What they don't realize is that these qualities are exactly what a good driver isn't. Good drivers are defensive drivers who have a larger awareness of the roadway than just simply their selfish needs to get to point B as quickly a possible; good drivers tend to "share the road" with other motorists. Collisions are caused by conflicts in the roadway. Aggressive drivers who think they are good drivers cause more conflicts than defensive drivers. When you get two aggressive drivers causing a conflict at the same time, you have an accident. (I'm not saying that this is how all accidents happen, just preventable ones)

I agree with most of the points except the tendency to "share the road". Some do it to an extreme - driving 20% slower than the speed limit (or the speed everyone else is driving at), letting anyone get in front of him/her. This agitate drivers who normally would not be agitated, and causes a lot of passing, which in turn causes accidents.

Another example, some people insists on yielding even when they have the right-of-way. I always insist that they keep their right-of-way and go first.

We don't need people with a tendency to "share the road", or people who are polite and courteous.
Instead, we need people who understand right-of-way, who signal before switching lanes, who don't have a sense of entitlement in conflict with right-of-way ("WHY DON'T YOU LET ME CUT IN??" "Because according to the Law, you don't have the right to cut in, so wait!!"), who drive at a speed in line with everyone else on the road, and did I mention right-of-way???

Rules above courtesy, period.

If the carrier did't put in the radio code and SPL firmware updates, which are not necessary to fix the emergency call issue, the phone would not brick because the FastBoot is not part of normal OS updates.

According to a lot posted on forums, no, they're requiring *everyone* to upgrade (or for those who already have the fix on unsubsidised phones, downgrade).

Apparently they're not doing network resets anymore. I had to social engineer a bit to get mine done.

Maybe it's a collusion, or maybe it's simply because the market is not saturated yet, so the carriers are in no rush to compete for customers because there always are those who don't have a phone yet.

I suspect when the saturation gets higher (which is happening), customers will switch carriers more aggressively (which is also happening). The hope is that after a year or so, the prospect of having anything like a collusion would make less sense than going all out and compete - because they'll hopefully be running out of new customers that don't require much effort to entice.

Thanks for letting me know Rogers is no longer the GSM monopoly here. Here is some more background information and more of my opinions below.

The bug was, when GPS is turned on, calls to 911 can crash the phone. This bug was fixed in Android 1.6 and subsequent releases, which came out months ago. However, Rogers stated that there'd be no 1.6 updates to their customers (contrary to what Magic users in other countries can do).

Data for all Dream/Magic users went down on Sunday, and will remain down until the update is applied. The reason for data shut down is that, apart from shutting down GPS, which a carrier cannot do remotely, shutting down data is also a work-around for the 911 call issue - so, this way it's guaranteed that 911 calls will always succeed from the moment they activated the block, thus, covering their ass from potential lawsuits.

What's on the update:
1. The 911/GPS crash fix in the main firmware.
2. HTC's new Sense UI made for 1.5.
3. New radio firmware
4. New bootloader firmware

#1 is the only necessary part to fix the 911 issue. #2 is of dubious usefulness to users, especially if it requires a full backup, that Rogers claimed can be done with "3rd party software" - but the software that can fully back the phone up are all root-user-only. How ironic.

#3 and #4 are out of pure user control so customers can no longer unlock or root or run custom firmware. I have no complaint if it's for subsidised phones. However, unsubsidised phones (i.e. those we have paid a full price to buy) are also forced to update, even for people who run custom firmware that *already* has the 911 issue fixed.

So we're given 2 carrots (911 fix and Sense UI) and 2 big sticks (useless control freak firmware updates).

My opinion is, they could have rolled out a fix sooner - if a lone hacker can do it in his spare time, I'm sure a major wireless carrier can do it - the sooner the better, because there are people whose life might be at risk.

Instead, Rogers probably spent a lot of time testing the unnecessary parts of the fix (Radio firmware and Bootloader), and also testing their totally useless "add-ons" (branding, partner bookmarks, unremovable links to Rogers Shop, "Ringback", Ringtone purchases, etc.) - without wasting time testing these unnecessary parts that provide negative values to their customers, especially those using unsubsidised phones, I imagine they could have rolled out the fix sooner - even for only ONE day, and putting less of our lives in danger. In my opinion, it's putting profits higher than customer safety.

