If you think 5 year loans are remotely feasible for houses, you must have no idea how much houses cost. (Hint: they cost a lot more than cars.)
30 years is fine if you plan to WORK for 30 years, at your CURRENT salary, pay it off ON TIME, and STILL have enough money over the years to handle the $XX,XXX in expenses you WILL incur to cover medical expenses, car expenses, etc.
It's not like the alternative is to live for free: you're going to have some monthly housing payment no matter what. Paying rent for 30 years is much worse, from a financial perspective.
Gradual deflation would NOT have a terrible impact on anyone in the middle of a 30 year lease. That's the whole fucking point of GRADUAL.
Depends what you mean by "terrible impact", I guess. (And I'm assuming you mean "loan", not "lease", since that's what we were talking about.)
Deflation basically raises your interest rate. If deflation is 1%, then that mortgage you thought was costing you 5% is actually costing more like 6%, because you're paying the same number of dollars back but those dollars are now worth more (it takes more work to earn them and you can buy more stuff with them).
Is that "terrible"? Maybe not, but it's still a bad thing, not a good thing.
You, and the rest of the STUPID FUCKS in the country who think perpetual debt is acceptable are the reason we're in this shithole.
Actually, I blame stupid fucks like yourself who pretend to know more about economics than the really do, and spout off glib, worthless proclamations that hurt more than they help. We'd be in better shape if politicians could pursue sound economic strategy instead of having to cater to people who think the federal government's budget ought to be drawn up the same way as a household budget.
Sure, you could save up your cash and buy a house when you're 60 instead of getting a 30 year mortgage when you're 30. But that means you lose the use of the house for those 30 years, and the money you save in mortgage interest, you lose in paying rent on another place for 30 years!
Likewise, you could save up your cash and expand your business 5 years from now instead of getting a loan and expanding today. But you might find that competitors have already taken your spot by then, either because they have more cash in the bank or because they don't share your fear of loans.
Protip: Avoid making any more economic pronouncements until you have a better understanding of the issues.
Very well. If logic and relevance are unimportant and any citation will do, then this ought to put your mind at ease. It has its own extensive list of references, too.
There are around 50 million mortgages in the United States. If everyone followed that philosophy, a lot fewer people would be able to own houses... or own cars, or start businesses and expand them, etc.
Like it or not, there is a place for borrowing, and we'd all be worse off without it. Well, maybe not the top 1% of wealthy people you mentioned earlier -- they can avoid debt like the plague, because they have cash in the bank to cover the expenses that ordinary people need loans for.
I don't see the relevance of those citations. The bit error rate of SATA, for example, has absolutely nothing to do with understanding why a subtle change in audio quality is not a possible failure mode. To understand that, you need to apply logic and think about what the data passing across the cable is used for.
I'm getting the impression that you're not interested in actually understanding the problem here; you just want to quibble, or perhaps to find any sort of citation so you can check a box on some ISO 9000-style Procedure For Evaluating Slashdot Comments. Please convince me I'm mistaken.
It would be handy if you pointed out what exactly you want a citation for. Since you didn't, I'll go into detail about each sentence; forgive me if this sounds patronizing.
"In summary, if your SATA cables are not broken, then an expensive cable can't provide any improvement in terms of data fidelity."
This is a deduction from the nature of digital information. A non-broken cable delivers the bits it's intended to deliver; otherwise it would be a broken cable. And if the correct bits are being delivered, a better cable can't make them any more correct.
"If they are broken, you'll notice much bigger problems that affect all data transfers."
This is a deduction from the nature of digital information, the importance of data in computers, and the non-sentience of passive cables. A broken cable will affect all data passing through it with the same probability; since it is not alive and has no computing power, it cannot "choose" to affect only audio data.
Much of the data that passes through will be glaringly obvious when corrupted, such as text and executable code. Even corrupted audio data will be quite noticeable: SATA is a serial connection (that's the "S"), so the most significant bits are as likely to be corrupted as the least significant ones.
"There is no conceivable SATA problem that would only manifest in subtle changes in audio quality."
This follows from the previous two sentences. Either the cable is broken and corrupts all data with the same probability, or it isn't broken and passes data through unchanged. Anything that could fail in a way that only affected audio data, and only subtly, would have to contain active components that are not part of a standard SATA cable.
It is possible, as I mentioned in the next sentence:
Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).
