Functional languages are becoming increasingly important as Moore's law expands via parallelism rather than single channel computing capacity.
One of the singular most powerful artifacts of functional languages is that they are inherently parallelizable without suffering from many of the ill effects of a serial language (such as procedural languages like C). These same things are also the hardest to test for correctness in serial languages because often the problem only exists as a race condition.
In a functional language, a loop over n data elements may be automatically parallelized into n simultaneous executions. You don't even have to ask for it to be parallelized, the runtime knows and will do so automatically. There is no loop which may not be parallelized unless it depends on an external serial source. Languages like Erlang are even able to automatically parallelize across any computing node, including other physical hardware in the same cluster. So the processing time of an O(n) operation is O(1) assuming sufficient simultaneous capacity. If you can't see the power of that, then by all means, stick with C.
F# might not be especially relevant because of its limited adoption rate, but other functional languages are, notably Erlang. This is how Asterisk, for example, is able to obtain such massive throughput on low end commodity hardware. Anyone looking to get into unlimited horizontal scalability should be looking Functional.
You wholly fail to address GP's point. Really huge job loss is much worse than job growth, even if job growth can't (yet) keep up with job demand.
This is just as true whether you look at ratio of new jobs to employment demand (as you suggest) as it is if you just look at raw numbers (as GP does).
Failure to completely recover in 2 years from the Republicans screwing the hell out of the economy doesn't mean they were doing nothing to help the economy. If they hadn't worked so hard, the 9.2% unemployment rate we have now would look more like 20%.
In July of 2008, the US national unemployment rate was 6%. By January, it had reached 8.5% (a 41% increase). The job loss momentum was incredible - 0.42% increase per month. The next 6 months, the Democrats had managed to slow this to less than half that rate of change - 0.2% increase per month.
The following 1.5 years has been relatively stable. It's not where we want to be, but on the whole, the rate of unemployment has managed to stay relatively stable. Economies don't turn on a dime. Even if they could, very rapid change in any direction is extremely unhealthy in the long run. It takes time to slow then stop job loss, then start job gains.
I'd much rather have a party in charge who keeps a level unemployment rate than one which has a dramatically increasing unemployment rate. Somehow though, "You didn't clean up after us quickly enough" is a reason to vote back in the people who made a mess in the first place. Surely THIS time around they won't make a mess!
According to many polls, the number one concern this election was the economy. Somehow in the minds of many, the economy is the fault of the Democrats, in spite of the fact that the 2008 candidates left the campaign trail to focus on the rapidly failing economy.
The Republicans couldn't have timed it better. Pillage the economy, let it fail just before the Democrats take office, and two years later when the Dems have halted and begun reversal of the worst economic disaster of all time, the Republicans come in, blaming the Democrats.
Somehow people buy that rhetoric. I guess angry shouting will beat out reasonable discourse nearly every time.
I'd be cautious about showing another job offer. To many employers, that's a sign that you're ready to jump ship (maybe you are), and although they may make a compelling counter offer for the short term, in the long term you may find you're a marked man.
There's an axiom in the employment and recruiting industries: never accept a counter-offer. If you show them another job offer, whatever comes across the table next (short of, "Good luck, clean out your desk by the end of the day") is a counter offer.
It's much better to show evidence of what the job market supports. IT Salary Surveys are a big way to do so, and so are anecdotes: "My old college buddy who has pretty much identical experience to me just took a job for $X," rather than, "I've been interviewing around, and I can make $X at this other company, they've extended me a job offer." You only do that if you really are ready to jump ship, and the counter offer had better be damn impressive to take the risk that you'll still have a job there 6 months later (when they have had time to find a replacement for you).
It sounds like you could target your coworkers by calling your HR department and asking for a reference for them (or getting a friend to do it so it's not your voice).
Also, most legitimate companies understand that people are often looking for a job while they still have one, and their previous employer doesn't know about it. Usually they will ask if they can call the previous employer for a reference before they do so (and especially if it says "2003-Present" would never make the assumption they could just call).
