Soylent space is full of people?

Only $20 burger I ever bought was in an all American food challenge and included 3 half pound patties with cheese, bacon, onion rings in between each layer, and a 3 layer bun. It came with a side platter of cheese fries, and if you could eat the whole thing in 30 minutes you got half off, a tee-shirt for the place, and your ignoble picture hung on the wall under the challenges. But that's about the only time I can see myself paying $20 for a burger (and technically I only paid $10 for it so, even then).

Course, I'm probably (definitely?) contributing to the accurate stereotype that Americans are overweight fat-asses in doing so. Still I digress, $20 for a plain old burger is nuts.

It's the same argument that violent video games increases violent crimes. Or that sex education increases teen pregnancy.

Technically speaking the child continues to be harmed long after the making of the content. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way. It doesn't have to be sexually, though certainly sexual abuse tends to be one of the more scarring forms of psychological trauma. Now imagine that your victimization was captured on film, and long after the abuse was over, you are periodically reminded of that abuse because the pictures of it resurface somewhere on the net.

Heck just the KNOWING that there are people out there who are watching it for their own sick pleasure would be enough to add on years of therapy for most victims. Add in the potential for someone you know to see your victimization (even accidentally, plenty of people upload child pornography to sites just to get off on shocking people who see it, take a look at 4chan for example), and recognize you from it. There's plenty of ways that continuing to distribute bits and bytes of computer data that represents child pornography harms the people involved.

Basically if you had a top of the line phone 2 years ago it can probably run ICS, it might be a little sluggish, but it's doable. I had an epic4g (basically sprint's version of the original galaxy s line) and it runs ICS fine via cyanogenmod 9. I haven't looked into budget android phones in a while, but I'd hope that most things bought in the last 6 months or so would have the specs to run ICS, since there's been 2 years of time for moore's law to catch up.

On the consumer side, 90% of smart phone customers don't use even 15% of what their devices are capable of doing. For most consumers, the questions, "Can it go online?", "Can it make phone calls and send texts?", "Does it have some stupid little games I can put on it to pass the time when I'm bored?", and "Does it work reasonably well without being too confusing for me to figure out" are all they care about. That functionality has been available long before android 2.3 even hit the scene, never mind 4.0.

The average consumer doesn't understand nor care about the differences between OS versions on really anything, computers, smartphones, whatever. As long as it does that one thing(s) that they want, most are satisfied. Now if they're exposed to a new feature from a new version they might grow to like it and use it, but chances are unless they're already a techie and looking into that sort of thing, most users won't care about it until there's some game/app/thing they want to do with their current device/OS and can't. Plus, unless they happen to be fairly tech savvy and aren't afraid of voiding warranties and what not the consumer is at the whim of their device manufacturers and carriers to get them updated software. So it's no surprise most people just stick with what they have if it works 'good enough'

From a manufacturer point of view they've already sold the product, maintaining updates costs them money, so they're disinclined to spend money on a product that's already sold. There's some work done on flagship products, and maybe a little bit just to earn enough goodwill with their customers that they'll keep coming back, but like all corporations they balance expenses for 'customer service' very carefully. For most corporations, customer service isn't about doing what's right for the customer, it's about doing enough to keep most of the customers happy, but not cost the company a fortune.

There's a little more incentive on the carrier's end to keep things updated, since their customers are paying for a service, not for hardware, and I'm sure that there's some push from the carriers to get their devices updated. But even then that costs money, so it's really only going to be their most popular devices that get attention, and less popular ones will fall by the wayside.

Tl;dr most people figure if it ain't broke, don't fix it

It can't hurt right?

Serious medical crisis aside, all I can picture in my head right now is Paul Ryan wearing a brain slug from Futurama, "Poor little guy starved to death"

Your argument is slightly flawed, roads are a public resource, you can only fit so many cars on any given road, and if those cars don't behave in a way which is predictable to other drivers then travel time would be erratic, and the danger of crashes is increased. Further without rules and an enforcement process if someone felt like being an asshole, they could simply park their 18 wheeler across the street and stop anyone from going anywhere. We have traffic laws because the road is a public place and without agreeing on some common rules they would be unusable. You are not giving up your freedom to speed, you are agreeing that if you want to use public roads you won't speed on them. If you however had a private road you could drive your car anyway you like on it, at any speed and any amount of recklessness.

If I was using a public computer with agreed upon rules about how the machine would be used to ensure the safety and security of others I would have no problem operating within a walled garden, it's not my hardware, and if I want to use it the owner is perfectly justified at setting rules on how it is to be used. However if it's MY hardware, why does some other company have the right to decide what I can and can't do with my hardware. Now if I was either too lazy or unskilled to properly secure my hardware I have the right to allow some other company to do it for me by creating a 'walled garden' as it were, but I should always have the right to say screw you I want to run this program anyways, acknowledging the risks involved. If I want to let someone else handle the responsibility of securing my device that's fine, but I shouldn't HAVE to let someone else handle that responsibility.

This would largely be the same as the owner of a private road hiring a private security company to police their road and make sure that drivers on it obey whatever rules you institute, but you always have the right to fire that security company.

Instead what we have is a situation where I can buy a private road (piece of computing hardware), and the company I buy it from says, "ok you can only use your road (computer) to do these certain things we have already decided are allowable, otherwise we'll stop you from doing it"

Screw that, if I want to drive around like a mad man (expose my personal information to potential identity thieves), flip my car (have my banking info exposed to a Nigerian prince), and leave be hind some flaming wreckage (have all my money stolen) on my own private road (personal computing hardware) I should be allowed to.

Doomsday device? Aha! Now the ball's in Farnsworth's court.

Well you could argue that re flashing it is specialized knowledge, and depending on the level of 'bricking' may require specialized software that the manufacturer uses. I've heard the term semi-bricked tossed around a bit in the development community so that might be a valid alternative terminology.

Still I don't think their use of the term bricked is wrong. If the device won't boot and needs to be reflashed before you can do anything with it, I'd qualify that as 'bricked'

So we're building a faster more powerful android now? I wonder if the end result will be an energy draining old man, or a cocky teenager who's destined to become part of a biological super weapon.

And Simpsons, well, sort of. Simpsons has been going downhill for a while too, but it's still better than 90% of the crap out there.

Gandalf the Grey + Gandalf the White + Monty Python and the Holy Grail's Black Knight + Benito Mussolini + The Blue Meanie + Cowboy Curtis + Jambi the Genie + Robocop + Terminator + Captain Kirk + Darth Vader + Lo Pan + Superman + Every Single Power Ranger + Bill S. Preston + Theodore Logan + Spock + The Rock + Doc Ock + Hulk Hogan > Chuck Norris

Really now? When have you ever known a publicly held company to prioritize development and long term results, over short term profits. Shareholders are far too concerned with making that profit number bigger for the next quarter to worry about what's coming down the pike in a couple years. Take solar panels as a prime example. A company that put commercial grade heating/energy panels on their office building could save huge amounts of money in energy/heating costs. Solar energy is essentially free, the maintenance requirements of solar panels minimal, and the life time of a solar array 20-40 years. However there is a not insignificant upfront cost to install a solar array. In most cases it would take a company 5 years to 'break even' compared to traditional energy sources. Thus, since the cost to put something like that in place on an office building is expensive, and would eat into a companies profits NOW, while only providing savings much later, most companies choose to use traditional heating/energy sources, because they're much cheaper NOW, even though the costs of them will only continue to add up.

Good to see the US government isn't the only ones.