Keep in mind too that not everything you sign in those agreements will hold up in court. I believe those forced-arbitration clauses have been successfully fought against in court. Granted, you have to be fairly wealthy and/or be very pissed at them to pay the various lawyering fees.
They roam onto the verizon network, so their coverage is only as spotty as verizon for voice.
That would have been just dandy ten years ago.
Now, between GPS, GoogleTalk, and the other various social services out there, I pay more attention to data coverage than I do voice. Yes, having voice is important too in case you need medical attention, etc... but as far as usage goes, I'm 99% data. Dropping down to roaming data speeds does not a fun experience make.
To tack onto your car analogy, people who know a lot about cars often mod them to their desires. People who don't know a lot about cars don't normally tweak their shocks, install aftermarket sensors, NOS, or any of the other crazy shit people do nowadays. Or if they do, they hire somebody to do it for them. The day I install a NOS into my jeep is likely the day before my fiery death and I thankfully know this. People need to realize that installing random shit onto their phones without at least consulting the security screen are asking for pain.
To put it bluntly, these smartphones are computers. They are now no longer different than a PC, except for possibly the fact that they contain even more personal data than a typical computer does. iPhones are not immune to this either, as evidenced by the story earlier today where the app was sending passcodes to the guy's server. Don't you think a code review would have turned that up?
I would say that this is something that Google will likely have problems with in the future, but PCs are still going strong and Android is stronger than ever. Virus scanners have already come out, and I'm sure more are on the way. Google will likely tweak their OS in some attempt to limit the damage these apps can cause. But in the end, consumers need to get smarter. I'm not going to call them morons, but they are figuratively playing with fire when they do their banking on the same device they download porn apps on. Eventually, as the decades pass and the baby boomers begin leaving us, this problem will probably lessen and a new one will pop up in its place.
No need, It can just be circumvented by not using your ISP's nameservers. Nor is circumventing it illegal. Not that I look up any controversial material I need my own recursive nameserver for other reasons. I think I'll just ignore it instead.
You can be sure that, once people become accustomed to censoring websites for the children and "violent" websites, the next step is making it illegal to circumvent. Protecting the children is good, right? So obviously circumventing it is bad. The (mostly false) logical steps from "circumvention of a law" to "breaking it" is too easy in the lawmaker's mind.
Wouldn't it be easier, safer, and better to just fight it now, before it gets that far?
I'm curious how Google delayed their trademark registration. Now, I've never filed for a trademark, but I always had the impression that you filled a trademark at a government office, not at Google HQ.
Now, it may be that they had to license the 'chrome' trademark from Google, in which case isn't it completely up to Google to allow it or not? Regardless, it's not like "Chromebook" is that far of a stretch for Google to decided on.
Hell, if I were Isys, I would be jumping for joy that somebody could even possibly mistake my model name for something made by the tech behemoth that is Google. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt your possible sales.
Publishers and Authors both have freedoms of their own. It is their work and frankly they can do whatever the hell they want to with it. Saying they should forfeit copyright is ludicrous,
Copyright is a right created by the government and granted through the power we give the government. It was meant to simultaneously let an author live off the proceeds of his/her work, and to ensure that the work would find its way into the public domain in a reasonable timeframe so that the public could be enriched. You could say that copyright both gives and removes rights from an author.
While it is indeed true that authors have "freedoms of their own" they don't, for instance, have the freedom or right to say that their work is 'copyrighted for 500 years'. The government ruled that copyright was the same across the board so it would be fair to all parties. However, through various methods such as DRM, EULAs, and outright modifying the law to suit corporations, copyright has radically changed from the old intentions. It is now 99% a method for creating profits; at the cost of the public's best interest.
So yes, it is their work, and they can do what they want with it, as long as those options are limited to: releasing it in the public domain, copyrighting it, and destroying it.
OK, I concede the fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or proof that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.
However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite; namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-
The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.