Also, many companies would take receiving such a call as a sign that this employee is unhappy, and open negotiations with him/her. It is always expensive to hire a replacement for essential employees since the new employee will take a while to be as productive as the old employee. That wouldn't happen if the person hasn't done anything to distinguish themselves, or if the company was already dissatisfied with their performance.
If the company he inquiring with called without consulting him, that sucks, but that's the exception not the rule, and I'm not convinced people should avoid looking on that chance. If someone is worried the same thing would happen to them, then withhold the name of your current employer (put Confidential, available on request in the employer name). That's fairly common, especially with resumes put on job boards - who knows if someone in HR is searching for their company name in job boards. If and when that information is requested of you, you have the ability to caution the prospective new employer that they should not call your current employer for a reference, and explain the reasons.
If they terminate his employment, he retains no obligation, either morally, legally, or ethically toward helping them recover the rogue domain. His obligations toward them in this regard ended the same moment his employment did.
He shouldn't talk about this situation with prospective new employers, it's extremely unlikely to help him in an interview, and very likely to make the interview go badly for him. His former employer is furthermore prohibited by libel laws from accusing him of anything overtly to a prospective new employer. Unless they are very stupid, the worst possible response from a former employer is, "We have no comment on his tenure here." Don't get me wrong, that's the same as shouting, "Don't hire this guy if you can help it!" but they won't be able to go into specifics without substantial legal risk.
So there's no reason a new employer should ever hear any of the details of this situation, regardless of how blameless he is or is not.
I still don't believe that the reasons to be hesitant to recover the bogus domain have anything to do with technical competence.
The employer is acting extremely hostile toward him, in my experience, that suggests they've already made up their mind, and are just doing "due diligence" in terms of giving him a chance to redeem himself (when they have no intention of that being possible).
Interacting with a hostile second party does not mean capitulating on their every whim. As I said early in this conversation, if they ask him to do so, he should, given that it's established as a means of redemption. If he gives it right over, he has no remaining bargaining chips. Though he should also not be seen as using this as a bargaining chip in a proactive sense (and thus should hand it over only as a condition of returning to his job).
He should ask them what proof would satisfy them it wasn't him. If they tell him that no such proof is possible, then I see no reason for him to help them recover the rogue domain. If they are going to treat him unfairly like that, he shouldn't return that with assistance while he's not even drawing a paycheck any longer.
Regardless, at this point, trust is broken on both sides, and he should be working on cleaning up his resume. Even if he gets his job back, it's likely they will view him with suspicion, and for his part, he won't know what innocuous action will be interpreted as hostile and get him fired again. He should start the job hunt right away, and hope he can recover this position long enough to bridge the gap.
How they react is entirely up to them, and entirely beyond his control.
I only agree with the first half of this. He can influence their actions with his own, and if he intends to keep his job, he needs to be very careful how he responds. For someone who has already decided you're guilty, very few actions will prove otherwise.
I'm not saying it's hard for him to claim a domain name which has him listed as the registrant (as you have repeatedly suggested). I'm saying that doing so is not necessarily in his best interests, and to a skeptical employer doesn't actually prove anything except maybe that he was smart enough to use untraceable billing.
It sounds as if they're more upset that in their mind, he violated a noncompete agreement. The fact that they suspended him already means they have basically decided his fate and are giving him a chance to evidence collect on his own behalf before they terminate him permanently (maybe with a nice lawsuit for breach of contract to follow).
They came to him and said, "You broke your agreement, and are competing directly with us," managing to produce the domain within 24 hours and hand it over sure looks like someone trying to make amends for wrongdoing, no matter what means was used to acquire the domain.
Chances are that the lost wages he's looking at greatly outnumber the cost of employing a lawyer for a few hours (I doubt most people who could have acquired this position are making little enough that a week's salary is less than a few hours of lawyer time).
And yes, the police. If they're feeling vindictive, and it turns out the domain was acquired with a stolen credit card, and presumably the transaction crosses state lines. So some small town cops might have a shot at working a federal level case. Maybe it goes nowhere, but even so, the damage to OP is substantial. I've witnessed first hand the kind of bored injustice which can be served up by small time cops looking for something interesting to work on for once.
