My wife described to me the hand-signing machines used by politicians. It uses a real pen, and copies the signature better than a geek like me can tell. That said, I agree with you and we should write letters. Even if your actual representative didn't respond to you, someone on his staff did. That still counts for more than ranting on this site.
I forget where I read the article about military trained CEOs... apparently, they kick butt on Wall Street vs we college geeks. Lots of theories were stated... but when a guy can work for a seriously screwed up organization, be given screwed up goals and sorry resources, and still succeed in motivating his men and accomplishing the important goals... well that seems to translate real well into succeeding as a CEO in Dilbert land.
I've got a real soft spot for the Air Force (my Dad flew F102s, and is the guy in the official F102 post-card). Too bad there's no low impact way of helping out, kinda like the Army Reserve, but for geeks.
Naw.... there are far too many rooms and streets for that. All they need is an implant in every person that broadcasts location visual and audio to the NSA in real time. Much cheaper.
In short, you can't violate a patent in your head. You should not be able to violate a patent by typing. This is the simple dividing line between the good and bad patents I see scrolling across slashdot. We let Microsoft and other big American companies con Congress into this, and the rest of the world isn't dumb enough to go along. Sooner or later, we need to fix this... every year it hurts our competitiveness.
Skype pretty much admits allowing wire-taps by refusing to answer whether they do or not, and given the law that makes them do it, and the current administration's love of secret Internet monitoring, you pretty much have to assume your Skype calls are about as public as Slashdot. What's interesting about this article is to find the Germans doing it. They had seemed so progressive lately, I'm quite surprised.
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry about the 'weird beliefs' remark, which doesn't belong here. Practically any religion would seem to have weird beliefs to an outsider. I'll keep my fingers crossed for a planet.
LOL! Too bad we're way down on an old discussion, or you'd get mod-ed 5 Funny for sure. However, you need not worry... if my memory and second hand source are correct, Mormons don't believe in a Hell with fire and pain. You'll just be stuck with all the other non-believers, but there's still no booze:-(
Quite true. I originally did describe myself as an Atheist. Now, I usually either describe myself as "a hopeful Agnostic", or a Unitarian, but I get similar reactions for each. I've come to believe that we have a genetic need for spiritual beliefs. As evidence, consider that Neanderthals buried their dead with items to take to the after-life. Religion has been part of our lives from the first moments we could describe ourselves as modern humans, easily long enough to enter our genetic code the same way that attraction to the opposite sex is in our genetic code (for most of us). Life without any spiritual component lacks a very important component for being happy and well adjusted. I feel I've got just enough control over my own mind to be spiritual and yet only slightly hopeful that I'll exist in any meaningful way after death. It's kind of a hard state to reach.
Because we value freedom of religion as highly as we value freedom of expression. How anyone can mod you 'troll' is beyond me. This sight exists to have open discussions about interesting topics, and this article is about a particular religion. Suggesting it may be similar to another religion is spot-on-topic.
I suspect most main-stream religions started out this way. Early Christians were encouraged to give all their property to the church, because Judgment Day was near, and they would have no use for it. When it didn't come, rather than give up and go back to being plain old Jews, their religion gained even more momentum. New religions are cults. Old religions are established pillars of society. If we value freedom of religion, it's important not to attack the religion, but any illegal methods they may have adopted.
This attack on Scientology will most likely have the same effect as Bush's attack on Al Qaeda. It's just like the old saying: anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger. The best way to deal with extremists like Scientology is to ignore them, and to air out their stranger beliefs.
If my understanding is correct (not very likely), Mormons also have some weird beliefs. I've heard second-hand (yeah, like that's reliable) that in the highest levels of the church you may expect to be able to create your own planet in the after-life, becoming quite like God. I hope they're right and wrong... I hope their wrong about Mormons being the One True Faith of God, but right about being able to build a planet... sounds rather fun to me!
I agree. Freedom of religion is one of our most sacred values here in America. However, the newer the religion, the stronger the persecution, and the lower the tolerance, even here in America. Islam is a post-Jesus fork, and not particularly welcome. Mormonism is even newer, but at least home-grown, though we hanged plenty of them as heathens in days gone by (which is why men needed multiple wives - we killed off most of their men). Scientology seems little different, just newer.
Personally, I want to start my own religion. We'll worship nature, the Goddess, and dance naked around fires in Druid Circles in the woods, then have great orgies! Who's with me (other than ugly geeks)?