In summary, if your SATA cables are not broken, then an expensive cable can't provide any improvement in terms of data fidelity. If they are broken, you'll notice much bigger problems that affect all data transfers. There is no conceivable SATA problem that would only manifest in subtle changes in audio quality.
If your SATA cables are working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s your computer reads into memory is exactly the same as the sequence stored on the disk. You can't improve on that.
If you SATA cables aren't working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s will be different -- but as your quote pointed out, this would affect everything. The cable doesn't know whether it's transmitting a WAV, an MP3, a JPG, or an EXE. If your cables are corrupting data, your computer probably won't even boot!
But, as the quote also pointed out, there are systems in place to detect and correct errors. Even if your cables are corrupting data, it's extremely unlikely that your computer will think it's getting the correct data and proceed to play it. Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).
Deflation is bad for anyone who has any debt, which is an awful lot of people. The amount you owe is specified in nominal dollars, so deflation means you have to pay back a greater real value than you would otherwise.
It's also bad for anyone who runs a business, or works for a business, which again is an awful lot of people. Deflation -- or rather, the expectation of more deflation to come -- makes people less willing to spend money. I don't want to buy ten widgets for $10 today if I think I can get eleven for the same price tomorrow. So the widgets don't sell, the widget vendor gets desperate and drops his prices, and now he has to cut wages or lay off employees, and the cycle continues.
If someone is willing to lend him the money that means he has 'something' to back the loan up, viable business plan with nice profits on the horizon, credibility, whatever. It's an absolutely voluntary action of the lender. He 'buys' something from the borrower.
Likewise, our government has something to back the loan up: the prospect of future tax revenues and a history of never missing an interest payment. That's why people voluntarily lend money to the government by buying Treasury bonds.
The government is different - it is not interested in creating viable businesses providing a healthy stream of profit, long term non-bogus employement and stuff.
The government is certainly interested in creating and preserving viable businesses. You can't tax a business that doesn't exist or doesn't make money!
As for "non-bogus" employment, are you suggesting there's something "bogus" about working for the fire department, the courts, the DMV, the park service, etc.? Do those people not get paid real money and put that money back into the economy, same as everyone else?
Government spends money for the sake of doing it, but it's not productive, so it has no money on its own.
Government spending certainly can produce value for third parties. The highway system, for instance, has enabled countless billions of dollars worth of commerce. So have the courts, and even regulatory agencies like the FCC and FAA.
To spend it has to take first from someone who is with higher taxes or steal his purchasing power with inflation - both are involuntary.
You forgot borrowing. But more importantly, you're making an ideological side argument here which is beside the point. The fact that you're opposed to taxation and monetary expansion in general doesn't prove anything about the effectiveness of stimulating the economy by spending that money.
ROI on the higher education is less than stellar.
It doesn't always work for everyone, but people often do come out ahead by investing in their education. You don't even seem to be seriously disputing that.
Really, this should be obvious. Sometimes you have to invest money now -- money you might not actually have -- in order to make money in the future.
Another example: if you have no car and you live off the bus route, you're going to have trouble getting a job. Maybe you need to buy a car, maybe you need to move closer to where the jobs are, but either way it's going to cost you money. And if you can't afford to pay cash for it (because you're, you know, unemployed), you're going to be borrowing that money. Some people, apparently, would have you "live within your means" at all costs, even if that means staying unemployed indefinitely.
Others have already pointed out the problems with your history of the Great Depression: the depression ended years before the war started.
But to the extent that WWII also benefited the economy, "pulling millions of men out of the labor market" isn't where the benefit came from. At best, that would have superficially improved the statistics. The economic benefit of WWII came from stimulating demand: suddenly we were spending billions on tanks, planes, etc. that we hadn't been spending before. That grew the industries that made those things, putting money in the pockets of their workers, which they then put back into the economy.
This, however, is an egregious mistake:
Nobody ever got rich by spending more money than they have.
Are you saying you've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to start a business, which eventually pays off the loan and provides a healthy stream of profit?
You've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to go to college, learning skills that they use to get a higher-paying job, eventually paying off the loans and keeping the increased income?
Surely you've at least heard of war bonds, which the government used to borrow money it didn't have and spend it on the war that you believe brought us out of the depression!
