Just speaking as someone who's PI is in the Sony dump, I have not yet been killed.

However, I'll be under fraud alert for the next three years, Nigerian princes call my cell about twice a day, and someone has already tried, and fortunately failed, to open a student loan in my name. (No, I don't get it either.)

I mean it's not awful, it's not like I slept with a video game reviewer or anything. But it's been a huge hassle.

I'm not sure Tyson is an atheist.

I may decide that I have (iTunes,Amazon,BeatPort) music but you have no business deciding, or worse forcing, those ditinguishing attributes for me.

Where have you been the last five years? The war was fought and consumers of your ilk have lost utterly. I mean you may want your phone or your computer to work this way but you're a vanishing minority. Only dorks prioritize app choice over content.

Can I store an arbitrary file on an iOS device yet? What if I want to download an MP3 using Safari or Chrome and play it with the native iOS music player? Can arbitrary apps share data without specific developer support yet?

How would you share data between two apps if both developers didn't support that?

Generally speaking, if you're a developer, you can vend whatever files you want as long as you and the recipient agree on type identifiers, either copying or by sharing a destructible reference. You can't save an arbitrary file to an arbitrary location because the apps are sandboxed, as far as they can tell they're the only thing running on the phone. It's a little more careful than Android but it's meant to be part of a defense in depth.

Everything you mention is fine but I'm not sure there's some killer user story or use case that justifies it in light of the security issues. I don't think any 3rd party app developer should be able to see any of your file system ever, not on your phone. It's just too dangerous, the thing is always on the network, it knows where you live and you can't unplug it.

Visible global filesystem on a phone always seemed like a gee-whiz feature that wasn't really justified. Frankly I think the visible global filesystem on personal computers isn't really justified, considering how many people just dump everything into ~/Documents and most productivity apps have their own bespoke document browser/organizer.

Honestly I just spent about 30 minutes trying to find a website where I could even try to download an MP3, usually everything I'd want to listen to is in the podcasting app (or the site the content is on just has an app). I used to have GoodReader, which you'd launch from a URL in Safari and it'd just download anything and play it, but it sorta became unnecessary after a certain point. I'm not sure what the point of being able to play it in the "native music player" is. What app you play content with shouldn't be important, all the matters is that the desired content is available by a convenient and appropriate modality. iOS doesn't have a "native music player," it has iTunes for music in iTunes, Podcasts for Podcasts, and then Beats and Amazon Music and Spotify and everything else for their music.

One app to play all your music is 1990s thinking; modern apps are meant to brand content and service experiences, instead of them all launching the "native music player" they all call the same native sound API. The mechanics of how the media moves across the internet or across the filesystem is invisible to the user.

-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K

"Oh, I don't know" -- Joel Robinson.

The IBM PC was an open platform, not an Open platform. :)

Similarly Microsoft's platform was "open," but only relatively, when compared to IBM. Meanwhile Linux is open and Open and really only excels at niches.

The conventional wisdom is that the Wintel platform prevailed because the hardware was cheaper; Windows and Mac OS had about the same level of openness from the perspective of third-party developers.

Google runs Android as an Open OS but most of the units sold are actually running closed-source code, because the OEMs can license their way out of being Open. Which is why Cyanogen exists.

I respectfully submit that Android is substantially more functional with its core set of applications than iOS.

A good case can be made that an OHA Android phone is a better value proposition for a vanilla end user than an iOS iPhone. If you're alright with your phone being a dumb terminal for Google services and $SOCIAL_NETWORK_X, you're better off.

If you're a third party developer like Microsoft though, it's a much worse value proposition to target the platform, because Google aggressively crowds them out of providing features, and their store/monetization model doesn't produce as much income. If you're somebody like Microsoft, Apple is kindof easier to work with, since Apple isn't trying to clone Onenote and constantly dragging the users to their clone through defaults and platform integration. Also if Microsoft wants to charge $5 for an app or an IAP, on iOS there's a good chance they'll actually get the sale. Ads just don't generate the revenue sales do.

The user value proposition starts to break down if the end user isn't vanilla, and actually kinda wants access to the kinds of high-quality 3rd party apps that tend to show up on iOS first or exclusively. Or they're privacy conscious, or would just prefer not use Google services for everything.

