Why is it we insist upon such complicated schemes for getting people to recycle? A good old fashion deposit scheme seems a much more effective alternative, although it does require something be done at the state or federal level, and a whole lot less intrusive. It works like this...

Require any store that sell beverage containers to accept them in return for cash or credit.
Require any large store that sells them provide automated reverse vending machines (Tomra) at the front of the store and they must pay out cash.
Barcodes must be attached to the product and intact for there to be a refund.
Raise the deposit on various items until you meet specific recycling rate targets.
Make defrauding the machine a felony.

This is hardly an original idea, but it works. You can easily achieve 80+% recycling rates for bottles and cans.

Downside - the usual bitching from the usual people that either hate the idea that they might be helping out their fellow man or vested interests like bottlers that think it will impact sales.

See bittorrent for examples.

It is the unfortunate side of homebrew software on cellular phones. I am all for people writing software to put on their phone for free, but the way it is done is by stripping the protections of the operating system that serves several purposes. Enforcement of software downloaded only being run on authorized users handsets, circumvention of the OS protections against malicious code execution by virtue of only signed software being run on the device.

I didn't say installing Linux is stealing. I said, "We aren't talking about people loading Linux on their phone to get a shell, the primary reason people want to hack their phone is theft of software." Which says, this isn't about people putting linux on their phone for fun or for the hell of it. This is specifically about circumventing the security mechanisms of a device for the sole purpose of dodging contractual obligations, and installation of illegally obtained software. I should have included theft of service in that statement.

Customers have no such right. Read the contract you signed.

If you are stating it shouldn't be legal, that is a different thing. In the US where customers have almost no protections, in part because we don't want legal protections from abusive contracts because to some it sounds like the loss of freedom, they write exactly this sort of crap into the contracts you are obligated to sign to obtain service.

Voiding the warranty isn't something that shoots off flares and calls home invalidating the warranty. They will still end up having to deal with claims that run through the warranty process, get mailed to some facility, get inspected, deemed void, and either returned or disposed of via recycling. None of which is free.

If your phone is jailbroken you can use software illegally. I assume you can figure the rest out.

Security through obscurity? No, security through active denial of access via handsets and commodity hardware. Obscurity is not a factor. Part of the security of the system is the handset side and not just for the network but for the user. Hacking your phone is disabling your own security.

And yet that isn't a mainstream point of view. Not everyone wants to write software. If you want to write your own software there are some legitimate ways to do that and signing up with Apple will cost you $99/year and Android is going to cost you the price of a phone $399.

While I completely understand your point of view it is generally believed the app store and music store are major drivers of the success of the smartphone.

It strikes me as funny that just a couple of years ago this problem didn't even exist. Nobody bitched about not being able to install software on the phone because all phones sucked and there was no general market for software on phones. What little there was in the form of Symbian or J2ME apps wasn't even guaranteed to work on the same hardware with different carriers. iPhone changed that and now we can bitch about the openness of their app store or that Android phones are coming out that lock you out of modifying the OS.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.

That is exactly what they are doing. For the non-tech affluent they are providing a phone that won't brick. It is guaranteed to work exactly the way it did the day you bought it.

If you want a phone to hack maybe you should buy the Google Developer phone from HTC. There the only limitation is screwing with the bootloader and the fact that the current model only supports 1.6 of Android and that you are on the now ancient HTC Magic.

I think you are missing the futility of not buying it based solely on the fact you don't like them coupling the the software and hardware. Every phone on the market running Android or iOS already implement some level of cryptographic lock out. This isn't going to diminish over time for the reasons I mentioned and a few I am sure I missed. I am going to guess 99+% of customers don't care to hack their phone and they aim to keep it that way.

They will all sell millions of phones with or without your help and I doubt many of them will end up in someone's ass.

Linux is licensed under GPL v2.

First, they don't want to deal with them in warranty. Even if people knowingly bricked their phone by attaching a car battery to it they will still hit up the warranty department with a cock and bull story about how it isn't their fault. Clogs up the warranty department and costs the company time and money.

Second, they cannot allow hacking the device to become mainstream. We aren't talking about people loading Linux on their phone to get a shell, the primary reason people want to hack their phone is theft of software. Which harms the platform because the vibrancy of the android platform requires high-quality software. If it is known that your aren't going to make money selling software that will limit the kinds of software available on that platform and that will limit the popularity of Android phones.

Third, hacking the phone can potentially open also sorts of attacks up on the cellular network. How long before people start listening to each others phone calls, hijacking calls, making calls on other peoples accounts, or just creating a DoS attack against the towers. How secure are those cell towers? I don't think we want to know.

Fourth, you do buy hardware software from the company. That is non-negotiable. You are buying a complete product not components.

Cryptographically signed software that starts from bootstrap is going to probably land on all devices eventually to help control costs, improve security, and maintain the revenue stream. They don't have to prevent you from cracking them forever, just until the next update.

Removing lead is progress and in time the restriction will become a non-issue for even those that believe in the goodness of lead.

In the US, people spent ages bellyaching about the low-flush toilets. Initially the toilets that came out often did perform poorly because when you could use half a lake to flush the toilet you didn't need good design. Designs have improved and one of the greatest wasters of fresh water was reduced.

Realize that government is a process and that there are always trade-offs. Usually they aren't even entirely clear trade-offs.

I just saw a program on the BBC following some of these snake oil salesmen that operate out of China and Costa Rica, and another one from 60 minutes called 21st Century Snake Oil. Digging a little deeper and you discover the people operating these clinics have been involved in other dubious ventures and employ high pressure sales techniques for treatments that have no reasonable chance of being successful.

There are perfectly good reasons why these treatments are legal in places with few regulations. The scientific evidence that any of these treatments is going to alter a bad situation is incredibly thin to non-existent. When the research has developed a treatment, and that treatment has proven effective it will be available in the West. Until then we should be helping these people cope with the situation they are in and accept the fact there aren't any cures and pursue these so-called doctors through government and legal channels.

And if you start developing a hardware platform and app store with Oompa Loompas you would have a fine piece of logic. You are presupposing that anything you write should be accepted to the Apple App Store. You are more than welcome to develop in any language you like and target the jailbroken phone market. Apple wants things submitted to their store using their toolchain.

I started using Linux in 1999 and it was definitely a hobbyist OS at the time. Today, Ubuntu provides a very nice user environment, is largely crash free, and certainly performs well. If anything the Windows UI is what seems to suck to me. The major issue remains momentum. Linux OSes achieving feature parity isn't good enough to knock Windows off the OS throne.

It is interesting because it says a lot about the value of free, and human behavior. Free isn't as enticing as we thought, unless it is exactly the same product minus the cost. People would generally pay for a known safe choice than learn a device that should do all the same things. In summary, the OS game is generally Microsoft's to lose.

As an example there is the case of IE where Microsoft screwed up and lost market share. We would still be bitching about IE6 if there weren't serious risks that were widely discussed that scared users over to the generally accepted alternative browser Firefox. We can win converts to open source when companies screw up, but simply building a better browser wasn't sufficient. In part because it wasn't better in any way that users understood.

So to boil down the situation to one has a crap GUI or a crap kernel is certainly an easy argument. Although it is one of pure opinion. The situation is far more complicated. Users make choices based on a range of reasons with heavy bias to the incumbent. It makes me think of the European browser choice system. How much would it affect the market if users were provided a boot-time choice with a variety of free OSes and Windows, where the users had to pay for Windows after they bought the computer rather than pre-paying and enticed to try free?

It reminds me of the very interesting WNYC Radio Lab episode on Choice. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/11/14