Actually, I don't think the article is saying that any rethinking of GRBs needs to be done here. The non-detection just proves the burst was from a lot farther than the Andromeda galaxy. That's a good thing, and in-line with some theories if I'm not mistaken. Last I'd read, these bursts can be so violent that they might kill all life forms in the galaxy where they occur. We really don't want them to be common enough to ever happen in our neck of the woods.
While IANAL, that does it, IMO! This knocks out claim #1. Yahoo made an honest mistake, and they have to protect themselves against patents worse than this from their competitors. I don't blame Yahoo, just the system that requires Yahoo to try and get these kinds of patents.
Not all patent errors are honest. This patent, for example, was submitted by an author who knew it was invalid. Check out the link to patent 5,068,063 cited by the patent. This semiconductor patent is citing a patent about carbon paper. Why? Because the author wanted to be able to say he made an honest mistake in case the patent examiner found this patent, number 5,068,603. He swapped two digits! This prior art completely invalidates 90% of his claims. The author simply lied to the USPTO.
Wow... I didn't see this coming. I figured it was impossible for Microsoft to undercut free software... guess I was wrong! I'm teaching my kids Ubuntu, however, I can be bribed to switch:-) If Microsoft would like one less slashdotter bashing Windows, a promise of free lifetime software and maybe a few hundred bucks would do the trick.
There may be prior art, but after carefully reading the patent, I suspect claim 1 may hold up. It uses the word 'presenting' confusingly, which can invalidate a claim, but the body of the patent makes it clear that 'presenting' means creating new objects on the screen that weren't there before in that location. If you drag an object, they might pop up a recyle bin right next to it, which otherwise wouldn't even be visible. I'm afraid this claim wont infringe any drag-and-drop application I've ever seen.
Two points: First, who cares if Yahoo patents some tiny area? This patent is so specific that few will ever feel the need to violate it. Second, this patent sucks because it's a software patent, not because it's obvious. I have several software patents. You need them in the US to protect your company from your competitor's software patents. However, the EU got it right when they rejected the concept. The world would be better off without them.
Yep, that's how I do it, too. I like to say I took way too much math to ever learn how to multiply, but if you show me the numbers, I can usually guestimate quickly and move on. In your example, I'd just say it's something between 4,000 (40*100) and 4,500 (45*100), and in most cases move on from there. Especially as an engineer, I almost always know my required precision when doing math. Computing run-time or memory usage I only do within 20%. Even if I need 6 significant digits, I do the simplified calculations and make sure my final answer falls within my precision error from my guess.
Once in college, the Electronics 101 professor handed out a really tough equation to solve. However, our standard practice was to only write out the answer to six significant digits. I realized in about 30 seconds that only one term in the sums on either side could contribute any significant digits, and I had the answer in a couple of minutes. The rest of the class thrashed out a solution over multiple pages of computations, and only a few of them got it right. I thought the professor was going to give a valuable real-world lesson on how real engineers do things, but no... the next lecture was entirely about solving the math the hard way. He sucked as a professor... completely lacking in creativity (he was a French visiting prof... most profs at my school were quite good).
Spoken like someone without much math experience. Until you get *past* diff-Eq, virtually all useful continuous math is wrote memorization (except perhaps proofs...that's mostly covered in geometry). Further, it's pretty much all memorization of algorithms. If you're not teaching algorithms, you're not teaching kids to understand math.
Well, I see we'll just have to agree to disagree. Math was my favorite subject at Berkeley, and even though I got an EECS degree, I took a math course ever semester. I was part of the math club, and frankly just love it. I have a patent on super-fast simulation of diff-eqs using backwards trapezoid with direct computation of the future point. I was the first person to ever create a commercially usable version of asymptotic waveform analysis - AWE (which is not as good as the patent I linked to). I dabble in high-frequency transformer design because it uses cool 3-D optimization techniques. Anyway, trust me, I like math, though I'm just an engineer.
If China and India and Singapore want to churn out clones who can mimic smart people well enough to repeat their work, let them. To continue leading, we need creativity, not the arts/literature kind, and it needs to be nourished in children. I strongly disagree that prior to diff-eqs, math should be mostly rote memorization. Math can be fun and creative starting in Kindergarten. My kids go to Montessori school, where they teach the why's before the how's. It's not for everyone, but it certainly is for me in my family. Unfortunately, with "No child left behind", our country is headed in the exact wrong direction, focusing on the how's rather than the why's.