They say they cannot support rooted phones, but people are not asking for support. They're only asking to get the service they have paid for - "service" meaning usable bandwidth. Somehow these carriers or some backwards-thinking PHB inside still think they can provide something more than bandwidth, and forcing these extra "services" to unsubsidised phones somehow seem to have a priority even when customer safety is at stake.

Disclaimer: I'm an avid mobile phone user.

So it doesn't diverge from an extrapolation.

Have they taken into account there could be a *decrease* of tumour over the years due to better health care and lifestyles (at least in part of the world).

My view as, following the existing trend cannot imply "cell phones don't increase chances of brain cancer". Maybe it's just offset by decreases due to some other reasons.

Think about it this way. You know, given the Chinese obsession over the number 8, there must be some way to make better and more profitable uses of 8.8.8.8, so they have reserved that.

> Emulate Atari, Commodore 64, or NES games

My brother does it all the time. He's not a computer junkie by any measure.

> Connect to my Netscape dialup ISP

Had no problem doing this even in 2003.

> Run Internet Explorer

Great. It's a feature.

> Run Microsoft Office so I can update my resume

No problem doing this with Wine.

> Let me select a hundred songs from a window, and play them in order. Instead it tries to play all 100 at the same time?!?!?

Again, no problem doing this since 1998.

I think you need to give Ubuntu live CD a try.

I create a simple HTML page with a Javascript.

The HTML lets me input the site name, and a master password. And then the Javascript will generate a password for me.

The Javascript algorithm is simple, it involves some summing, modulos, lengths, and Base 36 conversion at the end to give me an alphanumeric password. So far works all the time. I can specify the length of the desired password. If a number is required and the password does not contain it, I simply append a "0" at the end.

You can also play with CSS to make your password field invisible, etc. The only caveat is you want to copy some junk to the clipboard afterward to erase the copied-and-pasted password.

I made the algorithm so simple I could reimplement it from scratch on an Excel spreadsheet with built-in functions, no VBA.

The key to create your own algorithm is that, you're trying to make a simple hash. Try to make it so that changing one character either in the site name or the master password would make the entire password look different, not just a single character at some corresponding position.

If you don't want to bother with your own algorithm, you can just md5sum a concatenation of the site name and master password. I don't like this method because the master password must either be stored in a file or typed in the command line, which will be in the command line history, which may get backed up by mistake if you're at work and don't clear your history quickly. Also, md5sum may not be available on every computer - my own algorithm is easy enough to be constructed from scratch in a minute or 2.

How about Javascript? AFAIK Safari on iPHone even supports Canvas. Wouldn't that create an alternate platform anyway?

> but that is due to poor laws rather than any inherent problem.

What if the corporations themselves have a hand in making the laws poor in the first place?

IMHO, that would make it an inherent problem. At least I think if corporations are stripped the right to making any political contributions or donations, we'd end up with better laws.

Another way around it, is to make all political contributions anonymous, such that there is no way the receiver would know who donated to them, and for what reason.

I completely agree with your point of view.

Therefore, the solution should not be vengeful actions on persons until evidence is gathered on the questionable conducts.

Instead, the only suitable course would be to put an end to the failed experiment called "corporate personhood". A corporation is by the laws of nature not the same as a person. Therefore what works on a human being (rights, responsibilities, awards, punishments) are totally meaningless to corporations, or at least have their very definitions entirely twisted.

If corporations are to be granted human-like rights, there should be a separate constitution for them so that laws made to enforce responsibilities and rights of corporations would be well-defined.

For example, currently corporations can donate to political courses just like individual persons can. This makes no sense because corporations' concern (mostly, profit maximization, either short term or long term) is entirely different - in fact a lot of the time are totally at odds with individual persons' concerns. Do corporations need to eat? No. Do they have a health that can deteriorate if they ingest something poisonous? No. Can they have children that they care a lot? No. Do they have concerns about privacy? Yes, but if you snoop on them like they do on you, it'll be labeled as industrial espionage.

There are numerous examples to show that corporations will do whatever it can when they can get away with it. It's just "corporate nature". What a wonderful world it'd be if these desires weren't usually in conflict with desires of real persons.