This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; nor do I agree with you incorrectly attaching the "anti-intellectual geek" label to me. I love knowledge in nearly all its forms, and I only say 'nearly' because I don't really want to what my own feces tastes like.
OK, I concede that fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.
However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite- namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-
The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.
This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; we can all certainly agree it is easier to have a career with a degree than without.
In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.
And while you can certainly get some understanding from reading a "how to code for dummies" book, you won't get far until you fire up an editor and start tinkering. So I can certainly agree with the GP here that we are more doers and a lust for knowledge may be more of an effect than a cause.
This is a strange step back, I guess that with the iPad and all they wanted to "tabletize" the control
Not really a step back. In a nutshell, Nintendo basically innovates while relying on cheaper hardware to get ahead of the competition. As soon as the competition catches up with its fancier, more expensive hardware, they move on to the next thing. For example, the Wii had very little horsepower when compared to the 360 or PS3; it relied on its new motion sensing tech to sell it.
Now the 360 and PS3 both have their own Wii-like motion tracking hardware.
Nintendo would be hard-pressed to directly compete against MS or Sony in this generation without something new to make it stand out. Even if the press release is correct and it's "significantly more powerful than a 360 or PS3" most people would still probably rather take the other two if the WiiU was simply a horsepower upgrade.
Instead Nintendo has turned the tables again on their competitors by changing the playing field. It's not so much a step back as it is a step sideways and (hopefully) forward. And you may be on to something with the iPad thought... there has been a lot of talk lately about GoogleTV, smartphones and tablets stealing the traditional gaming console's cheese. If this catches on fast enough and big enough, they could defuse that problem for awhile longer. I'd be willing to bet money that Angry Birds (or something very similar) is one of the first things ported for it.
This is getting ridiculous. We need to standardize on min 8 / max 32k characters, arbitrary unicode, automatically rejecting dictionary words. There is no reason why any of the above should be a technological problem these days, and it should be flexible enough for future expansion.
Not a technological problem, no... but there are still problems with the approach.
1) That forces passwords to be fairly complex. The stereotypical grandparents with little patience for this crap will likely just give up. Most websites would rather a person use a weak password than not sign up at all. 2) The biggest security problem of today (IMHO) is not that passwords aren't secure enough, it's that most computers are so full of keyloggers and other malware. It doesn't matter if your bank's password looks like baud barf; if the hardware you're using is compromised, you're screwed. 3) The more complex you require passwords to be, the more likely people will just use one password for every service, which is much worse than having a weak password on one service.
And on a personal note, I think any password requirements are stupid. If I want a one-character password on some service, it should be allowed. Not encouraged, but allowed. It's my own responsibility to secure my access. Obviously this is only for personal use; your IT department at work will likely have a different view of this, and that is fine and expected.
Besides, it is common knowledge (and the whole point of this article) that if an attacker gets the hashtable, you're screwed. Any service worth its salt has anti-bruteforce functionality built in. Combine those two facts and password requirements aren't worth shit.
I suppose I should have prefaced my argument by saying that it might not even be cancer we need to worry about. We know that cell phone radiation does affect the brain (see: http://slashdot.org/story/06/06/26/1151231/Cell-Phone-Radiation-Excites-the-Brain) but we don't know the hows or the whys. Hell, this effect might even be 100% beneficial to humans and have no side effects. It just seems to me that we might be dressing our kids in asbestos clothing; we only know of the advantages, none of the dangers.
My post was meant more to illustrate the possible dangers of being wrong than to be another "oh my god throw all cell phones into the garbage" post, as some others who replied seem to think.
If the radiation from phones (or wireless for that matter) are carcinogenic somehow, should we not see a dramatic increase in cancer incidences in people who suffer from broken DNA-repair mechanisms? Is this being observed?
Not to validate the fear-mongering going on here, but your question points out the problem we face exactly.