I mean this sounds like it could be defeated with an entry in/etc/hosts, nevermind bothering to crack each app. Android being completely open will have no problem running a local daemon saying yes to everything you throw at it, I'm quite sure.
You can't edit/etc/hosts without rooting, and a local daemon won't be able to mimic the official licensing server if the protocol uses any sort of encryption (which I presume it does, because Google isn't stupid).
It's easy to see how "Allow installation of non-Market applications" will become *the* preferred method of software installation due to it being the only constant among handsets; the Market Place is only on special Google devices
This has not happened after almost two years of Android. Yes, there are devices without access to the Market. Those devices suck, and people who care about apps stay away from them.
and clearly Carriers will foist their own horrible interpretations of what they think an App Store should be, nobody will use them of course.
This has not happened either, as far as I know.
I don't predict App Stores on Android to be fruitful given this landscape,
Neither do I, because the Android Market already does what most people want from an app store. Its only major failing is that the payment system isn't yet operative in some countries.
even before taking into account the stench of fail permeating this Verizon App Store (or T-Mobile's App Café).
Not sure what you're talking about, and searching for "App Cafe" doesn't turn up any relevant hits. Verizon's "app store" for Android consists of a small section inside the regular Market app highlighting apps Verizon wants to promote (with a couple exclusives like an app to access your phone bill).
It doesn't completely prevent piracy; that's impossible without moving to a complete "trusted computing" dystopia.
What it does is raise the bar. It prevents the easy, casual kind of piracy where you copy the.apk off one device and onto another. Now you have to modify the code, which requires some level of skill and familiarity with the intimate details of Dalvik. It also breaks the original.apk signature, which changes the identity of the app, which has consequences for updating the app and sharing data between apps.
Sure. Point is, iPhone developers are forbidden from writing and distributing browsers that use non-Apple rendering technology. When a bug like this is found, all users can do is hope that Apple fixes it quickly.
On open platforms, developers have no such restriction. If a bug like this hit Android, you'd probably see third-party browsers on the market soon after that didn't have the same bug -- in fact, there's already a version of Firefox for Android, and there are multiple PDF viewers.
Opera Mini's server-side rendering and minimal interactivity make it unsuitable to replace a native browser for general use, as I'm sure you're aware.
However it's a poor argument in this case as any third party browser you used would still hand the PDF off to the vulnerable system library to parse and display...
... unless it didn't. Third-party browsers could use third-party PDF rendering libraries.
I just thought it was odd you were trying to argue against the security benefits of a closed app store using a bug in a totally open browser model.
On an open platform, you'd be able to use a third-party browser when flaws like this are discovered in the built-in browser.
On the iPhone, however, you're stuck with Apple's browser core (no pun intended). Third parties are allowed to post their own WebKit skins in the app store, but those are likely to feature all the same bugs.
I'd suspect even Google would make more effort to lock down Android if stuff like Installous was floating around there (is it? I have no idea).
You don't need anything like Installous on Android, because Android doesn't limit where you can install apps from. Once you check the "Allow installation of non-Market applications" option, you can just point the browser at a link to a.apk file.
Google is addressing paid-app piracy, but not by locking down the OS. Instead, they're letting apps check with Google's servers to verify that the app has been purchased by the person who's running it.
Likewise, Valve does not come and take your game away without a refund. You can still play it in single-player mode. You can still set up a private server and play with your friends. You can even still connect to public servers that don't use VAC.
VAC is a tool that server operators -- third parties as well as Valve -- can use to block players who have a history of cheating. You aren't entitled to use their servers; server operators have always been able to ban problem users individually. VAC is just a ban list that's updated automatically and shared between servers.
If you have a problem with that, I wonder what you think about the shared spam block lists. Do you think spammers are entitled to use your email server, too?
So you're saying any DRM that does not shut down the software 100% and stop any and all use of it. Is not DRM?
No. I'm saying a system that the server uses to decide to reject your connection is not DRM. DRM is a client-side limitation.
The acceptance problems of widespread iron clad DRM is not a technical, legal, or moral issue as many make it out to be.
There is, in fact, a significant technical difference between DRM and anti-cheating.
DRM is where you give someone a key and a lock and expect them not to put the key in the lock except under circumstances you've chosen to allow. Since this is technically infeasible when they have control of their own computers, it leads to all sorts of draconian laws and "trusted computing" measures.
