> I'm glad I don't have a visa...

So are we :-)

After 20 years in IT, having heard the same stories time and time again, I'm surprised so many people still fall for this age-old mock discussion. Isn't it obvious that platform manufacturers profit by limiting the access/content developers have to their systems?

That's why:
- Sun's Java VM was suddenly dropped from Windows
- Mono is not a Microsoft product
- MS wants an app store for Windows
- Silverlight exists
- jQuery exists
- Flash is depicted as bad boy on mobile
- Xbox exists instead of enabling Windows pc's for console use
- Document formats like .XSLX, .DOC and .ODS still need converter software
- no browser manufacturer sticks to the W3C recommendations and standards

Interoperability and compatibility is bad business. It's a Mexican stand-off or Cold War between the big corporations. Nobody wants to be the loser, so it's easier to stick to your guns than to move towards cooperation.

All the mock reasons that are given why certain things are 'bad" is just to keep the masses distracted. I'm disappointed in the huge number of hipster developers that swallow this shit for truth and don't see that the advancement of technology has been hugely disabled by this war mongering.

10 years ago the 'browser wars' took up at least 50% of development time on the projects I worked on as a web dev, and now in 2013 this is still a heavy burden on many IT budgets. Imagine what we could have build if everything worked properly. All the wasted time and money, and so many still fall for the farcical discussion of why one tech is better than another...

> at least let your try. Nowadays? Pffft.

This is a funny fallacy that I've seen happen before with advancing digital technology:

As a video editor in the 1990's, we used tape to process video. The video / audio signals were analog, which meant that drop-outs would immediately be visible or audible (cracking noises, horizontal gray flashes in the image). The image and sound would of course still be available (due to professional timebase correctors tapes good take a huge deal of flack before losing sync and produce rolling images etc.), but every disturbance of the signel would be immediately noticeable in the quality.

Halfway the 90's everything started going digital. This meant we still used tapes, but the tapes carried a digital signal. Digital signals can be recorded in such a fashion that they contain checksums. Using Solomon Reed encoding, this meant that physical disturbances on the tape could be overcome by reconstructing the missing data from the extra checksum data. Result: the smaller drop-outs would be penciled in 'under the hood' and out of view of the operators. "Wonderful!", you'd think. "Finally better quality for tapes!"

But the perception of the problem now shifted to cases were the damage of the tape was so bad that even SR couldn't handle it anymore. Think of cases where a courier packed live field recording taped in the side compartment of the car door, next to the speakers (magnetic speakers...). Every now and then a tape would come in so badly damaged that the signal was totally unusable for a couple of seconds and the digital VCRs would simply give up, fill the gaps of data with an entirely black screen and silence.

To the producers, this appeared as much more problematic, because in their perception a blacked out images was much worse than a bunch of static specks in the image. So they complained about the digital technology not being matured enough for broadcast quality processing.

What they didn't realize is that the part that blacked out, would of course have been filled with static noise had they used analog tape and be equally unusable. What they never saw, were the numerous smaller drop-outs that were now carefully rubbed away by the checksums.

Remembering the old Windows days (manually configuring IRQ slots, extended memory trouble) there were so many more crashes and other failures than I experience today, and I think that nowadays many smaller errors will already been repaired behind the scenes, without us realizing. Only when the system is forced to give up, it will BSD, but without knowing how many bullets one already dodged before that happens it might be perceived as errors more frequently resulting in an unrecoverable state (which, relatively may be true, but in absolute terms is not).

The way you describe it'll be hard to call your bet. How can one disprove this hasn't already happened?

Not the probing, but accessing the data through Acunetix. Because technically that is the moment when a law is broken. I'm not saying that I agree, but technically there was a law broken. That's why the school gets away with being dicks...

I guess the point is that no, you wouldn't be a criminal for notifying people of the missing wall, but you technically would be if you then stepped through the wall and took some of the money inside the bank to show that the wall was still missing. Which in your analogy would be what he did when he used the Acunetix software.

Not that I ethically find it to be a crime, especially as the school admits there was clearly no intent to harm, but if you want to make an accurate analogy he did more than just pointing out.

Best way to solve this weird situation is that IT departments stop being dicks about their policies and legislation should be less severe imho.

LOL I meant Flex, sorry

Try Flash

Or gently shaking his head in confirmation.

Sounds very interesting, but unless you can link to transcripts or other documentation, referring to "court cases" and "intelligence operations" simply counts as weasel words.

That's probably because the hot metrosexual chicks gently suck eachother's fingers after eating cheetos

You should have said: I didn't see the link

two identical twins?

I read that as 'more powerful' (as in memory, cpu speed, gpu capacity etc.)...

Smart phone apps don't kill people, reckless drivers kill people.