Perhaps it takes 25 years for cellphone radiation to make any observable changes in somebody's physiology. That would mean that most of the older generation wouldn't even notice a difference in their lives. But it also means that we currently have two entire generations that will all develop brain cancer around age 30. I imagine that would be a touch devastating to the first world countries.
Every kid in the US, Japan, Europe, etc has, in the last 24 hours, held one of these devices to their head. If it does indeed cause problems, we're going to be in a world of hurt at some point in the future.
Mostly I was just giving options. Basically, I agree with croco, although I see your side as well- a battery meter does not need my location, network or otherwise, but a 3rd party ad library might. As long as the dev is aware that using that library will likely result in privacy nuts not downloading and using it.
Realistically in the battery meter example, my first option would be to use the IP address. You already need network access to download the ads, so it's no additional rights to request. It can easily get a location down to a specific city, which most people are OK with giving out to advertisers. Also, coarse, network-based location is still a battery drain. It's not as much of a drain as full GPS, but still an increase. Using the IP address also has the benefit of offloading that processing from your device to the ad servers, where it belongs. I don't know the state of 3rd party ad services on Android, however; this may not even be an option currently. If not, it should be.
I concede. However, the question remains about offering haircuts in Portland, Oregon, to users in Portland, Maine.
There are other ways. Ways that don't compromise your privacy as much and don't drain the battery like GPS does.
You could use the IP address (ad agencies already do this now in webpages). You could use the coarse location, based off of cell towers. You could use data that the user already willingly provided, such as a zip code to retrieve weather data. Or you could just not attempt to provide location-aware ads; many people get by with just advertising websites that offer services you may want.
Please just stop with the gasoline / car analogy. It doesn't work in this case, and you playing devil's advocate is not advancing this conversation.
A battery meter does not need to know your location in order to tell you your phone's battery level, end of story.
If you have an app that reads your car's gas gauge and needs to know what units / whatever to display in, you simply ask the damn user where they are at, or simply ask what units they wish to see the data in. There is no need to overengineer the situation and use GPS to figure out they live in Germany and thus should display in liters.
That's fine; given the length of most AAA games nowadays, you'd still have plenty of time to finish and resell it back to Gamestop before the PigOverlords divest you of your innards.
Also, a majority of the phone users are not geeks with finely tuned BS meters or the ability to tell what the access even means.
True. But this is 'Ask Slashdot'. This isn't some soccer mom trying to figure out her new "Android iPhone", this is (presumably) an at-least fairly tech-savvy geek asking his or her peers what they recommend. We're not talking about the majority of phone users here.
An image is what, a few KB? That could easily be packaged with the original download.
If you are looking at an app that can download other wallpapers as a service, then sure, I agree with you. But if you do a search for wallpaper in the Android marketplace, most of what you see are packages with one, maybe two wallpapers- not a service. Also, I don't see an explanation of why it would need access to my bookmarks.
Regardless, I only used wallpapers as an example, and yes you can probably poke some holes on my argument by finding some apps that fit my criteria and aren't malicious. But my point was that we just need to apply some common sense here. If the app asking for more than it needs to do its job, then that should raise some warning flags in your head.
Install a firewall. Not to keep the hackers out, mind you, but to keep your data *in*. There are way too many apps that try to phone home or do things they don't need to ('live' wallpapers come to mind).
Bah! Screw that. Maybe I'm too idealist, but if I'm looking at an wallpaper (for example) and the security permissions require net access, SD card access, and access to your bookmarks, I just don't install it. There are two main reasons for this:
First and foremost, the app is obviously shady, if not outright malicious. I don't want it on my device at all. Secondly, and no offense here, but you are trusting a firewall / antivirus program to protect you from stupidity. There is no replacement for some common sense when it comes to installing programs on your computer. Most of us geeks here on/. already have a finely-tuned bullshit meter that can detect the majority of malicious software in the PC world before we run it. You need to enable that mental filter on your mobile device as well.
