actually know why the amount *is* so high. After all, we have a constitutional principle that punishments should not be cruel or unusual - in part, that means, I think, that the punishment should not be out of proportion to the crime. You know, that Constitution which Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc are saying is SO SACRED every day for the last year.
How is assessing damages which are greater than or equal to an average person's *entire lifetime income* for sharing 24 songs, NOT Cruel or Unusual? How did they even come up with that number? I don't think it would be possible to go back and find out how many copies were actually downloaded illegally from Ms. Thomas's computer, so I don't think that number represents what lawyers call "Actual Damages"? (That is, if we were talking about "Actual Damages", I think you'd look at something like: X copies of the song were downloaded, each copy having a retail value of $1, so damages are $X - where X would probably be something like 5000 - not 1.5Million).
I think your methodology may be flawed: can you *prove* that once a cookie is set, changing the User Agent String would have any effect at all? I would *expect* them to only check the User Agent string if the cookie is not found, otherwise just keep sending the user the same rate you sent previously for that cookie.
The real problem here, which few people seem to be mentioning, is *sample size*. Now, it's an interesting *observation* that one guy, using different browsers on the same computer got different rates when visiting the Capitol One site. But, a sample size of one isn't really data. As you say, trying to clear your cookies may not work if there is a flash (or other plugin) storing cookies elsewhere. Perhaps the site tracks your IP address. The only real way I can see to test this is to have people at lots of computers, with different IP addresses (e.g. not sharing one NATed public address), on different browsers, hitting the site. Get a sample size of like 100 or 200 'visits' from each browser, and see if any clear trend emerges across a larger sample size.
For all we know, the Capitol One site might be setup to detect multiple visits from the same IP address and keep lowering the rate, figuring that if you didn't sign up the first time you visited, perhaps they'll offer you a better deal the second and third times, trying to get you to sign up.
The rates could just be randomized within a range, so that Capitol One can try to see at what rate they get the optimum amount of response. I hardly find one guy's observations and 'analysis' to be convincing - but it's certainly interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
Is a day someone commits to an Android phone for the next two years. If Apple waits too long to make iPhone available on Verizon, it may find itself struggling to compete for awhile after the initial launch on Verizon.
I fully believe that the main reason Verizon got so much behind Android-based phones, was that A) Blackberries are liked by some people, but not everyone, and B) Android seemed to be the only other platform which could potentially drive the kind of sales the iPhone was seeing. Basically, Apple forced Verizon to push their competitors (and still is today), so Verizon did.
Again, tick-tock, every day which passes, lots of people on Verizon are buying Droids and other android-powered phones, and will likely continue to use those for at least two years. Once they're using them, they might find that even if they like the iPhone a little more, they're already 'settled' with data on their Android phone, apps they're used to using on their Android phone, etc.
"Prof too ethically incompetent to realize that punishing the ones who did right along with the guilty is an act more despicable than the original cheating? Check."
Is it unfair? Sure. Is it unfair that every U.S. taxpayer has to make up Billions in losses because of unethical Business Management practices at large corporations? Check.
Life isn't fair - people often end up paying for the mistakes and unethical conduct of others. It's quite a valuable lesson for the future captains of industry to learn, I'd say.
I want to see every opportunity taken by business schools to pound ethics and consequences into the heads of their graduates, because it's mostly business school graduates who've cause a lot of the economic problems of the past 3 years (and who knows how long into the future).
Right, because The Founders who wrote the Constitution realized that Terrorists could hijack airplanes full of highly volatile hydrocarbon fuels, and dive-bomb them into things, or blow them up, resulting in the deaths of lots of people.
Granted, The Founders were pretty forward thinking, but I don't think they could envision exactly the type of world we'd be living in 200 years later and the new types of threat present. The State-of-the-Art in weaponry when the Constitution was ratified were single-shot, manually loaded muskets, and large steel cannons.
"Here's the thing. This is exactly the terrorists' plan."
So, if I start punching you, you shouldn't try to block my blows - that's *exactly* my plan. Silly you - you're playing right into my schemes, You Fool! The Police shouldn't even bother to show up at a robbery - that's playing exactly into the plans of the robbers.
