Insurance companies aren't dumb to do this. They probably save money and end up with happier customers.

For example, I bought a laptop imported from Japan (a Fujitsu P-series) before they were available in the UK. Awesome little device, like a netbook - but back in 2001. The device cost around £2k, and had a 233Mhz CPU, optical drive, 60GB disk, 1024x640 screen.

In 2005/2006 the laptop got knocked off a table and the screen broke. Insurers tried to find a replacement screen, but couldn't. In the end they realised that for around £500 they could replace the entire machine with a device twice as powerful in terms of CPU, screen, etc, from the most recent P-series range. Cost of a replacement screen (plus labour to fit it) would probably have been more than the device.

Moore's law means it's usually cheaper to replace electronics with more recent models, and the customer gets an upgrade to boot. It does encourage fraud though.

How about this for an example. I run NewsRob on my Nexus One. It's an offline RSS reader, which periodically downloads the articles and web content in the background. It does this seamlessly and transparently, without me even noticing. When I fire it up, the content is all there, cached locally on the device - so I can read my feeds regardless of whether I have a signal or not. The closest equivalent to this on iPhone is Bylines. It can't sync in the background, and (I believe) can't run as a scheduled job in the background). So you have to have the download running in the foreground, which means that while it's downloading the content you can't do anything else. Which, frankly, is a total FAIL.

There are many other examples. I have a twitter app which refreshes my twitter feed periodically in the background and notifies me of mentions or messages. I have FoxyRing which runs in the background and every 10 minutes or so it checks the ambient noise level and sets the ringtone volume accordingly. I have a wifi app (Y5) which tracks my location, and if I'm in the same area as an SSID that I've connected to, it automatically enables Wifi (and when I leave that area, it switches wifi off again to save power). Another service I run in the background is 'Screen On', which monitors for certain applications running foreground, and if they're detected it switches the screen timeout to 'infinite'.

Now, some or all of those features, you could argue, could be part of the OS. They could also - with some hoop-jumping - be managed using notifications from the OS location/device state subsystem. However, that all requires the OS vendor to provide those functions. And the RSS download one simply isn't possible at all without it preventing me from using the device to do other things concurrently to the download.

Lots of people say "but I don't need multi-tasking" in justification of the iPhone's draconian limitations. Personally, my device would simply not fit my needs or requirements if it couldn't have background services running....

Have to agree, the new layout is just fine. But more importantly, I don't bother using the full version - I do everything from my Android device. Facebook haven't changed the mobile site (http://m.facebook.com) for over 2 years....

What happened was that the general public wants all the functionality, implemented 6 months ago on hardware which doesn't exist yet. So either Google/Apple/et al test properly, and consumers claim 'disappointment' that it takes 3 years for a device to get to market, or they do the best they can, get it into consumers' hands, and then push out updates whenever the next round of functionality/testing/bugfixing is complete.

Frankly, being an early adopter and a lover of new tech, I know which I'd prefer. Most bugs have workarounds (and, of course, the OSS community can fix or workaround some of them if the platform isn't horrendously locked down).

It's not about "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". It's about the fact that (as the parent wrote) Google doesn't give a shit about your individual data.

What google are looking for are trends. Not individual behaviour. If I go and visit www.corpse-pictures.com that doesn't help google unless others do. Individuals are outliers on the graph unless there's a lot of people behaving in similar correlated patterns, at which point the data becomes interesting.

People in this world are far too paranoid about their internet data without actually thinking about why they're paranoid. I bet half the people who use Tor to hide their web-surfing have thrown away supermarket receipts into the dustbin without shredding it, or use loyalty cards like Nectar etc when they shop at supermarkets...

"Unauthorized running of scripts on my computer"?

By visiting the site, you authorised it. If you don't want those scripts run, don't visit the site.

It's a bit like saying "unauthorised filming of me by CCTV when I walk into a branch of Sainsburys". If you don't like it, you can do the other thing.

