"the revolution will not be tweetivized"

(by the time he got the tweet posted, the revolution was over)

Sic Semper Tytoolus!

I favor a less funny, more useless answer: Internet Explorer.

They want everyone keeping all their devices connected to the online hub. This way they can control licensing, require updates, etc., more effectively than they do today.

You might like jailbreaking your console, but will you like it as much if your saved games are inaccessible? (maniacal laughter)

It doesn't matter, on /. every consumer is expected to sideload, install a clean OS, jailbreak, or otherwise do things the average person doesn't know how to do and/or wouldn't care to do if they could.

On /., everyone uses the same way you do. (or would, if they weren't so stupid)

Depends... if Ballmer had said the exact same thing, it wouldn't be AS true. In this case since someone who loves Android says it, it's a "gotcha".

I'm sure that Verizon thing won't change the iPhone's market share at all...

The biases only deal with embryonic stem cell research, which is but a subset of all types of stem cell research. For the record, I don't think you need a religious bias to object to embryo farming or similar (since this is /., we are allowed/required to carry out what-could-happen as far as possible)

Much more important than a petty political point is pointing out that exclusivity contracts in medical research are stupid. We should be attempting to advance as quickly as humanly and ethically possible in these fields, and awarding exclusivity for profit motivated (don't kid yourself, they are) universities and research institutions is damaging and nonsensical.

It's an example of a culture of remarkable achievement that had become susceptible to groupthink after a while.

Major malfunction is just NASA-speak.

The guy was struggling with what to say. I think the quote was something like "umm... obviously, a major malfunction".

What do you expect someone to say in that situation?

True - but I thought the downfall of custom circuits was that sometimes the operator chickens out. Obviously, those who plan these devices didn't find manually operated or time controlled mechanisms as effective as this, or they'd still be using them...

It's probably just an academic discussion because really, the chances this was going to happen or will happen again are probably slim.

I'm guessing they used an old phone or a burner that was recently (re-)activated and the spam was just sent to a random telephone number with a known-mobile exchange prefix.

Interesting. I wonder if this delivery method will cause countermeasures to be used to prevent attacks?

Perhaps governments may look at shutting off text messages in a given area, or from a given set of towers, if they perceive a threat to the area.

They already have the rights to kick anyone off PSN that they want to. The fact that you aren't paying for it doesn't mean there aren't any TOS.

They most definitely do store copies of those messages. These records can be subpoenaed and used in a trial like any other telephone records. Many, many examples exist.

Facebook and such, I feel, should be considered public if you have any common sense. Search engines are caching this stuff, it's backed up on volumes all over the place, it's transmitted to others' computers and mobile devices.

Especially if you are one of those who doesn't bother to have privacy settings locked down, I don't feel that we have any reasonable expectation of privacy on facebook and I think judges will continue to interpret things that way.

Remember, ISPs are evil traffic-throttling anti-neutrality daleks