No need to fear... VirtualBox and Xen have already gone open-source, so regardless of their profit status, their code will continue to benefit the world. I'm a fan of VMware and hope they do well, but they may need a similar model to Xen and VirtualBox to have real staying power.
I'm glad someone found the post funny, but seriously, the long division and 2-digit multiplication the woman was teaching is 1) boring... sure to put kids to sleep, 2) easy to forget, 3) provides zero insight into why it works, and 4) is simply a great example of monkey-see-monkey-do education. I'll bet that over 50% of all Americans have forgotten how to do long division, that 90% of them never understood why it works, and that 99% of us hate it. The "Turk" method would seem to have none of these problems, even if it's less efficient. When these methods were taught to our parents, they were really important tools to live in society, just like proper spelling and brushing your teeth. In the computer age, I'd say teach them this "Turk" method first, and later in a more advanced class, teach them the efficient algorithms, probably about when you introduce algorithms for finding greatest-common-divisors and such. Unfortunately, in this "No child left behind" world, our kids aren't being taught the why's anymore, only the how's. I'd rather have my children understanding basic concepts they can build on rather than how to mimic a four-function calculator by hand.
Here's a great test for your kids math teacher: Why is a negative times a positive negative? I asked every math teacher I knew in Georgia, and got nothing but blank looks. So, one day as a kid I sat down and worked it out, and discovered a lot about multiplication in the process that my teachers never knew. By college, I understood basic math operators well enough to recognize addition and multiplication in my digital electronics class: AND is multiplication, and XOR is addition. It then became obvious how to convert any boolean equation into a canonical AND/XOR sum of products form just by doing basic arithmetic. The poor kids who just did the monkey education thing can't even check their answers to see if the units are right and that the value is of the correct order of magnitude.
We do the exact same thing, though I suspect our style of OO in C might bend your mind just a bit. The hand-rails are the important thing, whether provided for by a strong group leader or by the language the group uses.
That video you linked to is one of the scariest I've seen in a while. Sorry if I lost your sarcasm... I would post this as an example of how incredibly stupid parents ruin school systems by forcing us to ban evolution, or any other modern thought from the classroom. I hope that's how you meant it. That bitch on the video pushing monkey-see-monkey-do education is partly responsible for our dumb high-school grads. I've never seen the "Turk" math she's talking about, but from the presentation, it's clearly a major improvement over the old stupid memorization techniques taught when I was in elementary school.
Sorry about being so acidic over a stupid parent. I spent eleven years of my youth in hell in a backwater Georgia school system where original thought was the enemy of the school. I don't blame professors on this issue. I blame the stupid backwards hicks.
About all I can suggest is that students who are inclined to supplement their educations through their own creative pursuits will continue to surpass those who treat CS simply as a profitable skill set.
Yes! I couldn't agree more. As for Java dumbing down education, that's a huge crock. Educators who pander to the most gifted (which I feel they should) typically fail to understand that software in the real world is developed by teams. Java provides those teams hand-rails to guide them towards productive collaboration. C++, in contrast, provides pistols, cannons, nukes, potato guns, and super-glue with which to shoot oneself in the foot. The author attacking Java has piss poor sense for what we need here in the real world.
Good bait for discussion, and always a fun topic! Many (most?) of us here already have dropped Microsoft. I'm not anit-Microsoft, I'm pro-Microsoft. Any company beating up the world with a US based monopoly is a company I want to stay strong. I don't happen to use any Microsoft products because they don't suit my needs as well as Linux, and I'm busy warping my children's minds by cutting their teeth on Ubuntu, Open Office, and FOSS games. I also taught them basic shapes as children: circle, square, triangle, and-gate, or-gate, mux... it was fun the other day to show my seven-year old daughter the TI TTL Databook and see her surprise when she realized she could read it! The Joe Sixpacks of the world are welcome to keep paying Microsoft their hard-earned money for software that's inferior to the free stuff... I'm all for it. They're also welcome to remain ignorant of how things really work. Joe Sixpack was made for Microsoft. So long as it helps the US, I'm all for it.
Let me be the first! In particular, Apple did quite intentionally brick the phones. They had to write extra code to detect modified base-bands, and extra code to then lock down the phones. They deserve every bit of anger directed at them. Personally, I'm not planning on getting back on the iPhone band-waggon, and will work with Android instead. If apple dies a painful death as a company, it couldn't happen to a nicer CEO.