Android gives you more information than we ever got on our PC. It's up to you to use it. Yes, I know that live wallpaper is oh so pretty, but resist the urge to install it when you see something fishy in the permission list and 99% of your security concerns disappear.
Of course the follow on effects of the US not being able to fund their government defecit and either having to print money the more old fashioned way or dramatically raise taxes would destroy the US economy. That in turn would be a significant issue for Chinese exporters - but they do export to countries that are not America and the American economic destruction would see world demand (and hence prices) on their imports drop significantly, so while triggering a large recession would not be a complete collapse.
All of the models I've seen paint an extremely dire picture if the US folds in on itself. It would be a ripple effect- you can't just say "oh, it would only effect China a little bit because they can sell their product elsewhere". Those other places would be hit hard too. The small shops that are the majority would die first, which would create huge layoffs, which would in turn impact the large shops.
You can't look at something as huge and interlinked as the world economy one small slice at a time- you need to look at the big picture. Even my explanation above, as generalized as it is, is way too simple. There is a reason foreign fat cats keep lending us money.
You see, when the Keynesian gods tell you that economy is about consumption, they are full of it, completely wrong. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. If nothing is produced, nothing will be consumed. Production IS economy.
I'd like to see how well an economy works when nobody buys anything it's producing.
Currently, China holds power because of the gap between [how cheap they can make a product], and [how much we rich folk will pay for said product]. If we weren't around to buy their stuff, or if we didn't spend an order of magnitude more to buy it than they paid to have it made, their economy as we know it wouldn't exist either.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind too that not everything you sign in those agreements will hold up in court. I believe those forced-arbitration clauses have been successfully fought against in court. Granted, you have to be fairly wealthy and/or be very pissed at them to pay the various lawyering fees.
They roam onto the verizon network, so their coverage is only as spotty as verizon for voice.
That would have been just dandy ten years ago.
Now, between GPS, GoogleTalk, and the other various social services out there, I pay more attention to data coverage than I do voice. Yes, having voice is important too in case you need medical attention, etc... but as far as usage goes, I'm 99% data. Dropping down to roaming data speeds does not a fun experience make.
But he's also quite right.
To tack onto your car analogy, people who know a lot about cars often mod them to their desires. People who don't know a lot about cars don't normally tweak their shocks, install aftermarket sensors, NOS, or any of the other crazy shit people do nowadays. Or if they do, they hire somebody to do it for them. The day I install a NOS into my jeep is likely the day before my fiery death and I thankfully know this. People need to realize that installing random shit onto their phones without at least consulting the security screen are asking for pain.
To put it bluntly, these smartphones are computers. They are now no longer different than a PC, except for possibly the fact that they contain even more personal data than a typical computer does. iPhones are not immune to this either, as evidenced by the story earlier today where the app was sending passcodes to the guy's server. Don't you think a code review would have turned that up?
I would say that this is something that Google will likely have problems with in the future, but PCs are still going strong and Android is stronger than ever. Virus scanners have already come out, and I'm sure more are on the way. Google will likely tweak their OS in some attempt to limit the damage these apps can cause. But in the end, consumers need to get smarter. I'm not going to call them morons, but they are figuratively playing with fire when they do their banking on the same device they download porn apps on. Eventually, as the decades pass and the baby boomers begin leaving us, this problem will probably lessen and a new one will pop up in its place.
Knowing humans, if it can be weaponized, it will.
In addition, laser beam eyes would be cool at night.
Not really all that cool, considering you would be effectively blind while using them.
No need, It can just be circumvented by not using your ISP's nameservers. Nor is circumventing it illegal. Not that I look up any controversial material I need my own recursive nameserver for other reasons. I think I'll just ignore it instead.
You can be sure that, once people become accustomed to censoring websites for the children and "violent" websites, the next step is making it illegal to circumvent. Protecting the children is good, right? So obviously circumventing it is bad. The (mostly false) logical steps from "circumvention of a law" to "breaking it" is too easy in the lawmaker's mind.
