"Because the waiting list had grown so long, there would be at least a 7-week delay, Maynard says he was told by Joann Chang, a legal specialist in Apple's litigation group. It's unclear how long the process took, but it appears to have been at least four months."

The backlog is 7 weeks, the process takes at least four months. The article is poorly worded.

Absolutely not. Although I'lll grant that even a whisper of a hint is "absolute proof" of bad things around here, so long as it involves Apple.

This sounds to me more like they are hacking the encrypted key, not merely bypassing the encryption with a back door.

Actually, even in the summary, the relevant part is here:

"Because the waiting list had grown so long, there would be at least a 7-week delay, Maynard says he was told by Joann Chang, a legal specialist in Apple's litigation group. It's unclear how long the process took, but it appears to have been at least four months."

It says that the waiting list is 7 weeks, and the process takes four months. However, even so, the entire article is quite vague. The only thing that's not is that there's no way there's as back door in Apple's encryption. At the very least, you'll need more than vague claims to support such a case.

You mean to say you were able to run through the ten thousand numbers between 0000 and 9999? You must be a super-hacker!

Don't worry, this is not what is happening.

Are you sure the keys are burned in during manufacturing? When you remote wipe an iPhone, it wipes the key and the contents become inaccessible. If the key itself is hard coded in hardware, that's not exactly possible to do directly.

It would be, were that the case. But it's all but certainly not. There's no way Apple would put an actual back door into their products.

If you had read the article, you'd notice that the process takes four months. If they had a back door, it would take a few minutes. Also, had you read the article, you'd notice that Google will reset the password and send that to law enforcement.

But I'm sure that's not outrageous. Lol!

That's true, but only if there was an actual back door.

However, in all fairness, if you have proper evidence that Apple has a back door, I'll be right there with you. That would be wholly unacceptable.

Again, information most people don't have. On Windows, it's "click here to download Java" and on the Mac, it's a dialog box that pops up asking if you want to install it, and OS X takes care of the rest.

Broadly speaking, that is quite simply not true. But in terms of installing software from apt repositories, that's true. But not all distros have GUI repository software installed by default, and not all distros even use binary repositories. But more to the point, I was responding to the claim that a command line option was so much easier than doing it on Windows.

Absolutely false, sorry.

Fortunately, on Windows and the Mac, no one deals directly with the file anymore, it's all handled by the OS (on the Mac), and reasonably automated on Windows.

This is the same, lame, argument Linux proponents have been making for over a decade now, and it's no more true today than it was back then. Linux is not easier to use than Windows or OS X. The fact that Linux has such a paltry market share should clue you in to that.

And I like Linux. A lot. I can run it far better than I can run a Windows box (and I'm good with Windows as well). There are only a handful of things it does more easily for me than OS X does.

In a discussion about operating systems, and Linux in particular, if someone brings up "Chrome" and Android in a similar way, it's pretty damned obvious to all but the most aloof pedant what the writer is referring to.

I like how you seem to think that supports the notion that installing Java on Linux is easy.

Same as above, except s/Java on//.

Meaningless. On PCs, Linux is a distant (and I mean distant) third. It's all but entirely irrelevant.

I also find it amusing that you think Chrome and Android are "Linux". They run a modified Linux kernel, and beyond that the similarities increasingly fall apart.

And FYI, I like Linux. A lot. I run it from time to time, and if it weren't for OS X, it would be my primary OS.

Actually it's not. It's also all the knowledge that must be gained to get to that point as well.

On Windows, it's as simple as, "This program/website requires Java, click here.". On the Mac, it's even simpler.

This is both the main strength and main weakness of Linux, and why it will never be the Year of Linux on the Desktop until something like Ubuntu succeeds in hiding the complexity of Linux from the user.

I never said they were. I just said they are dorky. That doesn't preclude non-dorky ones either. But, regardless of how dweebish they look, they provide enough utility that people wear them in spite of how they look. This also doesn't preclude people finding "dorky" to be appealing, or even the right combo of personal style and industrial design where the headset could look cool (as lame as this is, I imagine the Beats by Dre bluetooth headphones would be fairly low on the dork scale).

Glass is even worse than that, quite possibly without a concomitant increase in utility.

Maybe that's how Glass will overcome its dorkiness barrier... By making everyone else look even dorkier. Then wearing Glass will actually look cool by comparison.

Genius!

Whereas before you didn't have to do anything.

Somehow, though, there are people here who will claim absolutely nothing has changed.

No, it's because it's a fucking stupid observation with no relevancy whatsoever.

Oh, I missed this part:

Tablets solve three gigantic problems (well, tablets solve two, the iPad solves three).

• 1. Provides 75-90% of the capabilities of a laptop with far less than 1/3 the bulk.
• 2. Far more convenient for most tasks. Call them the belittling 'lite' or 'consumption' tasks if you must, but they are things everyone does and quite enjoyable on a tablet.
• 3. (Primarily iPad at present, looking forward to improvements on Android at I/O) Provides a level of ease of use, security and privacy far beyond anything offered by notebooks.

I know the Slashdot retcon of technological history says that people only buy iPads because they are stupid or want to impress their friends, and not because they actually like them and find them useful. I wonder how that is supposed to explain over 19 million iPads sold last quarter. Must be a lot of dumb people with money, or something...

You'd think people here would be more likely to be familiar with the concept of Occam's Razor.