Just what do you think the insurance company does? There are a bunch of medical professionals on a panel there that decide what procedures should be covered and why. The difference in this case is who pays those people and what their motives and incentives (shareholders and profit) are when making a decision. They're just as much a "death panel" as the people doing the same job in socialised medicine elsewhere.

Oh and yes, you have the right to sue... I just can't see that having any real use if you're looking at a 6 month time scale. Another thing that no doubt comes into play when the insurance company is looking at the

If on the other hand if the insurance company gives carte blanche for whatever treatment is necessary and also has to factor in the cost over the life of the policy of paying for these expensive procedure... end result... premiums go up, just like taxes have to go up, to cover the cost of the government based health care if the system was to provide a similar carte blanche for doctors to treat as they will.

Towards the end of life, whether that be in old age, or as a result of disease or misfortune, everything reasonable should be done to treat the patient, trade offs will have to be made though as resources are limited and medical care is expensive, requiring trained professionals of which there are limited number and physical resources that have to be paid for.

No matter what, difficult decisions will have to be made somewhere along the line... and it astounds me that when it comes to the provision of health and wellbeing, people think these decisions are better made by corporations whose chief motivation is profit.

Oh FFS Slashdot... will you please remember my long winded comment if I forget my passord on a different PC... dang it.

Well anyway my response pretty much boiled down to...

iOS has the users... Android has the flexibility and the growing market, but is a pain...

Depends on whether you're striking out on your own, or you're looking for work... if the latter... just look at the job market and decide, which has more job ads where you want to work and on what... if the former... well Android is likely to have the larger market long term... but it's a shit to support with all the different O/S and device combinations... and that's assuming the iPhone doesn't ever get off of AT&T in the US (which I assume from your comments is likely to be your major market striking out on your own).

Programming wise... if you're a programmer... i.e. one who can actually hold down a job and get some work done as opposed to a religious asshat, it's more about the libraries than the language.

Yes there are a few subtelties here and there, but Java and C (and Objective C) are reasonably alike (actually as a Java programmer of 10+ years I prefer Objective C)... Memory management is a bigger issue in Objective C than in Java, but frankly if you'd rather ignore memory management when programming in Java, I'd rather not employ you.

If you have some killer app that you have in mind... go for BOTH platforms.... not that hard... from a programmers perspective they're not that different. i.e. understand each platform's lifecycle etc. ...and yes, the comment is a bit rambling, but it's late, there is alcohol involved... and I'm a programmer who's been around long enough (I've programmed in X86 assembler) to realise that asking which platform to program for is kind of like asking which type of bread should I learn to bake, or which plan of house should I learn to construct (yeah, probably not great examples, but you get my jist).

Was it just me who looked at the picture attached to the article and thought "Thunderbirds"? ...then I looked at the bunch of characters next to it and I swear I saw some puppet strings.

A long time ago someone set up an organisation with the explicit purpose of lobbying for and protecting artists rights.

This extended to the collection of fees on behalf of the artists.

Naturally these organisations which originally made up of the artists themselves are now staffed mainly by lawyers and the kind of people who's main aim is to maximise revenues for the artists and to increase the power and size of the organisation itself.

Not hard to see now why they don't see "artistic expression" and "the promotion of music" as their main aim.

Happens all the time... organisation outgrowing it's original purpose and becoming a thing unto itself.

So, switch to T-Mobile.. they currently offer an unlimited data plan over 3G... really, I'm using it with the Nexus One I got from the Google I/O conference.

Should work on a jailbroken just iPhone fine. Oh, upset you need to jailbreak it... locked to AT&T... upset about that... well DUH, you bought an iPhone.

From what I understand, the unlimited contracts already in place continue at least until the contract is up. That's what you signed up for... AT&T doesn't have to extend that contract any more than you do.

Most people DON'T use anywhere near as much as 2Gb on the iPhone... a lot of people can actually save money.

Over the air bandwidth IS a limited resource in some densely populated (or densely populated by iPhone/smartphone users) areas in the US, regardless of how upset you feel about it, especially when that over the air bandwidth INCLUDES the bandwidth used to make 3G voice calls.

