It's easy to tell someone using a device to turn it off. How do they easily tell if the cellular radio is off? The press release says "no bars displayed". So now the flight attendant has to confirm the absence of one of the smallest icons on the screen?

Even more crazy, this changes the very definition of "airplane mode" from "all radios off" to "cell radio off, but wifi and bluetooth radio okay". Current devices don't even have such a mode! And how many non-techies even have a clear idea of the distinction?

Do you know what currency is?

Not paying for contracted work is still default. Or worse.

This is one of the great hypocrisies of people who say it would be okay to hit the debt ceiling. They claim that government should be fiscally responsible while simultaneously claiming it would be okay for the government to not pay its bills, which is the most fiscally irresponsible thing that could happen. If you want to change something, change the budget -- future commitments -- don't default on past commitments. (See how "default" doesn't apply to just debts.) If you don't have enough votes to get your way, wake up and realize that you live in a democracy, speak your mind and compromise.

So what you're saying is that an app is a glorified bookmark. wow.

But the problem is that putting DRM in the standard shifts the cost of the DRM from the vendor to the community. Now there is no cost for them implementiing DRM. WE pay for it by having to have a standard-compliant client. The feedback mechanism you give is broken by putting DRM in the public standard.

Of course... it had a resistive touchscreen. Modern smartphones are capacative touchscreen devices. That is THE difference between smartphones available from the late '90's through late 00's and current-day smartphones. There are plenty of previous examples of things like the app store. Most of the "innovative" UI interactions that people like you credit to Apple are just things that work on capacative touchscreens but not on resistive ones. Have you every tried swipe-based gestures on a resistive touchscreen? It just doesn't work. Also, no mult-touch on resistive touchscreens.

I give big credit to Apple for being the first to get a capacitve touchscreen phone to market, and making it a really quality product at the same time. That is really hard. But the "revolutionary" thing has nothing to do with apple - it is the capacative touchscreen and the low-power portable hardware.

From reading the descriptions on the sync site... no. Anyone with the key can access the files. This provides some security, but it is pretty brittle. As long as everyone using it understands the level of security that should be applied to that key. i.e. anyone who steals the key can access the files. So, for example, never send the key over email.

This seems like a reasonable solution for either just syncing personal files, where one individual has control of the key(s). Or syncing among a small technical group where everyone understands the relevance of the security of the key(s). Or syncing low-risk files among a less formal group. So it provides "some security" but you shouldn't really call it "secure", where "secure" would be per-user authenticated based on unique, private credentials for each user that they will not, in practice, give to others.

Seems like crossing the border with no information in your possession is the only reasonable way to go.

I had a friend mention recently that at NASA you can't take your laptop overseas (or maybe it was just to China), they give you a blank ipad when you leave and then you give it back and they wipe it when you get back. Assuming that you wait until you are in-country to start using the ipad this means you would cross the border with no information on you subject to search. It seems like with the "consent" requirement you could get away with refusing to sign into your email from a device that isn't yours if you cite company policy.

And to add to your list: if you work at any educational institution, the federal laws on student data privacy are such that you would be violating them with this kind of open-ended access as well.

No - the plane is safe even if the battery catches fire. My understanding of the comment is that safe failure is the result of the change in design. With the previous design, battery failure by fire could endanger the aircraft. With the new design battery failure by fire does not endanger the aircraft. This is how subsystem failure is managed in aircraft. Whether or not a failure endangers the craft has huge implications for how its safety is evaluated.

Did you somehow miss the fact that Apple broke the status quo that you just mentioned by refusing to sign cross-licensing agreements? And if you think that one-click would have passed muster as a patent in the '80s you also slept through the transition from when method patents were not allowed to the current condition where they are. Just because it was bad before doesn't mean it can't get worse.

Put your strawman away. Hoarding cash and saving are not the same thing. Currency is for providing efficiency of exchanging goods and services, not for long-term storage of capital. That's why it's called currency!

Individuals have a choice to save via investment (keeping capital in the economy) or via hoarding currency (keeping capital out of the economy). Beyond a certain amount liquidity buffer, widespread "saving" in the form of hoarding cash is a good way to destroy an economy by breaking the assumptions that everyone uses to fairly exchange goods and services using currency. A mildly inflationary currency is a stable currency because it discourages it being used for something other than currency, i.e. long-term storage of capital. You are arguing that zero inflation is enough to maintain a stable currency. You are wrong. We tried that, it didn't work.

Coming back to bitcoin. Bitcoin is a perfectly reasonable exchange currency for small transactions. i.e. you convert money to bitcoin then back out again. This is because its short-term value is fairly predictable and low-risk. However its long-term value is completely uncontrolled because there are so many unknown hoarders. And this problem will just get worse.

Bitcoin will probably last another few years and then it will choke on its own deflation. i.e. bitcoins will become so valuable that none of them will be in circulation. The hilarious thing is you will probably see this as a the success of bitcoin! Look how valuable they are! But it will have been a total failure as a currency. Thankfully anyone with some good sense sees this coming a mile away and nobody is likely to die as a result. (you know people die when large economies break right? This is not a game.)

Of course the hilarity (i.e. stupidity) ensues when "how things were before" is just something made-up that never actually existed. Or it is something that was changed precisely because it was a provably terrible way of doing things. The problem with a lot of politics in the US, especially on the conservative side, is that it has become disconnected from reality. If a "conservative" allows someone else to define "how things were" then they are just a pawn to be manipulated. Progressives (that is the more appropriate term in this context) have reality issues too, i.e. thinking something will work better just because it is "new", but that seems a lot less of a problem right now. Progressives seem to have their hands full just keeping Bad Stuff (like invading other countries) from happening.

Just to be clear, this is NOT "software as a service". SAAS is where they pay you to use the software (for example through a web interface) but they do not get either the compiled code or source code. You are working as a contract developer. In copyright terms it is a "work for hire."

I agree that use of GPL completely depends on how the payment-for-work model for a given piece of software works. If one's revenue depends on artificial scarcity, GPL is not really viable as its intention is to remove artificial scarcity.

Honest questions here:

Does this mean it stores the secrets on the SIM card because it is hardened? or it uses the existing keys/etc in the sim card? (I don't even know if the former is possible.) Is there no other hardened storage on a smartphone?

One of the problems is that if I have two banks (or others) I'd prefer to use different authentication tokens for each. But if both of them authenticate from the same sim card....

I think that you are wrong. Given the nature of the study, I am inclined to believe that when they say "we know that disadvantaged students perform more poorly..." that they know this for real i.e they have the statistics to back it up. The point is that the simple fractions of disadvantaged students doesn't quite work the way you might expect.