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My wife described to me the hand-signing machines used by politicians. It uses a real pen, and copies the signature better than a geek like me can tell. That said, I agree with you and we should write letters. Even if your actual representative didn't respond to you, someone on his staff did. That still counts for more than ranting on this site.
I can't agree more, and in fact, I did write David Price about it... and he replied! Gotta love an involved congressman.
I forget where I read the article about military trained CEOs... apparently, they kick butt on Wall Street vs we college geeks. Lots of theories were stated... but when a guy can work for a seriously screwed up organization, be given screwed up goals and sorry resources, and still succeed in motivating his men and accomplishing the important goals... well that seems to translate real well into succeeding as a CEO in Dilbert land.
I've got a real soft spot for the Air Force (my Dad flew F102s, and is the guy in the official F102 post-card). Too bad there's no low impact way of helping out, kinda like the Army Reserve, but for geeks.
Naw.... there are far too many rooms and streets for that. All they need is an implant in every person that broadcasts location visual and audio to the NSA in real time. Much cheaper.
In short, you can't violate a patent in your head. You should not be able to violate a patent by typing. This is the simple dividing line between the good and bad patents I see scrolling across slashdot. We let Microsoft and other big American companies con Congress into this, and the rest of the world isn't dumb enough to go along. Sooner or later, we need to fix this... every year it hurts our competitiveness.
Skype pretty much admits allowing wire-taps by refusing to answer whether they do or not, and given the law that makes them do it, and the current administration's love of secret Internet monitoring, you pretty much have to assume your Skype calls are about as public as Slashdot. What's interesting about this article is to find the Germans doing it. They had seemed so progressive lately, I'm quite surprised.
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry about the 'weird beliefs' remark, which doesn't belong here. Practically any religion would seem to have weird beliefs to an outsider. I'll keep my fingers crossed for a planet.
LOL! Too bad we're way down on an old discussion, or you'd get mod-ed 5 Funny for sure. However, you need not worry... if my memory and second hand source are correct, Mormons don't believe in a Hell with fire and pain. You'll just be stuck with all the other non-believers, but there's still no booze :-(
Quite true. I originally did describe myself as an Atheist. Now, I usually either describe myself as "a hopeful Agnostic", or a Unitarian, but I get similar reactions for each. I've come to believe that we have a genetic need for spiritual beliefs. As evidence, consider that Neanderthals buried their dead with items to take to the after-life. Religion has been part of our lives from the first moments we could describe ourselves as modern humans, easily long enough to enter our genetic code the same way that attraction to the opposite sex is in our genetic code (for most of us). Life without any spiritual component lacks a very important component for being happy and well adjusted. I feel I've got just enough control over my own mind to be spiritual and yet only slightly hopeful that I'll exist in any meaningful way after death. It's kind of a hard state to reach.
Because we value freedom of religion as highly as we value freedom of expression. How anyone can mod you 'troll' is beyond me. This sight exists to have open discussions about interesting topics, and this article is about a particular religion. Suggesting it may be similar to another religion is spot-on-topic.
I suspect most main-stream religions started out this way. Early Christians were encouraged to give all their property to the church, because Judgment Day was near, and they would have no use for it. When it didn't come, rather than give up and go back to being plain old Jews, their religion gained even more momentum. New religions are cults. Old religions are established pillars of society. If we value freedom of religion, it's important not to attack the religion, but any illegal methods they may have adopted.
This attack on Scientology will most likely have the same effect as Bush's attack on Al Qaeda. It's just like the old saying: anything that doesn't kill me makes me stronger. The best way to deal with extremists like Scientology is to ignore them, and to air out their stranger beliefs.
If my understanding is correct (not very likely), Mormons also have some weird beliefs. I've heard second-hand (yeah, like that's reliable) that in the highest levels of the church you may expect to be able to create your own planet in the after-life, becoming quite like God. I hope they're right and wrong... I hope their wrong about Mormons being the One True Faith of God, but right about being able to build a planet... sounds rather fun to me!
I agree. Freedom of religion is one of our most sacred values here in America. However, the newer the religion, the stronger the persecution, and the lower the tolerance, even here in America. Islam is a post-Jesus fork, and not particularly welcome. Mormonism is even newer, but at least home-grown, though we hanged plenty of them as heathens in days gone by (which is why men needed multiple wives - we killed off most of their men). Scientology seems little different, just newer.