The new iOS4, background processing, music services, uploading HD video would likely be the reason that AT&T have implemented the new caps. You seriously expect them to invest heavily in a 3G network, coming under increasing strain, but with them getting the same amount of money from subscribers?

Oh and yes, I used to run a small ISP in Australia, where we had to pay for every byte going the provider of our upstream network and I'll tell you (as every ISP in Australia likely will) that when bandwidth is a LIMITED resource (and you either have a sunk cost, or pay to increase that bandwidth) you have to price accordingly.

No, the new iPhone features would have killed AT&T's network had they not put something in place to limit usage or at least make people aware of how much data they're using. This is actually a discount if you don't use that much data.

There's still get unlimited Wi-Fi access with AT&T's plan.

I'm assuming you actually want to be able to make a call with your phone in SF and NY?

There is a FINITE amount of bandwidth available in the 3G spectrum that AT&T uses and you can only improve the density of 3G access points by so much.

..... and you really want a company with Adobe's record in security and stability using low level hooks.

No thanks, I'd prefer not to cripple my Mac.

I don't care if they include it with the OS.... but...

The big question is can it be turned off (or uninstalled), or will users be forced to download flash objects while browsing on their mobile, consuming both bandwidth and CPU (and by extension, battery power).

I have a Flash blocker installed in my browser, simply because MOST flash content doesn't interest me. Before I installed a Flash blocker, Flash was often the single biggest user of CPU and resources while browsing some websites.

Also will they expose the mechanism by which they're allowing Flash into the browser, so additional browser extensions/plugins can be created that can block the Flash content like existing desktop plugins.

One branch is expressing concerns about our lovely Internet filter while the other is trying to ram ACTA down our throats.

BOTH will have an effect on free speech... neither of them we want.

Seriously... humans are the weak link... don't tell me it's so!

Erm, slotting RAM in, connecting some HDD cables and clipping a fan to the case...

LOL, the hardest part (of any PC build, let alone server (that's not a server)) was always trying to figure out which screw thingamajigs the motherboard required inserting into the case and then putting the motherboard in.

That and the inevitable blood spill! An upgrade or new PC requires a sacrifice of blood!

Yes and no... Xerox has a number of products in the document management space... i.e. things like scanning originals and putting original (electronic) documents in and archiving and making them searchable in house or online.

It's quite possible that Google/Yahoo have a number of patents in the search space that restrict or otherwise hang over features that Xerox may want to incorporate into these products.

Xerox no longer just makes office photocopiers, scanners and faxes ( multifunction machines these days). A large part of their business is document management software and services.

Well technically code on Android IS signed, BUT the private key is generated entirely on the developer's machine and serves merely to ensure that a group of applications come from the same developers or an upgrade to an application comes from the same developer.

Given the Android platform, it was only a matter of time.

From what it looks like from reading what little details there are about the application, it may have registered itself in the Android phone to handle URLs and pop up a web view to display those URLs while recording input. Such a thing is relatively easy to do on Android via Intent Filters I think.

Android does have a fairly comprehensive permissions system (similar to Java permissions), that inform the user when the application is installed exactly what permissions the application needs (as in the above case), but I'm guessing Joe User really doesn't take much notice when installing applications on their phone.

For example WHY on earth should an arcade game need access to your phone information and your contacts... I've lost count of the number of applications I've refused to install on my phone because the permissions they ask for seem a little overreaching for what the application actually does. I doubt however that your average user takes that amount of care when installing such applications.

Regardless of what people say about the app store approval process and the lack of access developers have to certain features of the phone, it WILL stop things like this from happening.

Steeeeve.....

Again, why should money be diverted from a SCHOOL program to support SETI.

SETI@Home is all about moving the cost of the calculation to someone else..

You know at this point just DONATING to a SETI cluster optimised for doing such calculations would probably be cheaper and WAY more efficient, but that would actually involve donations rather than a "cool competition", which is what he SET@Home charts etc. are.