Pingtime. While not as low-latency as the shotgun method, the ensuing packet flood caused by your method would certainly be more entertaining.

And, in the end, when Verizon and Comcast are the content distributors and Verizon wants to target Comcast users and Comcast wants to target Verizon users, they'll agree to exchange each others' traffic for free and what's old is new, again.

Transit is what you get when you accept packets at one end of your network and pass them through the other. Verizon's customers are endpoints on Verizon's network, making them part of Verizon's network for the purpose of determining who is selling transit and who is buying. Level 3, on the other hand, is accepting packets at one end and passing them out the other end, which is transit, which is what Level 3 provides to Verizon, not the other way around.

You know the Instagram app could do the image compression client-side, right? This would help there, as well, without costing Facebook a single extra CPU cycle.

Oh, no, I fully understood all the comments before yours, which were referring to Google finding vulnerabilities, but possibly *not* reporting on NSA-planted vulnerabilities. Those comments provided the context under which I interpreted your comment to be referring to the exclusive right to report on found vulnerabilities. Apparently, your comment was made out of context so, of course, the context in which it was taken was also incorrect.

That said, it's still not an exclusive right, as implied by the comment to which you were replying:

Unless Russia and China became part of the US and I just never heard about it.

It's not an exclusive right; what's stopping you, or anyone else, from doing the same thing, so you can be sure you're finding *all* the vulnerabilities?

Agreed! This is actually the first thing I tried to do in the developer preview, after having watched people interacting with the touch interface. I can see how they can *think* it would be less intuitive; I mean, how do you do 2- and 3-finger gestures with a single mouse cursor? But, then, how does a one-fingered man do them at all? He can still, at least, open apps, click buttons, and move stuff around, though. Yes, a single finger and the mouse cursor should behave identically; hell, make right-click behave like a 2-finger gesture (making a 2-finger tap or sequence of taps register as a right-click or sequence thereof) and do the same for middle-clicks, for users with a clickable scroll-wheel or a 3rd button.

I'm sure my lack of degree in UX design has me missing something important, here, but I can't see how this would degrade the interface *at all*, other than maybe forcing MS to reassign 2- and 3-finger taps to different functions than they currently have. I'm not sure that would be a bad thing, especially if the interface becomes more intuitive in the process.

So, because one of my examples is, in your eyes, invalid, despite all of my valid examples, my entire point is invalidated? By that logic, your use of an invalid (by way of disagreeing with itself) source invalidates your entire point and we should both shut up.

Falls under the Tablet Setup category if we're talking about iPads, or Device Setup if iPod or iPhone, since you want to nag about iDevices.. $29.99 and up, in either case.

It's been fun, but arguing with the same troll all night has gotten to be quite boring by now, so I'm going to go back to spending time with my wife now that I've cleared that up.

To be clear, there is no rage here. I'm actually finding your antics quite amusing, or I'd have moved on some time ago.

So, you've come around to agree with my initial position. Clearly, you disagreed at the onset of this debate, or there would have been no debate; my position has not changed.

Then what are you arguing? I never argued the 87% number that you posted, but that a statistically-significant number of those devices were upgraded by 3rd parties. Since the hard numbers for that simply do not exist, some extrapolation does need to be done to reach a reasonable conclusion. If you can explain how my conclusion, that enough people need help with their devices (and hell, we'll limit it specifically to upgrading their iOS devices, because what the hell, why not?) that it is profitable to train people to provide and market the service, is unreasonable, please do so. Furthermore, if you can explain how the way I arrived at that conclusion (that services exist just for this purpose, and that those services are, quite obviously, profitable) is unreasonable, I'm open to that, as well.

That said, I'm pretty sure you did, in fact, assert that iOS users upgrade their own devices, the the point of there not being a statistically significant subset of iOS users who do not. Ahh, yes, right here, where you say

And, as I've stated previously, an example is not a limitation, it's an example. Other examples exist, in posts farther up the thread, to illustrate this.

Ahh yes, I read the whole page. There is actually a 3rd set of numbers on that page; and no two sets agree. <sarcasm>Those are sure some strong and reliable numbers.</sarcasm> Do you see now, perhaps, why I'm questioning them? That said, I'd be willing to concede that first-day upgrades were, most likely, done by the device owner.

Where, in that post, do I say that these users aren't taking steps to maintain their (in this case) websites? Simply put, I don't; I do, however, recount an event that has become recurrent enough so as to be a pattern, therefore a statistic (I'd have to active count each interaction to generate a hard number from the data, but it is a statistic, nonetheless) and not simply anecdotal.

That isn't the claim I made you limited this to iOS devices, while I provided iPads and Android devices as examples; I also listed cars, guns, microwaves, and televisions in an post predating the iPad and Android post, which should have made it clear that I was not limiting the scope. And certainly, even if I were limiting the scope, I did not limit it to iOS devices. Again, that was your doing. As a secondary point, there is evidence out there of malware in the iOS store, but, due to the limitations Apple places on what you can do with an app once you've downloaded it, there's really no way you can audit to prove otherwise. I'll leave you to do your own research and draw your own conclusions, since it's clear that I won't be swaying your opinion. For the record, I love my iPad and MacBook Pro.

Likewise and likewise. You have an assertion, that 87% of iOS device users upgraded their own devices; business logic and the fact that GeekSquad and the like offer such upgrading services, at a cost, would seem to indicate otherwise. I'm in full agreement with the numbers you have posted; I only disagree with your interpretation of those numbers, and for good reason.