I for one can't accept the notion that we shouldn't *try* to secure air travel. You either have to accept that all security is a waste of time - and thereby accept a substantially high number of highjackings and bombs, or you make a best-effort approach. I'm not naive enough to think that we can stop all terrorist plans, but all we really have to do is make it hard enough that we substantially reduce the frequency at which they are successful. If we didn't try security at all, highjackings and bombings would probably happen on a weekly basis. As it stands, while I'm sure at some point another terrorist attack could and probably will succeed at some point in the future, we seem to be keeping it to something like a once-or-twice-a-decade success rate.
As for the Constitution: there's no Constitutional right to fly. Flying is a privilege. If you want that privilege, you have to agree to the rules, that's just how it works. You don't *have* to fly.
Reading the slashdot summary, my first thought was, "This has setup written all over it". I mean, the kid is throwing a tantrum, and the parent doesn't order the kid to be quite and walk "over there" (i.e. through the scanner) and you'll get your teddy bear back. Then, the parent "just happens" to be a reporter.
I'd almost be willing to stake money that the reporter set this situation up, perhaps even *coached* his 3-year old, to create the situation he wanted so he could get the video he wanted.
I'd also just like to echo the sentiment that someone else posted - if you accept that such searching is legitimate for *anyone*, then you must accept it for *everyone*. You cannot make exceptions, because as soon as you do, "The Terrorists" will figure it out and use a member of whatever 'exempted' groups you allow to pass screening. It doesn't matter if someone is an 80 year old white person, or a 3 year old baby, they can be exploited. In the case of babies, it not be completely implausible that a terrorist might use their own babies to smuggle something in through screening (after all, they don't have to put their baby on the plane that they're gonna blow up - they just need to get material in through screening; I wouldn't even completely put it past a real hard-line terrorist to sacrifice their own kid, although I'd find that scenario less likely than just using the baby as a mule in the airport).
As for anyone who is older, anyone could potentially be exploited - say a terrorist group kidnaps some old white church-lady-from-Ohio's (who you wouldn't suspect of ever being involved in terror) granddaughter, then tells the grandmother that unless she does exactly what she's told, her granddaughter will disappear forever and become a sex slave who's beaten every day for the rest of her short life, or murdered. I suppose some people might have the courage to resist the terrorists in that case, and tip off the TSA, but I bet there are some people who'd decide to try to 'protect' their granddaughter, even if that means other people die.
By the way, just by making the *decision* to exempt any group, you give the terrorists an incentive to specifically target that group. By not exempting anyone, you are protecting everyone to some degree.
While I don't totally disagree with your assessment, I think in that particular bit you quoted, she is referring to the fact that, as she stated earlier in the ramble, that she worked out a deal with the author and payed her a royalty.
I do think the Cooks' Source owner/editor/publisher tried to make things right in the end, it sounds like, but people won't leave her alone about this. While I think the owner was in the wrong, both in lifting the article without securing permission beforehand, and then to tell the other person that posting something on the web releases it "into the public domain", I do think it sad that this small business is going out of business because of one mistake, which she tried to make amends for.
Oh well, she'll probably relaunch it in a few months under a new name. *grin*
You can only express so much in a subject line, which is why I did clarify immediately in the text, with regards to 'ionizing radiation'.
. . .justify each and every individual decision to screen someone. As soon as you give the TSA discretion to 'skip over' people they think don't fit 'the profile' of 'suspicious/possibly dangerous', everyone else will bitch about being targetted.
Nobody can claim discrimination or prejudice if everyone is screened.
Also, the second you exempt a group, people will start trying to claim other groups *should* be exempt - you'll get the muslims saying muslim grandmothers in full head-to-toe Burkas should just be passed through - that you shouldn't just exempt 'white' grandmothers.
There's also the small possiblity that someone in a group you would otherwise never expect to be terrorists (e.g. an elderly white person), might have converted to a radicalized form of some ideology or another, and are used as a mule exactly because everyone knows they won't be screened. Or maybe, "The Terrorists" do something like kidnapping their grandchild and telling them if they don't do what they're told, their grandkid is gonna get a bullet in the back of the head, or tortured. From that standpoint, no exempting them is protecting them - if no group is exempted from screening, then there's no particular incentive to target a member of any particular group.