An anti-cheating system, on the other hand, provides information that third parties can use to decide whether or not to do business with you. It works without needing to pass any draconian laws or to deny you the use of your own computer, because the third parties are the ones making the decision -- and they're voluntarily using the system to provide a better experience for their legitimate players.
It's managing your digital right to play the game by the rules.
Not true - VAC doesn't disable the game entirely, it only stops you from connecting to servers that check VAC. Even if you're branded a cheater, you can still run a private server or play on non-VAC public servers.
A "fix" would be getting rid of the shared key for broadcast, but that would require the AP to send a separate "broadcast" packet to each user individually, using their unique per-user key, instead of just one packet.
How about just signing the important AP broadcast messages with a private key unique to the AP, so they can still be broadcast but the recipients can verify that they're not spoofed?
Droid is the Motorola trademark (licensed from Lucasfilm) for their hardware that runs the Android software.
I think Verizon is the company that licensed it, actually. They don't only call Motorola phones "Droid": the Droid Eris and Droid Incredible are made by HTC.
A healthy woman who is not on birth control and is abstinent will have a monthly period, that's true.
But in nature, most individuals are not abstinent. Throughout history, most women had far fewer periods, because they were having sex without contraception, which meant they spent a lot of time pregnant. That's what the GP meant by "you also get adorable little babies".
Of course his bit about "enormous reduction in breast cancer risk" is misleading, because he's ignoring the fact that pregnancy and childbirth are actually quite hazardous. Women had much shorter life expectancies when they were having all that unprotected sex, especially before modern medical hygiene practices (like washing your hands before delivering a baby).
what's wrong with "these seats are reserved for my wife and I" ?
"My wife and I" is only grammatically correct when "I" would be correct on its own: you wouldn't say "reserved for I", so you shouldn't say "reserved for my wife and I" either. "These seats are reserved for my wife and me" is correct.
The issue is that they don't know they are providing bandwidth for somebody else's call. It's in the fine print, but your average Joe doesn't read/understand it.
I wonder how many of them understand they're providing bandwidth for someone else's download when they use BitTorrent.
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A 5 year loan is fine.
If you think 5 year loans are remotely feasible for houses, you must have no idea how much houses cost. (Hint: they cost a lot more than cars.)
30 years is fine if you plan to WORK for 30 years, at your CURRENT salary, pay it off ON TIME, and STILL have enough money over the years to handle the $XX,XXX in expenses you WILL incur to cover medical expenses, car expenses, etc.
It's not like the alternative is to live for free: you're going to have some monthly housing payment no matter what. Paying rent for 30 years is much worse, from a financial perspective.
Gradual deflation would NOT have a terrible impact on anyone in the middle of a 30 year lease. That's the whole fucking point of GRADUAL.
Depends what you mean by "terrible impact", I guess. (And I'm assuming you mean "loan", not "lease", since that's what we were talking about.)
Deflation basically raises your interest rate. If deflation is 1%, then that mortgage you thought was costing you 5% is actually costing more like 6%, because you're paying the same number of dollars back but those dollars are now worth more (it takes more work to earn them and you can buy more stuff with them).
Is that "terrible"? Maybe not, but it's still a bad thing, not a good thing.
You, and the rest of the STUPID FUCKS in the country who think perpetual debt is acceptable are the reason we're in this shithole.
Actually, I blame stupid fucks like yourself who pretend to know more about economics than the really do, and spout off glib, worthless proclamations that hurt more than they help. We'd be in better shape if politicians could pursue sound economic strategy instead of having to cater to people who think the federal government's budget ought to be drawn up the same way as a household budget.
Sure, you could save up your cash and buy a house when you're 60 instead of getting a 30 year mortgage when you're 30. But that means you lose the use of the house for those 30 years, and the money you save in mortgage interest, you lose in paying rent on another place for 30 years!
Likewise, you could save up your cash and expand your business 5 years from now instead of getting a loan and expanding today. But you might find that competitors have already taken your spot by then, either because they have more cash in the bank or because they don't share your fear of loans.
Protip: Avoid making any more economic pronouncements until you have a better understanding of the issues.
Very well. If logic and relevance are unimportant and any citation will do, then this ought to put your mind at ease. It has its own extensive list of references, too.
There are around 50 million mortgages in the United States. If everyone followed that philosophy, a lot fewer people would be able to own houses... or own cars, or start businesses and expand them, etc.