Very good point. Google aren't trying to produce the iPhone-killer, since they make a whole bunch of revenue via search/maps/gmail on the iPhone. What google probably want is a Microsoft-killer and Nokia-killer. There's plenty enough revenue in the smartphone market for 2 players, and Google makes money from both of them....

Well, okay, I mean "anyone normal". ;)

I don't actually care if somebody knows I use Gmail, and most people can't tell cosmetically from a received email (particularly as I use my own SMTP).

Of course if I really wanted to hide the fact that I use GMail, instead of mail directing straight to Google, I could have an immediate redirect from my non-Google-hosted pop account to my Gmail account. In fact, that's how I used to have it, before Google introduced the ability to specify custom SMTP servers and I migrated to using their infrastructure directly.

"Domain name provider"? Who do you mean by that? I own my domain name, the only service I need is the registration - which is handled by Nominet etc, the same as everyone else uses for their domains. It's pretty safe to say that if they fail, DNS fails, and the entire internet fails - which means my email will become less relevant. And besides, a friend of mine owns an ISP and manages my registration, so I know I can (if really necessary) update A and MX records at any time night or day.

Really? My firstname@lastname.com email address makes insanely easy to give my email address over the phone or to somebody in a pub. Usually, if they know my name, they don't even have to write it down. Why is that vain? I'd rather that than have to give some obscure name like fred_johnson1237x@somedomain.btinternet.com

And more importantly, if you have a domain name you're not tied into the webmail provider OR your ISP.

I have firstname@lastname.com as my email address (yes, it's a bit generic - ha!). All my email accounts on my domain are consolidated within a gmail account, but now they allow me to properly use my own SMTP server via GMail, I can completely invisibly do this. So nobody sending mail to or receiving mail from me knows it's all done by Gmail.

Not only am I completely decoupled from my ISP, I'm also decoupled from my mail provider. If Google does something I don't like, or something better comes along (unlikely, but possible) I can switch my email instantly at no cost. Likewise, if I'm unlucky enough to have my mail suspended for some reason, again, I'm not at GMail's mercy.

Complete lack of reliance on mail provider and ISP is the only way to be sure.

Ahhhh. I just wrote exactly the same thing a bit further down. Yes, irritates me hugely, that does.

If I see a developer candidate who has his own personal domain, I'll mod him up. If I see somebody with AOL, I'll be less convinced. It's a bit like going for an interview with a mobile phone carrier, and giving a land-line as your phone number. Or maybe going for an interview as an HGV driver and asking if somebody can pick you up from the station.

The thing that really irritates the hell out of me is seeing vans for tradesman who have their own domain, but an AOL email address. E.g.

www.andys-plumbing.co.uk

andysplumbing@aol.com

Grrrr!

...about who's at #1?

All these Rage fans getting so het up about X-factor being top of the chart. And yet they themselves seem to feel the need to have their music choice validated by everyone else buying the same.

The chart is about populist music - by definition. So why complain about X-factor-bots being at the top of it?!?

Jeez. Sheeples, all of them. If you like music, buy/listen to it. If not, don't. WTF GAFF about whether all the other people out their bought it?

I would suggest that whilst you think you're a geek, you're probably not.

I've been a software developer for 17 years, across 7 or 8 different jobs, in different industries ranging from e-commerce website construction/development, through desktop publishing, and (at the moment) finance. In all those years I've never been mentally exhausted, because I love developing software. I often wake up in the middle of the night thinking about how I'm going to fix/write something, and have to write it down. I regularly write code in my spare time. I've also only ever been on-call for all day/night 2 years of that whole career, and that was when I worked for a small company (larger companies have proper support structures so people are only on call at specific, rota'd times). It's perfectly possible to find a software dev job that doesn't require long hours or being on call.

And if you think that life in teaching is going to be a bed of roses, think again - you'll earn far less than you would in IT, and you'll work just as hard (most teachers I know regularly take 2-3 hours' marking work home most evenings during term-time).

You'd be better off finding out what the jobs you want to do are actually like, than basing it on stereotypes and opinions from /.