Personally, I want to start my own religion. We'll worship nature, the Goddess, and dance naked around fires in Druid Circles in the woods, then have great orgies! Who's with me (other than ugly geeks)?
Actually, I don't think the article is saying that any rethinking of GRBs needs to be done here. The non-detection just proves the burst was from a lot farther than the Andromeda galaxy. That's a good thing, and in-line with some theories if I'm not mistaken. Last I'd read, these bursts can be so violent that they might kill all life forms in the galaxy where they occur. We really don't want them to be common enough to ever happen in our neck of the woods.
While IANAL, that does it, IMO! This knocks out claim #1. Yahoo made an honest mistake, and they have to protect themselves against patents worse than this from their competitors. I don't blame Yahoo, just the system that requires Yahoo to try and get these kinds of patents.
Not all patent errors are honest. This patent, for example, was submitted by an author who knew it was invalid. Check out the link to patent 5,068,063 cited by the patent. This semiconductor patent is citing a patent about carbon paper. Why? Because the author wanted to be able to say he made an honest mistake in case the patent examiner found this patent, number 5,068,603. He swapped two digits! This prior art completely invalidates 90% of his claims. The author simply lied to the USPTO.
Wow... I didn't see this coming. I figured it was impossible for Microsoft to undercut free software... guess I was wrong! I'm teaching my kids Ubuntu, however, I can be bribed to switch :-) If Microsoft would like one less slashdotter bashing Windows, a promise of free lifetime software and maybe a few hundred bucks would do the trick.
There may be prior art, but after carefully reading the patent, I suspect claim 1 may hold up. It uses the word 'presenting' confusingly, which can invalidate a claim, but the body of the patent makes it clear that 'presenting' means creating new objects on the screen that weren't there before in that location. If you drag an object, they might pop up a recyle bin right next to it, which otherwise wouldn't even be visible. I'm afraid this claim wont infringe any drag-and-drop application I've ever seen.
Two points: First, who cares if Yahoo patents some tiny area? This patent is so specific that few will ever feel the need to violate it. Second, this patent sucks because it's a software patent, not because it's obvious. I have several software patents. You need them in the US to protect your company from your competitor's software patents. However, the EU got it right when they rejected the concept. The world would be better off without them.
Yep, that's how I do it, too. I like to say I took way too much math to ever learn how to multiply, but if you show me the numbers, I can usually guestimate quickly and move on. In your example, I'd just say it's something between 4,000 (40*100) and 4,500 (45*100), and in most cases move on from there. Especially as an engineer, I almost always know my required precision when doing math. Computing run-time or memory usage I only do within 20%. Even if I need 6 significant digits, I do the simplified calculations and make sure my final answer falls within my precision error from my guess.
Once in college, the Electronics 101 professor handed out a really tough equation to solve. However, our standard practice was to only write out the answer to six significant digits. I realized in about 30 seconds that only one term in the sums on either side could contribute any significant digits, and I had the answer in a couple of minutes. The rest of the class thrashed out a solution over multiple pages of computations, and only a few of them got it right. I thought the professor was going to give a valuable real-world lesson on how real engineers do things, but no... the next lecture was entirely about solving the math the hard way. He sucked as a professor... completely lacking in creativity (he was a French visiting prof... most profs at my school were quite good).
Well, I see we'll just have to agree to disagree. Math was my favorite subject at Berkeley, and even though I got an EECS degree, I took a math course ever semester. I was part of the math club, and frankly just love it. I have a patent on super-fast simulation of diff-eqs using backwards trapezoid with direct computation of the future point. I was the first person to ever create a commercially usable version of asymptotic waveform analysis - AWE (which is not as good as the patent I linked to). I dabble in high-frequency transformer design because it uses cool 3-D optimization techniques. Anyway, trust me, I like math, though I'm just an engineer.
If China and India and Singapore want to churn out clones who can mimic smart people well enough to repeat their work, let them. To continue leading, we need creativity, not the arts/literature kind, and it needs to be nourished in children. I strongly disagree that prior to diff-eqs, math should be mostly rote memorization. Math can be fun and creative starting in Kindergarten. My kids go to Montessori school, where they teach the why's before the how's. It's not for everyone, but it certainly is for me in my family. Unfortunately, with "No child left behind", our country is headed in the exact wrong direction, focusing on the how's rather than the why's.