If it was paid for with a stolen credit card from the Ukraine, and the email address was for some gmail account that google traces to a user in Zagreb, he's in the clear.
Actually that doesn't really help his case as far as his employer is concerned. It doesn't prove that he wasn't the responsible party. In the mind of his employer he's already guilty, and needs to prove his innocence to them, and merely transferring the domain to them and producing some untraceable billing information doesn't accomplish this. With the billing information in hand (assuming it's fraudulent), the employer might then decide to engage the police.
Probably the best thing he can do is talk to his employer, ask them what action in their mind he can take to absolve himself of the issue. They will either give him a path to redemption which if reasonable he can follow, or they won't, in which case he really should talk to a lawyer - even if just to pay the guy a couple hundred bucks to talk over the situation for an hour and get an idea of best course of action.
I'm not OP, but I can say I've moved away from iStuff because I don't like being told what I'm allowed to do with hardware I own. Sorry Steve, if you really believe something sucks, let us find it out for ourselves.
I don't believe that's Steve's motivation at all. The problem is Flash lets you create applications that Steve hasn't had an opportunity to monetize. I'm astounded that people are still parroting his excuse for it.
I dropped my iPhone for a Nexus One directly as a result of this walled and restricted garden. I prefer freedom, and I'm glad I have it. Mobile gaming sites like Kongregate have proven that Flash is only as bad as the developer creating the content. I'm glad I was pushed this direction, it turns out I like Android a lot more than iOS. iOS might be ever so slightly more polished, but the extra things you can do with Android make it a completely worthwhile upgrade.
Me either. Sure, I can find examples of Flash which assume desktop processing power. But those are not only the exception, Flash functions which specifically target the phone really rock (kongregate.com for example).
Anyway, I like to have the choice, it's what made me give up my iPhone for Nexus One, and I'm glad I did.
Wish I hadn't used up my mod points earlier today. This comment is a rare buoy in the frothing sea of "if it's Microsoft, it necessarily sucks," tripe.
You wouldn't happen to work for a company named similarly to your username would you?
I have a Synology DiskStation DS509+ (a really fantastic product, the web based admin is extremely easy to use and provides a lot more functionality out of the box than I was expecting, including music streaming, and a nice web based file management UI which you could choose to expose to your friends if you wish). With 5x2TB drives I get 8TB of storage (1 for parity). This is the disk store for my AppleTV. I used HandBrake to rip my own DVD collection to this as m4v files (around 100 movies [152gb] and around 30 TV shows [732gb]).
The only difficulty involved is that I do need a computer running iTunes to act as the streaming interface. AppleTV can't stream directly from the NAS (which I find extremely annoying).
It also acts as a backup target (it shows up as a Time Capsule for Macs), and of course I keep my music and photo collections on there as well, but those are not as relevant to the AppleTV.
You're right, if a merchant account gets lots and lots of fraudulent charges against it, it's going to get shut down pretty quick. But they can steal that information and submit it to valid terminals for nefarious purposes.
I found an RFID under the collar of a shirt I had worn and even washed a few times. If being used as a theft deterrent system, it would behoove manufacturers to hide them on the clothing our outright put them in a part of the item which you can't find it at all without destroying it (such as inside the soles of shoes).
Of course the problem with RFID is that its information can be obtained without the owner of that information being reasonably able to detect it (http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/how-to-hack-an-rfide.html).
I don't actually know of any reasons RFID is better for certain applications (eg, use in credit cards), so in the absence of some obvious benefit, it seems like a major reduction in security for no reason.
It gives you better information than you could get without access to that information. As supplemental information to a traditional casing, it can dramatically reduce the likelihood of bumping into someone (such as when you ring the doorbell in your workman's uniform to double check there is in fact nobody home) who might remember your face.
In addition, with the geotagged photos, you could be seeing what theft targets there are on the premises. Big screen TV, new camera, new computer, etc., but also less obvious things like jewelry. You can make it so their in-and-out time in the house is dramatically reduced, they could enter with a shopping list. And maybe they can even identify a likely ingress and egress target (for example, the location of window air conditioners on the first floor) without having to snoop around the house.