It's not like they're high resolution photographs which show a lot of detail. What's presented on the linked sites are very blocky/pixelly images with almost no contrast - there's really nothing to see. If that's all there is, people need to move on and quit worrying about. Of course, if they increase the resolution and contrast in the future, then there might be a valid reason to worry, but I for one honestly wouldn't give a crap if someone posted a crappy blocky no contrast 'naked' picture of me somewhere - there's not even enough detail to identify who you're looking at in those.
At least, it isn't 'ionizing radiation', which is the radiation most people think of when they hear the word 'radiation' - e.g. the type that can give you radiation sickness, cancer, etc. "Millimeter wave" scanners are just radio waves. We live in a constant ocean of radio waves. 24 hours a day radio waves are passing through you (at least, at some frequencies), and bouncing off you (at other frequencies). If they *must* scan people, I'd rather it be with radio waves than X-Rays, which *are* radiation in the 'ionizing radiation' sense of the word.
Who's saying we should build an atmosphere on Mars? I thought the proposals were based on the idea of having sealed, underground habitats (underground because it's warmer, and the soil would provide some additional shielding from radiation, etc), with their own 'closed' atmospheric system?
Honestly, I'd have to see a closed atmospheric system working in a sealed, underground habitat on Earth that runs reliably for a couple decades, before trying something like that on Mars.
At least on Mars, the heat and pressure aren't so bad it would require a lot of extra engineering to deal with. On Mars, they could probably do EVAs in spacesuits - on Venus, well, perhaps, but the spacesuit needs to withstand 92 atmospheres of pressure, plus high temperature.
Probably because they are less likely to survive the trip? I dunno, but I'd think for such missions, you'd want to start with the strongest, healthiest people you can just so that they hopefully survive long enough to actually land on Mars, and do whatever scientific mission they are tasked with. Someone who is terminally ill might die in week 3 or 6 of the trip, before ever getting to Mars. Or, they might just be too physically weakened to survive atmospheric entry and landing, or too weak to do anything useful when they get there.
Or just use death row convicts. "Well, you can face certain death in 10 years when your appeals run out, and you will die a murder/rapist, or you can go to Mars, advance mankind's understanding of science, and die with (some) honor, in about 10 years, and get a chance to fly in space and play with cool technology in the meantime".
Yeah, not sure that would fly, but who knows.
I'm just trying to figure out why this would fall into the Idle category? I thought Idle was supposed to be for *completely* useless, completely *offtopic* stuff which wouldn't fit anywhere else on slashdot?
Information about WSJ articles on privacy and cookies seems pretty on-topic compared to most of the stuff in Idle.
Unfortunately, the linked article is a bit light on details, apparently because Microsoft isn't being forthcoming with any real technical info, but it's possible no encryption is being used. Perhaps WP7 is reformatting the SD Cards with some new, undocumented, unstandardized filesystem. Perhaps it adds an incompatible 'extension' to an existing filesystem (because, you know, Microsoft *never* adds poorly documented, incompatible, unstandardized extensions to standardized technologies). Although it certainly is possible some sort of encryption is being used, we can't assume that.
. . . to finish the Ares Heavy Lifter. I mean, what's the point of having the Space Telescope ready for launch if there's no launch vehicle to put it in orbit?
"To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by 10*pi".
There, isn't that more elegant?
I wondered the same thing - if these debug features are useful to developers debugging their own software, why not market this as a feature? The only thing that occurred to me, is that, maybe there is some sort of security problem with this debug functionality? Does anyone know - could these debug features be used to do something like break Operating System security models, leading to privilege escalation issues, or for other nefarious purposes?
Another fabulous slashdot article summary - comparing the sales on the first day of the WP7 phone with 6 months of sales for the G1? Seriously? I'm no Microsoft fanboy (I've got a G1 sitting on my desk 8 inches from me right now), but c'mon. It would be much more interesting to know how many G1's were sold the first day, the first week, and the first month, and compare that to WP7.
It's true! He just forgot to mention *which* equator he was referring to. I believe in this case, it would be the equator of Uranus.
I'm confused. Nobody can succeed with the whole world as your enemy. Maybe I'm missing something, but from where I sit, it doesn't look like Oracle has many friends to begin with, and is losing more every day. Oracle and Microsoft have basically been enemies forever, but Oracle had other companies which were it's friends, of sorts, like Sun, IBM, and some others. It just looks to me that Oracle is going to make everyone into their enemy, and how can any company succeed, long term, with that situation?