Like it or not, there is a place for borrowing, and we'd all be worse off without it. Well, maybe not the top 1% of wealthy people you mentioned earlier -- they can avoid debt like the plague, because they have cash in the bank to cover the expenses that ordinary people need loans for.
I don't see the relevance of those citations. The bit error rate of SATA, for example, has absolutely nothing to do with understanding why a subtle change in audio quality is not a possible failure mode. To understand that, you need to apply logic and think about what the data passing across the cable is used for.
I'm getting the impression that you're not interested in actually understanding the problem here; you just want to quibble, or perhaps to find any sort of citation so you can check a box on some ISO 9000-style Procedure For Evaluating Slashdot Comments. Please convince me I'm mistaken.
It would be handy if you pointed out what exactly you want a citation for. Since you didn't, I'll go into detail about each sentence; forgive me if this sounds patronizing.
"In summary, if your SATA cables are not broken, then an expensive cable can't provide any improvement in terms of data fidelity."
This is a deduction from the nature of digital information. A non-broken cable delivers the bits it's intended to deliver; otherwise it would be a broken cable. And if the correct bits are being delivered, a better cable can't make them any more correct.
"If they are broken, you'll notice much bigger problems that affect all data transfers."
This is a deduction from the nature of digital information, the importance of data in computers, and the non-sentience of passive cables. A broken cable will affect all data passing through it with the same probability; since it is not alive and has no computing power, it cannot "choose" to affect only audio data.
Much of the data that passes through will be glaringly obvious when corrupted, such as text and executable code. Even corrupted audio data will be quite noticeable: SATA is a serial connection (that's the "S"), so the most significant bits are as likely to be corrupted as the least significant ones.
"There is no conceivable SATA problem that would only manifest in subtle changes in audio quality."
This follows from the previous two sentences. Either the cable is broken and corrupts all data with the same probability, or it isn't broken and passes data through unchanged. Anything that could fail in a way that only affected audio data, and only subtly, would have to contain active components that are not part of a standard SATA cable.
It is possible, as I mentioned in the next sentence:
In summary, if your SATA cables are not broken, then an expensive cable can't provide any improvement in terms of data fidelity. If they are broken, you'll notice much bigger problems that affect all data transfers. There is no conceivable SATA problem that would only manifest in subtle changes in audio quality.
If your SATA cables are working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s your computer reads into memory is exactly the same as the sequence stored on the disk. You can't improve on that.
If you SATA cables aren't working as they should, then the sequence of 0s and 1s will be different -- but as your quote pointed out, this would affect everything. The cable doesn't know whether it's transmitting a WAV, an MP3, a JPG, or an EXE. If your cables are corrupting data, your computer probably won't even boot!
But, as the quote also pointed out, there are systems in place to detect and correct errors. Even if your cables are corrupting data, it's extremely unlikely that your computer will think it's getting the correct data and proceed to play it. Instead, it will retry, and the symptoms you'll see are slow or stalled transfers (just like a bad network connection).
Deflation is bad for anyone who has any debt, which is an awful lot of people. The amount you owe is specified in nominal dollars, so deflation means you have to pay back a greater real value than you would otherwise.
It's also bad for anyone who runs a business, or works for a business, which again is an awful lot of people. Deflation -- or rather, the expectation of more deflation to come -- makes people less willing to spend money. I don't want to buy ten widgets for $10 today if I think I can get eleven for the same price tomorrow. So the widgets don't sell, the widget vendor gets desperate and drops his prices, and now he has to cut wages or lay off employees, and the cycle continues.
If someone is willing to lend him the money that means he has 'something' to back the loan up, viable business plan with nice profits on the horizon, credibility, whatever. It's an absolutely voluntary action of the lender. He 'buys' something from the borrower.
Likewise, our government has something to back the loan up: the prospect of future tax revenues and a history of never missing an interest payment. That's why people voluntarily lend money to the government by buying Treasury bonds.
The government is different - it is not interested in creating viable businesses providing a healthy stream of profit, long term non-bogus employement and stuff.
The government is certainly interested in creating and preserving viable businesses. You can't tax a business that doesn't exist or doesn't make money!
As for "non-bogus" employment, are you suggesting there's something "bogus" about working for the fire department, the courts, the DMV, the park service, etc.? Do those people not get paid real money and put that money back into the economy, same as everyone else?
