I've never had a keyboard phone fail

A beer spilled on my Treo 650, killing a couple of keys. I was able to buy a replacement keyboard off a random eBay seller and swap it in without much trouble (after which the phone was as good as new), but it was an annoyance all the same.

I suspect a newer touchscreen phone would've been less vulnerable to that kind of failure. Can't say that I've tested the theory yet, even though I usually have a beer in one hand and my phone in the other (to log the beer) whenever a beerfest is on.

Oh, sure, I'm just saying it would be funny. Revenge for all the epithets /.ers have hurled at him from this site. Not nearly so many since he retired, but you remember what it was like in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Bill Gates.

Replaces the front page of /. with a picture of him naked, rolling in money, pointing at you and laughing.

Oh, you're absolutely right. I'm definitely not saying it would be impossible to hide a backdoor in an open core design. Absolutely could. Same thing with FOSS...just see the Underhanded C Competition.

But today you could have (and probably do have...) explicit backdoors in silicon, besides debugging interfaces, and you'd never know. With an open core design, you'd have to hide it.

The argument against the physical keyboard is a designer's argument. We all know that today's design doesn't create more, it takes away, takes away, takes away. The physical keyboard annoyed these designers so they wanted to get rid of it entirely. This left only HTC as the last company to produce keyboards. Then, there was an internal power struggle in the company and the keyboard faction lost. And that's how we got to where we are today.

They can if they believe that performer will incite violence, which I believe was their reasoning here as the performer is from one of the gangs involved in the violence. The concert was a fund raiser for a kid killed in the getaway after another gang shot one of Keef's gang members.

I don't think that's unreasonable.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/16/148761812/this-american-life-retracts-mike-daiseys-apple-factory-story

A highly popular episode of This American Life in which monologuist Mike Daisey tells of the abuses at factories that make Apple products in China contained "significant fabrications," the show said today.

"We're horrified to have let something like this onto public radio," Ira Glass, the show's executive producer and host said in a blog post today. "Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards."

The 39-minute piece aired in January and TAL says after 888,000 downloads, it became its most popular podcast. The story is compelling: It tells of the awful working conditions of Chinese workers making shiny Apple products like iPhones and iPads at factories owned by a company called FoxConn, which also manufactures products for other electronics giants.

The piece essentially made Daisey Apple's chief critic and it also inspired a Change.org petition that collected more than 250,000 signatures demanding that Apple better the working conditions at the factories.

I disagree. Saying "people couldn't understand the hardware" is the same as people saying "open source software is irrelevant because you can't understand the software."

Some people can. I have an electrical engineering degree and specialized in computer architecture in grad school. I could understand it. And just like anything else...it's not that hard when you know what you're looking at.

Eh. When laying out silicon, you generally use libraries of simple parts you chain together. You make a register once, and then you replicate it each place you need a register. A TON of those transistors are cache, which is the same pattern repeating over and over again.

I'm not saying there's anyone who's looked at every transistor, but there's probably somebody who's looked at the layout of a cache cell, a register, an ALU, standard multiplexers, etc.

You check out as the real KGIII. Or a very good KGIII Markov chain text generator.

nope. Workers in Shenzhen are highly mobile and if they don't like something, they walk out and get another job across the street. Bosses moan they have to pay more and more to keep workers on the job. It sounds like you were a victim of the NPR fake story that said things were like that. Seriously, it was a total lie, the journalist just went there and told a story about what he wished were true instead of investigating the conditions on the ground. It was widely reported when it came out and we're going to be dealing with the fallout for years to come. Facts != narrative.

Skeptical != cynical.

The one publicly available edition of the state laws of Georgia is the unannotated version.

This lawsuit is about the annotations, not the code.

Illegally? How so?

I'm very hopeful this works. It's easy to be cynical, so I won't say "meh it's all bullshit!" Still, I won't be convinced until I see it provide thrust in a vacuum, away from Earth's magnetic field. It's still far, far too likely it's pushing off something terrestrial. So I'll give them a healthy "go, team, go!"

That said, quoth the article:

I don't know about that. He is a real professor at a real university, but he also has filed for a patent on a gravity generator, using a process no one has duplicated. Somebody who thinks they've got a gravity generator, but gosh just can't prove it to everybody else, is definitely somebody who may be "unconsciously influenced by a desire to see it work."