Wrong. your OTHER choice is to ask the user at the time the app is trying to do the thing in question the app would like to get permission for - so it would ask when the app tried to send an SMS.
This just changes the nature of the trojan, it doesn't protect the user against anything. Particularly since it's impossible to tell from the number whether a text will cost you money.
As I observed, a media player sending SMS's is a poorly disguised trojan, but what if instead it's an app for which it seems to make sense to send SMS messages? Perhaps it advertises itself as an American Idol Voter app, or perhaps it advertises itself as a Charity SMS Donation app, and so forth. The point being that there are legitimate uses for SMS in applications, and if the app disguises itself as an app which has legitimate uses, the app developer can still screw you over.
Either the phone will ask every time (frustrating if you're trying to develop a replacement app for the built-in one), in which case it just has to trick the user into agreeing (this is just a different aspect of the same social engineering which the malicious developer already had to engage in), or as you suggest, if it only prompts n times, then the app just has to generate n legitimate seeming SMS's before it sends a flood of malicious ones.
Even though saying a user "can't miss" something in a list of other things seems wrong to me from direct experience, I'm willing to concede that point.
If you read the screen you can't miss it. If you missed it, then you haven't read the screen.
Your only other choice is to prohibit software from doing things which might not be desirable to the user, including the legitimate uses of software in areas where there is also room for illegitimate uses.
Personally I prefer to have a choice in what my software can do, and I think Android provides an excellent middle ground. Software is limited to what it advertises that it does. I wouldn't install a music player which has a SMS function. Of course just because this app is poorly disguised does't mean another trojan wouldn't be. But still, I'll take software freedom over lack of choice.
This is an app which is not installed via the Android Market. You have to first enable the installation of apps from outside the Market (an option in system settings). Once you've made that change, neither Google nor any other entity controls what you install on your phone any longer.
Also, you still have to go through a screen which warns that this application requires special permissions; the ability to send SMS's is listed under a big bold heading along the lines of "Things which may cost you money."
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Functional languages are becoming increasingly important as Moore's law expands via parallelism rather than single channel computing capacity.
One of the singular most powerful artifacts of functional languages is that they are inherently parallelizable without suffering from many of the ill effects of a serial language (such as procedural languages like C). These same things are also the hardest to test for correctness in serial languages because often the problem only exists as a race condition.
In a functional language, a loop over n data elements may be automatically parallelized into n simultaneous executions. You don't even have to ask for it to be parallelized, the runtime knows and will do so automatically. There is no loop which may not be parallelized unless it depends on an external serial source. Languages like Erlang are even able to automatically parallelize across any computing node, including other physical hardware in the same cluster. So the processing time of an O(n) operation is O(1) assuming sufficient simultaneous capacity. If you can't see the power of that, then by all means, stick with C.
F# might not be especially relevant because of its limited adoption rate, but other functional languages are, notably Erlang. This is how Asterisk, for example, is able to obtain such massive throughput on low end commodity hardware. Anyone looking to get into unlimited horizontal scalability should be looking Functional.
Actually so far, TARP has profited 8.2 percent netting taxpayers $25.2 billion.
So the solution is to vote in the people who created the mess in the first place?
What could possibly go wrong?
You wholly fail to address GP's point. Really huge job loss is much worse than job growth, even if job growth can't (yet) keep up with job demand.
This is just as true whether you look at ratio of new jobs to employment demand (as you suggest) as it is if you just look at raw numbers (as GP does).
Failure to completely recover in 2 years from the Republicans screwing the hell out of the economy doesn't mean they were doing nothing to help the economy. If they hadn't worked so hard, the 9.2% unemployment rate we have now would look more like 20%.
In July of 2008, the US national unemployment rate was 6%. By January, it had reached 8.5% (a 41% increase). The job loss momentum was incredible - 0.42% increase per month. The next 6 months, the Democrats had managed to slow this to less than half that rate of change - 0.2% increase per month.
The following 1.5 years has been relatively stable. It's not where we want to be, but on the whole, the rate of unemployment has managed to stay relatively stable. Economies don't turn on a dime. Even if they could, very rapid change in any direction is extremely unhealthy in the long run. It takes time to slow then stop job loss, then start job gains.