Wouldn't it be easier, safer, and better to just fight it now, before it gets that far?
I'm curious how Google delayed their trademark registration. Now, I've never filed for a trademark, but I always had the impression that you filled a trademark at a government office, not at Google HQ.
Now, it may be that they had to license the 'chrome' trademark from Google, in which case isn't it completely up to Google to allow it or not? Regardless, it's not like "Chromebook" is that far of a stretch for Google to decided on.
Hell, if I were Isys, I would be jumping for joy that somebody could even possibly mistake my model name for something made by the tech behemoth that is Google. I'm sure it wouldn't hurt your possible sales.
Publishers and Authors both have freedoms of their own. It is their work and frankly they can do whatever the hell they want to with it. Saying they should forfeit copyright is ludicrous,
Copyright is a right created by the government and granted through the power we give the government. It was meant to simultaneously let an author live off the proceeds of his/her work, and to ensure that the work would find its way into the public domain in a reasonable timeframe so that the public could be enriched. You could say that copyright both gives and removes rights from an author.
While it is indeed true that authors have "freedoms of their own" they don't, for instance, have the freedom or right to say that their work is 'copyrighted for 500 years'. The government ruled that copyright was the same across the board so it would be fair to all parties. However, through various methods such as DRM, EULAs, and outright modifying the law to suit corporations, copyright has radically changed from the old intentions. It is now 99% a method for creating profits; at the cost of the public's best interest.
So yes, it is their work, and they can do what they want with it, as long as those options are limited to: releasing it in the public domain, copyrighting it, and destroying it.
IANAL
OK, I concede the fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or proof that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.
However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite; namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-
The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.
This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; nor do I agree with you incorrectly attaching the "anti-intellectual geek" label to me. I love knowledge in nearly all its forms, and I only say 'nearly' because I don't really want to what my own feces tastes like.
OK, I concede that fact that saying "spoon fed" may have been too strong a phrase. It was a poor choice of words that many people here took as a challenge, or that I was biased against higher education. Both are incorrect.
However, unlike many of the rebuttals I received after my post, I have some evidence to cite- namely the Hacker's Jargon file section on Education-
The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart.
This is located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/education.html and was created with the help of a survey that went out to Usenet way back in the day. Yes the data is old. Yes, the data and/or editor may be biased. But this jargon file was put together by many hackers and read by countless hackers in its many years of existence. And I said nothing about college not having any benefit; we can all certainly agree it is easier to have a career with a degree than without.
In the programming world, I always got the impression that, collectively, we respected the self-taught coder more than one who spent four years in school being spoon fed how to code.
And while you can certainly get some understanding from reading a "how to code for dummies" book, you won't get far until you fire up an editor and start tinkering. So I can certainly agree with the GP here that we are more doers and a lust for knowledge may be more of an effect than a cause.
This is a strange step back, I guess that with the iPad and all they wanted to "tabletize" the control
Not really a step back. In a nutshell, Nintendo basically innovates while relying on cheaper hardware to get ahead of the competition. As soon as the competition catches up with its fancier, more expensive hardware, they move on to the next thing. For example, the Wii had very little horsepower when compared to the 360 or PS3; it relied on its new motion sensing tech to sell it.
Now the 360 and PS3 both have their own Wii-like motion tracking hardware.
Nintendo would be hard-pressed to directly compete against MS or Sony in this generation without something new to make it stand out. Even if the press release is correct and it's "significantly more powerful than a 360 or PS3" most people would still probably rather take the other two if the WiiU was simply a horsepower upgrade.
Instead Nintendo has turned the tables again on their competitors by changing the playing field. It's not so much a step back as it is a step sideways and (hopefully) forward. And you may be on to something with the iPad thought... there has been a lot of talk lately about GoogleTV, smartphones and tablets stealing the traditional gaming console's cheese. If this catches on fast enough and big enough, they could defuse that problem for awhile longer. I'd be willing to bet money that Angry Birds (or something very similar) is one of the first things ported for it.