Government spends money for the sake of doing it, but it's not productive, so it has no money on its own.
Government spending certainly can produce value for third parties. The highway system, for instance, has enabled countless billions of dollars worth of commerce. So have the courts, and even regulatory agencies like the FCC and FAA.
To spend it has to take first from someone who is with higher taxes or steal his purchasing power with inflation - both are involuntary.
You forgot borrowing. But more importantly, you're making an ideological side argument here which is beside the point. The fact that you're opposed to taxation and monetary expansion in general doesn't prove anything about the effectiveness of stimulating the economy by spending that money.
ROI on the higher education is less than stellar.
It doesn't always work for everyone, but people often do come out ahead by investing in their education. You don't even seem to be seriously disputing that.
Really, this should be obvious. Sometimes you have to invest money now -- money you might not actually have -- in order to make money in the future.
Another example: if you have no car and you live off the bus route, you're going to have trouble getting a job. Maybe you need to buy a car, maybe you need to move closer to where the jobs are, but either way it's going to cost you money. And if you can't afford to pay cash for it (because you're, you know, unemployed), you're going to be borrowing that money. Some people, apparently, would have you "live within your means" at all costs, even if that means staying unemployed indefinitely.
Others have already pointed out the problems with your history of the Great Depression: the depression ended years before the war started.
But to the extent that WWII also benefited the economy, "pulling millions of men out of the labor market" isn't where the benefit came from. At best, that would have superficially improved the statistics. The economic benefit of WWII came from stimulating demand: suddenly we were spending billions on tanks, planes, etc. that we hadn't been spending before. That grew the industries that made those things, putting money in the pockets of their workers, which they then put back into the economy.
This, however, is an egregious mistake:
Nobody ever got rich by spending more money than they have.
Are you saying you've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to start a business, which eventually pays off the loan and provides a healthy stream of profit?
You've never heard of anyone taking out a loan to go to college, learning skills that they use to get a higher-paying job, eventually paying off the loans and keeping the increased income?
Surely you've at least heard of war bonds, which the government used to borrow money it didn't have and spend it on the war that you believe brought us out of the depression!
I mean this sounds like it could be defeated with an entry in /etc/hosts, nevermind bothering to crack each app. Android being completely open will have no problem running a local daemon saying yes to everything you throw at it, I'm quite sure.
You can't edit /etc/hosts without rooting, and a local daemon won't be able to mimic the official licensing server if the protocol uses any sort of encryption (which I presume it does, because Google isn't stupid).
It's easy to see how "Allow installation of non-Market applications" will become *the* preferred method of software installation due to it being the only constant among handsets; the Market Place is only on special Google devices
This has not happened after almost two years of Android. Yes, there are devices without access to the Market. Those devices suck, and people who care about apps stay away from them.
and clearly Carriers will foist their own horrible interpretations of what they think an App Store should be, nobody will use them of course.
This has not happened either, as far as I know.
I don't predict App Stores on Android to be fruitful given this landscape,
Neither do I, because the Android Market already does what most people want from an app store. Its only major failing is that the payment system isn't yet operative in some countries.
even before taking into account the stench of fail permeating this Verizon App Store (or T-Mobile's App Café).
Not sure what you're talking about, and searching for "App Cafe" doesn't turn up any relevant hits. Verizon's "app store" for Android consists of a small section inside the regular Market app highlighting apps Verizon wants to promote (with a couple exclusives like an app to access your phone bill).
It doesn't completely prevent piracy; that's impossible without moving to a complete "trusted computing" dystopia.
What it does is raise the bar. It prevents the easy, casual kind of piracy where you copy the .apk off one device and onto another. Now you have to modify the code, which requires some level of skill and familiarity with the intimate details of Dalvik. It also breaks the original .apk signature, which changes the identity of the app, which has consequences for updating the app and sharing data between apps.
Sure. Point is, iPhone developers are forbidden from writing and distributing browsers that use non-Apple rendering technology. When a bug like this is found, all users can do is hope that Apple fixes it quickly.
On open platforms, developers have no such restriction. If a bug like this hit Android, you'd probably see third-party browsers on the market soon after that didn't have the same bug -- in fact, there's already a version of Firefox for Android, and there are multiple PDF viewers.
You could always use Opera MINI on the iPhone.
Opera Mini's server-side rendering and minimal interactivity make it unsuitable to replace a native browser for general use, as I'm sure you're aware.