I'd much rather have a party in charge who keeps a level unemployment rate than one which has a dramatically increasing unemployment rate. Somehow though, "You didn't clean up after us quickly enough" is a reason to vote back in the people who made a mess in the first place. Surely THIS time around they won't make a mess!
According to many polls, the number one concern this election was the economy. Somehow in the minds of many, the economy is the fault of the Democrats, in spite of the fact that the 2008 candidates left the campaign trail to focus on the rapidly failing economy.
The Republicans couldn't have timed it better. Pillage the economy, let it fail just before the Democrats take office, and two years later when the Dems have halted and begun reversal of the worst economic disaster of all time, the Republicans come in, blaming the Democrats.
Somehow people buy that rhetoric. I guess angry shouting will beat out reasonable discourse nearly every time.
I'd be cautious about showing another job offer. To many employers, that's a sign that you're ready to jump ship (maybe you are), and although they may make a compelling counter offer for the short term, in the long term you may find you're a marked man.
There's an axiom in the employment and recruiting industries: never accept a counter-offer. If you show them another job offer, whatever comes across the table next (short of, "Good luck, clean out your desk by the end of the day") is a counter offer.
It's much better to show evidence of what the job market supports. IT Salary Surveys are a big way to do so, and so are anecdotes: "My old college buddy who has pretty much identical experience to me just took a job for $X," rather than, "I've been interviewing around, and I can make $X at this other company, they've extended me a job offer." You only do that if you really are ready to jump ship, and the counter offer had better be damn impressive to take the risk that you'll still have a job there 6 months later (when they have had time to find a replacement for you).
It sounds like you could target your coworkers by calling your HR department and asking for a reference for them (or getting a friend to do it so it's not your voice).
Also, most legitimate companies understand that people are often looking for a job while they still have one, and their previous employer doesn't know about it. Usually they will ask if they can call the previous employer for a reference before they do so (and especially if it says "2003-Present" would never make the assumption they could just call).
Also, many companies would take receiving such a call as a sign that this employee is unhappy, and open negotiations with him/her. It is always expensive to hire a replacement for essential employees since the new employee will take a while to be as productive as the old employee. That wouldn't happen if the person hasn't done anything to distinguish themselves, or if the company was already dissatisfied with their performance.
If the company he inquiring with called without consulting him, that sucks, but that's the exception not the rule, and I'm not convinced people should avoid looking on that chance. If someone is worried the same thing would happen to them, then withhold the name of your current employer (put Confidential, available on request in the employer name). That's fairly common, especially with resumes put on job boards - who knows if someone in HR is searching for their company name in job boards. If and when that information is requested of you, you have the ability to caution the prospective new employer that they should not call your current employer for a reference, and explain the reasons.
If they terminate his employment, he retains no obligation, either morally, legally, or ethically toward helping them recover the rogue domain. His obligations toward them in this regard ended the same moment his employment did.
He shouldn't talk about this situation with prospective new employers, it's extremely unlikely to help him in an interview, and very likely to make the interview go badly for him. His former employer is furthermore prohibited by libel laws from accusing him of anything overtly to a prospective new employer. Unless they are very stupid, the worst possible response from a former employer is, "We have no comment on his tenure here." Don't get me wrong, that's the same as shouting, "Don't hire this guy if you can help it!" but they won't be able to go into specifics without substantial legal risk.
So there's no reason a new employer should ever hear any of the details of this situation, regardless of how blameless he is or is not.
I still don't believe that the reasons to be hesitant to recover the bogus domain have anything to do with technical competence.
The employer is acting extremely hostile toward him, in my experience, that suggests they've already made up their mind, and are just doing "due diligence" in terms of giving him a chance to redeem himself (when they have no intention of that being possible).
Interacting with a hostile second party does not mean capitulating on their every whim. As I said early in this conversation, if they ask him to do so, he should, given that it's established as a means of redemption. If he gives it right over, he has no remaining bargaining chips. Though he should also not be seen as using this as a bargaining chip in a proactive sense (and thus should hand it over only as a condition of returning to his job).