This is getting ridiculous. We need to standardize on min 8 / max 32k characters, arbitrary unicode, automatically rejecting dictionary words. There is no reason why any of the above should be a technological problem these days, and it should be flexible enough for future expansion.
Not a technological problem, no... but there are still problems with the approach.
1) That forces passwords to be fairly complex. The stereotypical grandparents with little patience for this crap will likely just give up. Most websites would rather a person use a weak password than not sign up at all.
2) The biggest security problem of today (IMHO) is not that passwords aren't secure enough, it's that most computers are so full of keyloggers and other malware. It doesn't matter if your bank's password looks like baud barf; if the hardware you're using is compromised, you're screwed.
3) The more complex you require passwords to be, the more likely people will just use one password for every service, which is much worse than having a weak password on one service.
And on a personal note, I think any password requirements are stupid. If I want a one-character password on some service, it should be allowed. Not encouraged, but allowed. It's my own responsibility to secure my access. Obviously this is only for personal use; your IT department at work will likely have a different view of this, and that is fine and expected.
Besides, it is common knowledge (and the whole point of this article) that if an attacker gets the hashtable, you're screwed. Any service worth its salt has anti-bruteforce functionality built in. Combine those two facts and password requirements aren't worth shit.
As far as I understand, you are correct.
I suppose I should have prefaced my argument by saying that it might not even be cancer we need to worry about. We know that cell phone radiation does affect the brain (see: http://slashdot.org/story/06/06/26/1151231/Cell-Phone-Radiation-Excites-the-Brain) but we don't know the hows or the whys. Hell, this effect might even be 100% beneficial to humans and have no side effects. It just seems to me that we might be dressing our kids in asbestos clothing; we only know of the advantages, none of the dangers.
My post was meant more to illustrate the possible dangers of being wrong than to be another "oh my god throw all cell phones into the garbage" post, as some others who replied seem to think.
If the radiation from phones (or wireless for that matter) are carcinogenic somehow, should we not see a dramatic increase in cancer incidences in people who suffer from broken DNA-repair mechanisms? Is this being observed?
Not to validate the fear-mongering going on here, but your question points out the problem we face exactly.
Perhaps it takes 25 years for cellphone radiation to make any observable changes in somebody's physiology. That would mean that most of the older generation wouldn't even notice a difference in their lives. But it also means that we currently have two entire generations that will all develop brain cancer around age 30. I imagine that would be a touch devastating to the first world countries.
Every kid in the US, Japan, Europe, etc has, in the last 24 hours, held one of these devices to their head. If it does indeed cause problems, we're going to be in a world of hurt at some point in the future.
Mostly I was just giving options. Basically, I agree with croco, although I see your side as well- a battery meter does not need my location, network or otherwise, but a 3rd party ad library might. As long as the dev is aware that using that library will likely result in privacy nuts not downloading and using it.
Realistically in the battery meter example, my first option would be to use the IP address. You already need network access to download the ads, so it's no additional rights to request. It can easily get a location down to a specific city, which most people are OK with giving out to advertisers. Also, coarse, network-based location is still a battery drain. It's not as much of a drain as full GPS, but still an increase. Using the IP address also has the benefit of offloading that processing from your device to the ad servers, where it belongs. I don't know the state of 3rd party ad services on Android, however; this may not even be an option currently. If not, it should be.
I concede. However, the question remains about offering haircuts in Portland, Oregon, to users in Portland, Maine.
There are other ways. Ways that don't compromise your privacy as much and don't drain the battery like GPS does.
You could use the IP address (ad agencies already do this now in webpages). You could use the coarse location, based off of cell towers. You could use data that the user already willingly provided, such as a zip code to retrieve weather data. Or you could just not attempt to provide location-aware ads; many people get by with just advertising websites that offer services you may want.