No need to fear... VirtualBox and Xen have already gone open-source, so regardless of their profit status, their code will continue to benefit the world. I'm a fan of VMware and hope they do well, but they may need a similar model to Xen and VirtualBox to have real staying power.
I'm glad someone found the post funny, but seriously, the long division and 2-digit multiplication the woman was teaching is 1) boring... sure to put kids to sleep, 2) easy to forget, 3) provides zero insight into why it works, and 4) is simply a great example of monkey-see-monkey-do education. I'll bet that over 50% of all Americans have forgotten how to do long division, that 90% of them never understood why it works, and that 99% of us hate it. The "Turk" method would seem to have none of these problems, even if it's less efficient. When these methods were taught to our parents, they were really important tools to live in society, just like proper spelling and brushing your teeth. In the computer age, I'd say teach them this "Turk" method first, and later in a more advanced class, teach them the efficient algorithms, probably about when you introduce algorithms for finding greatest-common-divisors and such. Unfortunately, in this "No child left behind" world, our kids aren't being taught the why's anymore, only the how's. I'd rather have my children understanding basic concepts they can build on rather than how to mimic a four-function calculator by hand.
Here's a great test for your kids math teacher: Why is a negative times a positive negative? I asked every math teacher I knew in Georgia, and got nothing but blank looks. So, one day as a kid I sat down and worked it out, and discovered a lot about multiplication in the process that my teachers never knew. By college, I understood basic math operators well enough to recognize addition and multiplication in my digital electronics class: AND is multiplication, and XOR is addition. It then became obvious how to convert any boolean equation into a canonical AND/XOR sum of products form just by doing basic arithmetic. The poor kids who just did the monkey education thing can't even check their answers to see if the units are right and that the value is of the correct order of magnitude.
We do the exact same thing, though I suspect our style of OO in C might bend your mind just a bit. The hand-rails are the important thing, whether provided for by a strong group leader or by the language the group uses.
That video you linked to is one of the scariest I've seen in a while. Sorry if I lost your sarcasm... I would post this as an example of how incredibly stupid parents ruin school systems by forcing us to ban evolution, or any other modern thought from the classroom. I hope that's how you meant it. That bitch on the video pushing monkey-see-monkey-do education is partly responsible for our dumb high-school grads. I've never seen the "Turk" math she's talking about, but from the presentation, it's clearly a major improvement over the old stupid memorization techniques taught when I was in elementary school.
Sorry about being so acidic over a stupid parent. I spent eleven years of my youth in hell in a backwater Georgia school system where original thought was the enemy of the school. I don't blame professors on this issue. I blame the stupid backwards hicks.
Yes! I couldn't agree more. As for Java dumbing down education, that's a huge crock. Educators who pander to the most gifted (which I feel they should) typically fail to understand that software in the real world is developed by teams. Java provides those teams hand-rails to guide them towards productive collaboration. C++, in contrast, provides pistols, cannons, nukes, potato guns, and super-glue with which to shoot oneself in the foot. The author attacking Java has piss poor sense for what we need here in the real world.
Good bait for discussion, and always a fun topic! Many (most?) of us here already have dropped Microsoft. I'm not anit-Microsoft, I'm pro-Microsoft. Any company beating up the world with a US based monopoly is a company I want to stay strong. I don't happen to use any Microsoft products because they don't suit my needs as well as Linux, and I'm busy warping my children's minds by cutting their teeth on Ubuntu, Open Office, and FOSS games. I also taught them basic shapes as children: circle, square, triangle, and-gate, or-gate, mux... it was fun the other day to show my seven-year old daughter the TI TTL Databook and see her surprise when she realized she could read it! The Joe Sixpacks of the world are welcome to keep paying Microsoft their hard-earned money for software that's inferior to the free stuff... I'm all for it. They're also welcome to remain ignorant of how things really work. Joe Sixpack was made for Microsoft. So long as it helps the US, I'm all for it.
Let me be the first! In particular, Apple did quite intentionally brick the phones. They had to write extra code to detect modified base-bands, and extra code to then lock down the phones. They deserve every bit of anger directed at them. Personally, I'm not planning on getting back on the iPhone band-waggon, and will work with Android instead. If apple dies a painful death as a company, it couldn't happen to a nicer CEO.