I accept that the G1 can't do all the things that phones with faster CPUs, more RAM, and more flash memory can. I'm not talking about updates to the latest-greatest version of Android. I mean simply fixes for things like this exploit - Google might say that upgrading the entire OS might fix the problem, but they should also be prepared to offer *small* OTA fixes for older versions of Android to address problems just like this, and the carriers need to get those fixes out to the handset owners. Fix the kernel, if it needs it, or .so libraries, or dalvik class files which have specific problems.
I just want my phone to be able to keep working at the level it was originally sold at, but an exploit like the one discussed in this article could potentially brick my phone (or, if my phone becomes 'owned' and I can't clean it, I'll be forced to stop using it even if it technically still works, so it would *effectively* be bricked, from my standpoint).
I wonder if there is any law which covers this sort of situation. The original G1 was only released like 3 years ago - not really very old, but T-Mobile has completely abandoned owners/users of the G1 and is not providing any additional updates.
Honestly, I blame Google. From day 1, it should have been mandatory that OS updates would come from Google, forever. Carriers don't give a crap about keeping users in updated code once the phone is sold. To them, it's just a device which comes in a box, gets sold, and if it becomes 'obsolete' within 2 years, well that's just another box they can sell you in 2 years.
It's absolutely inexcusable that a programmable, Internet enabled device of the complexity of a G1 should not have guaranteed security updates for the included software, for a minimum of 10 years.
The Solution for the ITU, FCC, et al., is to abandon the term '4G' - it's already out in the wild. I don't think they can really enforce this - basically, Sprint, etc. are 'grandfathered'. Back when 2G, or 3G were being considered, an appropriate standards body like the ITU should have Trademarked the term 4G, so this could never have happened. But it has, too bad.
So the answer is to create a new, catchy trademarked term, which people can only use the trademark if they *actually conform to the standard*. Something similar in concept to the "Wifi" trademark - I may be wrong, but I believe you cannot call your product "Wifi" if it actually isn't fully conforming, because it's a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, and you need permission from the trademark holder. The problem with "4G" was that companies started using it before anyone had trademarked it, so if it's demonstrably better than '3G', and there's no definition of '4G', I suppose you can't really say it's *not* 4G. Someone else can't come along after the fact and define 4G after someone's already started using it.
I think we can all understand why the RIAA wants the amount to be so high, but I don't actually know why the amount *is* so high. After all, we have a constitutional principle that punishments should not be cruel or unusual - in part, that means, I think, that the punishment should not be out of proportion to the crime. You know, that Constitution which Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc are saying is SO SACRED every day for the last year.
How is assessing damages which are greater than or equal to an average person's *entire lifetime income* for sharing 24 songs, NOT Cruel or Unusual? How did they even come up with that number? I don't think it would be possible to go back and find out how many copies were actually downloaded illegally from Ms. Thomas's computer, so I don't think that number represents what lawyers call "Actual Damages"? (That is, if we were talking about "Actual Damages", I think you'd look at something like: X copies of the song were downloaded, each copy having a retail value of $1, so damages are $X - where X would probably be something like 5000 - not 1.5Million).
I think your methodology may be flawed: can you *prove* that once a cookie is set, changing the User Agent String would have any effect at all? I would *expect* them to only check the User Agent string if the cookie is not found, otherwise just keep sending the user the same rate you sent previously for that cookie.
The real problem here, which few people seem to be mentioning, is *sample size*. Now, it's an interesting *observation* that one guy, using different browsers on the same computer got different rates when visiting the Capitol One site. But, a sample size of one isn't really data. As you say, trying to clear your cookies may not work if there is a flash (or other plugin) storing cookies elsewhere. Perhaps the site tracks your IP address. The only real way I can see to test this is to have people at lots of computers, with different IP addresses (e.g. not sharing one NATed public address), on different browsers, hitting the site. Get a sample size of like 100 or 200 'visits' from each browser, and see if any clear trend emerges across a larger sample size.
For all we know, the Capitol One site might be setup to detect multiple visits from the same IP address and keep lowering the rate, figuring that if you didn't sign up the first time you visited, perhaps they'll offer you a better deal the second and third times, trying to get you to sign up.
The rates could just be randomized within a range, so that Capitol One can try to see at what rate they get the optimum amount of response. I hardly find one guy's observations and 'analysis' to be convincing - but it's certainly interesting.