He should ask them what proof would satisfy them it wasn't him. If they tell him that no such proof is possible, then I see no reason for him to help them recover the rogue domain. If they are going to treat him unfairly like that, he shouldn't return that with assistance while he's not even drawing a paycheck any longer.
Regardless, at this point, trust is broken on both sides, and he should be working on cleaning up his resume. Even if he gets his job back, it's likely they will view him with suspicion, and for his part, he won't know what innocuous action will be interpreted as hostile and get him fired again. He should start the job hunt right away, and hope he can recover this position long enough to bridge the gap.
I only agree with the first half of this. He can influence their actions with his own, and if he intends to keep his job, he needs to be very careful how he responds. For someone who has already decided you're guilty, very few actions will prove otherwise.
I'm not saying it's hard for him to claim a domain name which has him listed as the registrant (as you have repeatedly suggested). I'm saying that doing so is not necessarily in his best interests, and to a skeptical employer doesn't actually prove anything except maybe that he was smart enough to use untraceable billing.
It sounds as if they're more upset that in their mind, he violated a noncompete agreement. The fact that they suspended him already means they have basically decided his fate and are giving him a chance to evidence collect on his own behalf before they terminate him permanently (maybe with a nice lawsuit for breach of contract to follow).
They came to him and said, "You broke your agreement, and are competing directly with us," managing to produce the domain within 24 hours and hand it over sure looks like someone trying to make amends for wrongdoing, no matter what means was used to acquire the domain.
Chances are that the lost wages he's looking at greatly outnumber the cost of employing a lawyer for a few hours (I doubt most people who could have acquired this position are making little enough that a week's salary is less than a few hours of lawyer time).
And yes, the police. If they're feeling vindictive, and it turns out the domain was acquired with a stolen credit card, and presumably the transaction crosses state lines. So some small town cops might have a shot at working a federal level case. Maybe it goes nowhere, but even so, the damage to OP is substantial. I've witnessed first hand the kind of bored injustice which can be served up by small time cops looking for something interesting to work on for once.
Actually that doesn't really help his case as far as his employer is concerned. It doesn't prove that he wasn't the responsible party. In the mind of his employer he's already guilty, and needs to prove his innocence to them, and merely transferring the domain to them and producing some untraceable billing information doesn't accomplish this. With the billing information in hand (assuming it's fraudulent), the employer might then decide to engage the police.
Probably the best thing he can do is talk to his employer, ask them what action in their mind he can take to absolve himself of the issue. They will either give him a path to redemption which if reasonable he can follow, or they won't, in which case he really should talk to a lawyer - even if just to pay the guy a couple hundred bucks to talk over the situation for an hour and get an idea of best course of action.
I'm not OP, but I can say I've moved away from iStuff because I don't like being told what I'm allowed to do with hardware I own. Sorry Steve, if you really believe something sucks, let us find it out for ourselves.
I don't believe that's Steve's motivation at all. The problem is Flash lets you create applications that Steve hasn't had an opportunity to monetize. I'm astounded that people are still parroting his excuse for it.
I dropped my iPhone for a Nexus One directly as a result of this walled and restricted garden. I prefer freedom, and I'm glad I have it. Mobile gaming sites like Kongregate have proven that Flash is only as bad as the developer creating the content. I'm glad I was pushed this direction, it turns out I like Android a lot more than iOS. iOS might be ever so slightly more polished, but the extra things you can do with Android make it a completely worthwhile upgrade.
You forgot:
3) Most flash actually works pretty well on most phones, so why not have the choice?
Me either. Sure, I can find examples of Flash which assume desktop processing power. But those are not only the exception, Flash functions which specifically target the phone really rock (kongregate.com for example).
Anyway, I like to have the choice, it's what made me give up my iPhone for Nexus One, and I'm glad I did.
Wish I hadn't used up my mod points earlier today. This comment is a rare buoy in the frothing sea of "if it's Microsoft, it necessarily sucks," tripe.
You wouldn't happen to work for a company named similarly to your username would you?