Android can share data freely among applications and is much less picky about data formats, so there's no need to resort to some of the weird fuckery or workarounds iOS users have to deal with to bend, fold or mutilate their needs into something that iOS can actually do.

I think you may be working with old information.

Buddhism generally doesn't assert the existence of the supernatural, not does Taoism. Many devotees of these are hold syncretic beliefs that incorporate supernatural elements, though.

Certain tenets of Scientology are supernatural, most saliently, the claim of the existence of "thetans."

I dunno, the original claim was pretty general in nature and equally unsupported.

The actual "evidence" question is actually sorta beside the point. Arendt specifically in Origins of Totalitarianism discussed how the Nazis would systematically treat actual criminals better than political prisoners or random arrestees, because in the end the message they were trying to send was that they could destroy you whenever they wanted, and it didn't really matter if you'd done anything wrong. The only way you could be safe is by enthusiastically cooperating, and even then it was never really enough.

At this point we would make the distinction between a merely authoritarian regime and a more "bloodthirsty" thing. The first would be like, say, Morsi's Egypt or Iran, where they arrest people for opposing the state. The latter would be more like North Korea, where they arrest people at random wether they oppose the state or not, because the terror is an end itself.

Miller was writing about the Hollywood Blacklist in the end, but it's an important example of authoritarianism of the first kind. Joe McCarthy knew that Dalton Trumbo and Clifford Odets hung out, that they were fellow travelers with more committed Communists and even soviet agents, he had all the evidence he needed to prove association. But the logic of the 50s Red Scare wasn't driven by the desire to find Communist agents as much as it was to get "suspect" individuals to turn over their friends, so that even though there was no evidence of actual wrongdoing, there were simply so many people named that spectre of conspiracy took on a life all its own, and the spectacle of people evading the "justice" of HUAAC or the senate, of "hiding" their friends and associations, would cast disrepute on leftism in general. They arrest you to make you look guilty, and then they make you turn States Evidence to buy back your respectability.

Or to put it another way -- Says Who?

Hannah Arendt, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arthur Miller... read something, kiddo.

Your choices are to lie convincingly or be taken out and shot.

This is often how the hypothetical is phrased but it almost never works out in just this way. The usual options are:

Door number 1: Tell the truth and accept those consequences.

Door number 2: Deny your involvement. The people arresting you usually have physical evidence of your association though, so in order to prove your loyalty they demand you become an informer and you have to turn over your friends. That's what's required to make your lie "convincing." Then when the revolution comes you're tarred a "collaborator."

Lying will save your hide but often at the cost of your cause. The "oppressive, murderous dictatorships" we have experience with won't settle for someone who's merely innocent, regardless of wether that innocence is the truth or a lie.

Worked for Kirk when he encountered the Kobayashi Maru.

Sorry this was me, I didn't realize I wasn't logged in:

The round LG is about $50 cheaper and it looks like a nice $100 watch. Which is problematic since it costs $300.

I think when it comes to pricing these wearable things out, Apple has the right idea in that the functionality is there but it's redundant to the value proposition. The value of the watch is its value as jewlery. That it is useful is nice but even a cheap smart watch is still going to cost over $200, and for that if better get something that looks as good as a $200 chronograph.

1) Sometimes I need a timecode stopwatch, and it's distracting to use the phone in screenings.

2) I do like the idea of discreet notifications.

3) I usually wear a Fossil on dates and when I meet clients but, typically for a man's watch, it's very blocky and it doesn't really work under a sport jacket or french cuffs, which I like to wear. Something like an Apple Watch has a cleaner look, but it's still a smartwatch so it projects sophistication. It's really the only piece of jewelry a man can pull off in professional situations, except for maybe cufflinks and a wedding band.

Understand, this thing is being sold primarily as jewelry. It's a kewl smartwatch too, but the smartwatch features are necessary, not sufficient.

Let's punish people who are good at something! Diversity!

All it really does is shift the external negotiation, between company and employee, to an internal negotiation, with HR and upper management on one side (who want people cheap), and the staff and project managers (who want the best people).

Ability to negotiate, or rather, communicate your needs in a persuasive way, is sortof a core competence, everybody who wants to be successful and progress in their career either needs to have it or at least needs to have confidence in the process.

And StartCom has been handing out S/MIME certificates without charge.

I probably wouldn't be interested in a CA that gave me my cert, I'd rather have one that signed one I generated :)