Please just stop with the gasoline / car analogy. It doesn't work in this case, and you playing devil's advocate is not advancing this conversation.
A battery meter does not need to know your location in order to tell you your phone's battery level, end of story.
If you have an app that reads your car's gas gauge and needs to know what units / whatever to display in, you simply ask the damn user where they are at, or simply ask what units they wish to see the data in. There is no need to overengineer the situation and use GPS to figure out they live in Germany and thus should display in liters.
That's fine; given the length of most AAA games nowadays, you'd still have plenty of time to finish and resell it back to Gamestop before the PigOverlords divest you of your innards.
Also, a majority of the phone users are not geeks with finely tuned BS meters or the ability to tell what the access even means.
True. But this is 'Ask Slashdot'. This isn't some soccer mom trying to figure out her new "Android iPhone", this is (presumably) an at-least fairly tech-savvy geek asking his or her peers what they recommend. We're not talking about the majority of phone users here.
An image is what, a few KB? That could easily be packaged with the original download.
If you are looking at an app that can download other wallpapers as a service, then sure, I agree with you. But if you do a search for wallpaper in the Android marketplace, most of what you see are packages with one, maybe two wallpapers- not a service. Also, I don't see an explanation of why it would need access to my bookmarks.
Regardless, I only used wallpapers as an example, and yes you can probably poke some holes on my argument by finding some apps that fit my criteria and aren't malicious. But my point was that we just need to apply some common sense here. If the app asking for more than it needs to do its job, then that should raise some warning flags in your head.
Install a firewall. Not to keep the hackers out, mind you, but to keep your data *in*. There are way too many apps that try to phone home or do things they don't need to ('live' wallpapers come to mind).
Bah! Screw that. Maybe I'm too idealist, but if I'm looking at an wallpaper (for example) and the security permissions require net access, SD card access, and access to your bookmarks, I just don't install it. There are two main reasons for this:
First and foremost, the app is obviously shady, if not outright malicious. I don't want it on my device at all. /. already have a finely-tuned bullshit meter that can detect the majority of malicious software in the PC world before we run it. You need to enable that mental filter on your mobile device as well.
Secondly, and no offense here, but you are trusting a firewall / antivirus program to protect you from stupidity. There is no replacement for some common sense when it comes to installing programs on your computer. Most of us geeks here on
Android gives you more information than we ever got on our PC. It's up to you to use it. Yes, I know that live wallpaper is oh so pretty, but resist the urge to install it when you see something fishy in the permission list and 99% of your security concerns disappear.
Contrary to many people's belief otherwise, I do not need a new smartphone to survive.
Of course the follow on effects of the US not being able to fund their government defecit and either having to print money the more old fashioned way or dramatically raise taxes would destroy the US economy. That in turn would be a significant issue for Chinese exporters - but they do export to countries that are not America and the American economic destruction would see world demand (and hence prices) on their imports drop significantly, so while triggering a large recession would not be a complete collapse.
All of the models I've seen paint an extremely dire picture if the US folds in on itself. It would be a ripple effect- you can't just say "oh, it would only effect China a little bit because they can sell their product elsewhere". Those other places would be hit hard too. The small shops that are the majority would die first, which would create huge layoffs, which would in turn impact the large shops.
You can't look at something as huge and interlinked as the world economy one small slice at a time- you need to look at the big picture. Even my explanation above, as generalized as it is, is way too simple. There is a reason foreign fat cats keep lending us money.
You see, when the Keynesian gods tell you that economy is about consumption, they are full of it, completely wrong. Consumption is a trivial consequence of production. If nothing is produced, nothing will be consumed. Production IS economy.
I'd like to see how well an economy works when nobody buys anything it's producing.
Currently, China holds power because of the gap between [how cheap they can make a product], and [how much we rich folk will pay for said product]. If we weren't around to buy their stuff, or if we didn't spend an order of magnitude more to buy it than they paid to have it made, their economy as we know it wouldn't exist either.