Bones has got to be the worst offender for this, which particularly bothers me because, honestly, if you rated what characters in television series were the least likely to bother showing off a new gadget to those around them, I would say Temperance Brennan should land somewhere in the top five. She just wouldn't care. But White Collar also earns an honorable mention lately; they seem to be trying to take the crown of Random Car Placements from Bones. Though at least they've tried to work it into the script through jokes, like covering the hybrid during a high-speed driving sequence.

Neal: Why is there a tree on your dashboard?
Diana: It's a hybrid. It shows me how efficiently I'm driving.
Neal: You're not driving very green. All the leaves are falling off.
Diana: *annoyed* Do you want to catch this guy?
Neal: I feel like I'm stuck in the Giving Tree. There's nothing left but a stump.
Diana: *more annoyed* I'll grow a new one over the weekend!

I didn't say they SUCCEEDED, but they tried.

That's the thing. Watching Castle and seeing that Rick Castle has an iPhone, or that Detective Beckett has a Palm Pre? Eh, whatever. They're probably going to have a cell phone, like most of the people in the US. As long as you're not throwing that device into my face really obnoxiously, I don't care what it is. It's just a prop, and I can focus on the story. Seeing that Shawn on 'Psych' carries an iPhone, again, not terribly jarring. None of them make a big deal about their phones, they just use them on screen.

But when I'm watching Bones and, say, Dr. Brennan feels a need to explain her new Windows Phone 7 device and show the Metro UI off to someone? Or on /any/ show where they feel the need to discuss the little tree on the dashboard (or demonstrate the Bluetooth capabilities) of certain hybrid cars? (White Collar, I'm looking at you as well here.) Those get annoying and jarring, because they feel like someone randomly regurgitated marketing into the middle of the script.

Be fair... for a while, the History channel made it seem as though all of human history boiled down to UFOs or Hitler. (Or sometimes UFOs and Hitler.) The Bible Sex and Mayan Apocalypse shows were at least a new form of irritant!

USA Network is apparently the exception to this; it seems like they'll give all their original programming at least two seasons to find its legs. Psych, Burn Notice, White Collar, In Plain Sight, Royal Pains... every one of them has been given sufficient time to find its legs and pick up an audience. And most of them have. I imagine their new series Fairly Legal will be given the same opportunity.

King County already has a vote-by-mail system in place. In fact, the last King County elections were handled entirely by mail.

The real problem I have with the Xoom is that you have to sign up for the cellular data plan in order for the tablet to enable WiFi. No Verizon data plan? No WiFi for you, either. Sure, you can cancel after the WiFi's been activated, with a minimum of one month data service... but still, that's just outright extortion. And there's no release date on the WiFi-only Xoom yet, so it's the cellular-enabled Xoom or nothing.

Safari comes with a Reader mode built-in, and there's the Readability add-on for Firefox and a similar one for Chrome. For general browser-agnostic solutions, often with mobile variants, there is the web version of Readability, or the Instapaper service.

To the best of my knowledge, all of those will slurp in multiple pages of an article when producing the clean/readable version of the article.

Does anyone else think of "Doctor Dinosaur" from Atomic Robo when reading this article?

http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/07/24/free-comic-book-day-2009/

Contractual, no, but there are practical considerations that make that difficult. The Android market gives you very little space to describe your app as it is; I doubt you could fit an entire compatibility list in there. And not many users will copy a link out of a marketplace description and open the Browser to see what a longer list of compatibility notes.

I think the problem is that most people are reading this as "apps are sending off the UDID" and going "eh, who cares" because the UDID doesn't have any real inherent useful meaning outside of iOS development provisioning. Even when they read that you can associate the UDID with a real name somehow (as in the Amazon and CBS apps), they still see UDID isn't really useful data. All you know is "this hexadecimal value -- which, for all practical purposes, may as well be random -- is Joe Public." If Amazon generated a blob of random binary data and used that to identify that device to the server instead of the UDID, but changed no other part of their protocol, you'd still be able to associate the random blob of data with Joe Public.

Where this becomes a privacy concern is that since multiple services take the shortcut of using the UDID as their tracking token, if you had, say, both Amazon's tracking data and CBS's tracking data, you could take Amazon's realname data and combine it with the CBS program's demographic data, and have a bigger, badder demographic database. Because they both use the UDID as their tracking token, there's a shared bit of data you can use to combine those sorts of tracking databases. But that's not really presented as the problem here, so most people just think "why should I care that the UDID is being sent? Thats no different than any other random data-tracking cookie."

In contrast, I think why people reacted more vehemently to the Android article was that the TaintDroid folks reported that Android apps were not merely using device identifiers as tracking tokens, but were also reporting back the actual phone number, or in some cases the IMSI. While I don't care much about my UDID being sent off as a tracking token -- it's not meaningful data in and of itself -- I am going to be a lot more disturbed if I find some app is sending my cellular subscriber data to a server without a damned good reason, regardless of what data they're tracking.

That said, the growing popularity of smartphones means that privacy and malware/trojan prevention on mobile platforms /is/ going to become more and more of a real concern, I think. There are already security suites available for them, like Android Firewall on Android, or FirewallIP on iOS; they all require rooting/jailbreaking to use, but they're there as an option. But because of how much computing people do on their mobile devices, I think eventually we're going to see -- of necessity -- these sort of privacy/security tools for mobile platforms becoming more common and mainstream, whether Apple and Google open up the platform to allow third-party security tools or whether they start providing a higher level of security themselves, /something/ is going to change in time.

I just downloaded 3 years of my savings account information on ingdirect to test. They offered it in CSV and two other formats (like Quicken probably, I forget specifically and already closed that tab out).

In fairness, the Lord of the Rings films were basically just one single unbelievably long movie, which happened to be broken into thirds for semi-sane human consumption.

Ah, then we can truly share the experience of those ancient Roman LINVX admins. :P

janus:~% perl --version

This is perl, vV.XI.I built for iCCCLXXXVI-linvx-thread-multi
(With II registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

It's not quite /that/ bad; they're in a specific area (along the fence line), and so not terribly intrusive for anything I'm likely to do. But they /are/ just on the inside of my fence line, instead of out in the little 'private lane' easement. (Which is, admittedly, mildly annoying if not a huge issue... they couldn't have put this all in a foot south of where they did?)

At any rate, my point is that due to subdivision, you can certainly have utilities laid out in such a way that construction or work on one house /can/ affect others. :)