I have a Synology DiskStation DS509+ (a really fantastic product, the web based admin is extremely easy to use and provides a lot more functionality out of the box than I was expecting, including music streaming, and a nice web based file management UI which you could choose to expose to your friends if you wish). With 5x2TB drives I get 8TB of storage (1 for parity). This is the disk store for my AppleTV. I used HandBrake to rip my own DVD collection to this as m4v files (around 100 movies [152gb] and around 30 TV shows [732gb]).
The only difficulty involved is that I do need a computer running iTunes to act as the streaming interface. AppleTV can't stream directly from the NAS (which I find extremely annoying).
It also acts as a backup target (it shows up as a Time Capsule for Macs), and of course I keep my music and photo collections on there as well, but those are not as relevant to the AppleTV.
The information on the card contains the plain text card number (the same one which can be used to perform online purchases): http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/how-to-hack-an-rfide.html
You're right, if a merchant account gets lots and lots of fraudulent charges against it, it's going to get shut down pretty quick. But they can steal that information and submit it to valid terminals for nefarious purposes.
I found an RFID under the collar of a shirt I had worn and even washed a few times. If being used as a theft deterrent system, it would behoove manufacturers to hide them on the clothing our outright put them in a part of the item which you can't find it at all without destroying it (such as inside the soles of shoes).
RFID on credit cards carry your name, address, and card number, among other details.
RFID on passports contain this and a lot more information (including a JPEG photo of you).
Of course the problem with RFID is that its information can be obtained without the owner of that information being reasonably able to detect it (http://tv.boingboing.net/2008/03/19/how-to-hack-an-rfide.html).
I don't actually know of any reasons RFID is better for certain applications (eg, use in credit cards), so in the absence of some obvious benefit, it seems like a major reduction in security for no reason.
It gives you better information than you could get without access to that information. As supplemental information to a traditional casing, it can dramatically reduce the likelihood of bumping into someone (such as when you ring the doorbell in your workman's uniform to double check there is in fact nobody home) who might remember your face.
In addition, with the geotagged photos, you could be seeing what theft targets there are on the premises. Big screen TV, new camera, new computer, etc., but also less obvious things like jewelry. You can make it so their in-and-out time in the house is dramatically reduced, they could enter with a shopping list. And maybe they can even identify a likely ingress and egress target (for example, the location of window air conditioners on the first floor) without having to snoop around the house.
This just changes the nature of the trojan, it doesn't protect the user against anything. Particularly since it's impossible to tell from the number whether a text will cost you money.
As I observed, a media player sending SMS's is a poorly disguised trojan, but what if instead it's an app for which it seems to make sense to send SMS messages? Perhaps it advertises itself as an American Idol Voter app, or perhaps it advertises itself as a Charity SMS Donation app, and so forth. The point being that there are legitimate uses for SMS in applications, and if the app disguises itself as an app which has legitimate uses, the app developer can still screw you over.
Either the phone will ask every time (frustrating if you're trying to develop a replacement app for the built-in one), in which case it just has to trick the user into agreeing (this is just a different aspect of the same social engineering which the malicious developer already had to engage in), or as you suggest, if it only prompts n times, then the app just has to generate n legitimate seeming SMS's before it sends a flood of malicious ones.
If you read the screen you can't miss it. If you missed it, then you haven't read the screen.
Your only other choice is to prohibit software from doing things which might not be desirable to the user, including the legitimate uses of software in areas where there is also room for illegitimate uses.
Personally I prefer to have a choice in what my software can do, and I think Android provides an excellent middle ground. Software is limited to what it advertises that it does. I wouldn't install a music player which has a SMS function. Of course just because this app is poorly disguised does't mean another trojan wouldn't be. But still, I'll take software freedom over lack of choice.
This is an app which is not installed via the Android Market. You have to first enable the installation of apps from outside the Market (an option in system settings). Once you've made that change, neither Google nor any other entity controls what you install on your phone any longer.
Also, you still have to go through a screen which warns that this application requires special permissions; the ability to send SMS's is listed under a big bold heading along the lines of "Things which may cost you money."