However it's a poor argument in this case as any third party browser you used would still hand the PDF off to the vulnerable system library to parse and display...
... unless it didn't. Third-party browsers could use third-party PDF rendering libraries.
I just thought it was odd you were trying to argue against the security benefits of a closed app store using a bug in a totally open browser model.
On an open platform, you'd be able to use a third-party browser when flaws like this are discovered in the built-in browser.
On the iPhone, however, you're stuck with Apple's browser core (no pun intended). Third parties are allowed to post their own WebKit skins in the app store, but those are likely to feature all the same bugs.
I'd suspect even Google would make more effort to lock down Android if stuff like Installous was floating around there (is it? I have no idea).
You don't need anything like Installous on Android, because Android doesn't limit where you can install apps from. Once you check the "Allow installation of non-Market applications" option, you can just point the browser at a link to a .apk file.
Google is addressing paid-app piracy, but not by locking down the OS. Instead, they're letting apps check with Google's servers to verify that the app has been purchased by the person who's running it.
Likewise, Valve does not come and take your game away without a refund. You can still play it in single-player mode. You can still set up a private server and play with your friends. You can even still connect to public servers that don't use VAC.
VAC is a tool that server operators -- third parties as well as Valve -- can use to block players who have a history of cheating. You aren't entitled to use their servers; server operators have always been able to ban problem users individually. VAC is just a ban list that's updated automatically and shared between servers.
If you have a problem with that, I wonder what you think about the shared spam block lists. Do you think spammers are entitled to use your email server, too?
So you're saying any DRM that does not shut down the software 100% and stop any and all use of it. Is not DRM?
No. I'm saying a system that the server uses to decide to reject your connection is not DRM. DRM is a client-side limitation.
The acceptance problems of widespread iron clad DRM is not a technical, legal, or moral issue as many make it out to be.
There is, in fact, a significant technical difference between DRM and anti-cheating.
DRM is where you give someone a key and a lock and expect them not to put the key in the lock except under circumstances you've chosen to allow. Since this is technically infeasible when they have control of their own computers, it leads to all sorts of draconian laws and "trusted computing" measures.
An anti-cheating system, on the other hand, provides information that third parties can use to decide whether or not to do business with you. It works without needing to pass any draconian laws or to deny you the use of your own computer, because the third parties are the ones making the decision -- and they're voluntarily using the system to provide a better experience for their legitimate players.
Anti-cheating software is the same thing as DRM.
It's managing your digital right to play the game by the rules.
Not true - VAC doesn't disable the game entirely, it only stops you from connecting to servers that check VAC. Even if you're branded a cheater, you can still run a private server or play on non-VAC public servers.
A "fix" would be getting rid of the shared key for broadcast, but that would require the AP to send a separate "broadcast" packet to each user individually, using their unique per-user key, instead of just one packet.
How about just signing the important AP broadcast messages with a private key unique to the AP, so they can still be broadcast but the recipients can verify that they're not spoofed?
Droid is the Motorola trademark (licensed from Lucasfilm) for their hardware that runs the Android software.
I think Verizon is the company that licensed it, actually. They don't only call Motorola phones "Droid": the Droid Eris and Droid Incredible are made by HTC.
Well, it depends how you define "natural".
A healthy woman who is not on birth control and is abstinent will have a monthly period, that's true.
But in nature, most individuals are not abstinent. Throughout history, most women had far fewer periods, because they were having sex without contraception, which meant they spent a lot of time pregnant. That's what the GP meant by "you also get adorable little babies".
Of course his bit about "enormous reduction in breast cancer risk" is misleading, because he's ignoring the fact that pregnancy and childbirth are actually quite hazardous. Women had much shorter life expectancies when they were having all that unprotected sex, especially before modern medical hygiene practices (like washing your hands before delivering a baby).
what's wrong with "these seats are reserved for my wife and I" ?
"My wife and I" is only grammatically correct when "I" would be correct on its own: you wouldn't say "reserved for I", so you shouldn't say "reserved for my wife and I" either. "These seats are reserved for my wife and me" is correct.
The issue is that they don't know they are providing bandwidth for somebody else's call. It's in the fine print, but your average Joe doesn't read/understand it.
I wonder how many of them understand they're providing bandwidth for someone else's download when they use BitTorrent.