Given that this is EA we are talking about, I can definitely believe that they'd somehow manage to be paranoid about 'piracy' of a game they are giving away. However, since it's also an older game(pre "Origin" store/client/pox-on-humanity and originally distributed largely on retail disks) and being given away it would be unsurprising if as little effort as possible was put into modifications for the new distribution.

Does anybody know how deeply baked-in SecuROM has to be? Would the developer/publisher have a 'clean' version that is then put through some sort of SecuROM conversion step, or would you have to go further back, and deeper, into the development process to cleanly rip it out?

I'm baffled at why including it would be worth much (especially if the license agreement involves any sort of volume-based payment, which would likely wipe out any minor benefits in audience tracking); but if it is sufficiently difficult to rip out then it would be understandable why EA wouldn't bother doing so(aside from just being evil).

But admitting 'neurological changes' is tantamount to doubting free will, and we just can't have that! Despite any and all evidence to the contrary, it simply must be true that a 'will' or 'self control' exists independent of any squishy brainial biology, yet somehow capable of controlling its function. Never you mind that this makes little sense, or that fiddling with self control through experimental manipulation is practically a psych research hobby, this hypothesis is simply too intuitively attractive to deny!

dude. he was being snarky because he is ignorant of the way expansion and contraction, dropping your phone, turning on and off your phone, etc. etc. damage the solid state components.

He's just ignorant and flipped off a sarcastic comment without thinking. I've done the same thing myself on other subjects.

It seems dumb and like solid state devices should be impervious to damage.

But run them hot, run them through a lot of on/off cycles or cool/hot cycles and they are damaged and have a lower MTBF.

My god, reading the entire thread, I can't believe anyone took him seriously.

What does he need to do, put it in green text?

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Look, for an easier way to find info on this subject google for router antenna's. They have the same problem (solid state but they degrade fairly quickly) and there are a lot more pages exploring why this is true.

My samsung has been hot to the touch many times (so over 100 degrees but probably less than 110- but probably over 110 inside) and heat is a leading cause for solid state parts of routers to go bad.

Outside of DEA flunkies and hardcore suffering enthusiasts, I don't think that there's much support for skipping opiates(indeed, it is commonly held that pain is under-treated); but there is an awareness that prescription opiates are a fairly common introduction to opiate dependency, especially in populations that would otherwise have few introductions to them.

Unfortunately, we barely know how pain works, and really don't have many alternatives to work with. The painkillers that aren't addictive are mostly OTC junk that pain barely notices, and the ones that actually work are typically close relatives of quite addictive compounds. At least the pillheads get their fix manufactured under FDA quality control rules, which makes them safer than the junkies.

The others didn't pick up your snark.

Look- every time you turn on and off your phone, it suffers damage.

Every time you drop your phone, it suffers from damage.

Electronics which are operated outside of their heat range suffer damage.

Expansion and contraction of solid state electronic devices causes damage.

Now... how about you stop being a snarky troll.

I vaguely remember some talk about an emulator at one point; but aside from that the two OSes have essentially zero in common. WebOS was (in my opinion) sadly underrated and died tragically young (I wouldn't be surprised if the situation has improved markedly; but back when 'Android tablet' meant 'Motorola Xoom running 3.0' it wasn't even fair how superior webOS was... Now that LG has it, it's probably gone to shit.); but it had absolutely no relation to palmOS, other than organizational.

The 'conduit' synchronization concept was pretty good as well (in an environment where 'eh, it's a computer, just give it TCP/IP and call it a day.' was not yet practical). The actual sync client, at least for Windows, was a total piece of shit; but conceptually the 'conduits' model was about the nicest flavor of PDA synchronization available before the rise of handhelds with their own data connections. PalmOS never handled those particularly neatly.

If you and everybody else responsible for the code running on the device aren't sloppy programmers, perhaps...

Even if your code is perfect, you still run the risk of having the other guy's program start scribbling over yours unless you feel like re-implementing absolutely everything whose behavior you don't entirely trust.

"Algorithm" is the distinction. Otherwise you're basically saying "What's my algorithm for doing X? I just demand X be done." Perhaps you could call it The King's Algorithm.

But 200 miles certainly covers any and all local in-town and in-area travel possibilities, and nearly everything but very long distance travel.

Nope. You need 250 plus a safety margin - on mountains for part of the trip.

In my case that's half a commute between my Silicon Valley townhouse and my edge-of-Nevada ranch. But that's virtually the same trip as between Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area and many weekend vacation spots: Lake Tahoe ski resorts, Reno gambling, gold country camping, etc.

Make a car that can do 30-mile-one-way commute efficiently and has this 250-and-chage range, and a Northern Californian who works near the coast and blows off steam near the CA/NV interface only needs ONE vehicle. (So it takes four to six hours to charge when you get there and when you get back - so what? It'll be parked longer than that anyhow.) Less and he/she needs TWO, with all the environmental impact of building both. Further, the long-range one is a gas hog by comparison.

Does a loaded F-150 even get 500 miles on a single tank of gas?

Yes, it does.

But it's a 37 galon tank.

I love everything about my F-150 Lariet EXCEPT the gas mileage (and the refusal to pan the weather map except when the vehicle is stopped). Unfortunately, when you have to haul several tons up and down a mountain or across an unpaved desert from time to time, it's hard to avoid a tradeoff in that department.

The internal "SD Card" is formatted with a Unix-style file system that provides access controls to keep apps from being able to access one anothers' data. External SD Cards are formatted with FAT32, because that's what the whole world expects. Unfortunately, FAT has no concept of ownership or permissions, so the path-based restriction is necessary to ensure that apps can't muck with each others' data.

It's too late now, but if this device had been encrypted before it was broken, you'd have a lot less to worry about.

OTOH, it's worth pointing out that if the level of effort required to find the storage on the broken device so you can wipe or destroy it is too much to bother with, it will almost certainly be too much effort for anyone to go through the same effort in order to retrieve your data, on the off chance there might be something of value in there somewhere.

hey, "print 0" runs in O(1)!

If it's just a screen connection issue, ADB/fastboot should be enough to wipe any internal storage good and hard.

If it's more broken than that, you'll have to go inside. If something has come loose that you can put back into place, you win. Otherwise, you can either pray for a friendly JTAG connection or physically destroy the flash chips.