Third party firmwares patch this. However it's the carriers and manufacturers who lock down bootloaders, void warranties, and refuse to allow a more open environment that refuse to make additional changes or updates. I've got a Note 2, it was updated by Samsung nearly a month before Verizon could come out with the update and that was delayed quite a bit from when Google released 4.4.2.

You can blame Google all you want, but it's an Open Source OS and patches can be backported by anyone. Sadly the only people interested in doing that have no power over the carriers and device manufacturers.

I don't think that intelligence (perceived or not) is equatable to a hobby.You can't get "more intelligent" and those few that are true blue geniuses didn't just start being a genius the way you or I go out and start stamp collection. It's a biological trait, not a sociological construct.

Your use of :D makes me question your claims. REAL intelligent people use asian emoticons xD.

Due process and speedy trial could be argued as including additional processing time due to a new records management system. Obviously a reasonable amount of time should be considered, I'd think that some additional time, especially for a violent crime, would not be considered unreasonable.

The performance reasoning may go away sometime soon. Microsoft has been working on a native compiler and has a preview for Windows Store apps. They've said they're bringing it to the full .NET platform. At which point you get all the performance of C++ with the benefits of a robust framework and a good language.

I don't see how it 's a conspiracy. I don't recall tax law as being akin to criminal law and thus "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't really apply. All they did was target political groups (both conservative and liberal according to TFA) and audited them. I truly don't understand the big deal over this -- personally I think ALL political non-profits should be audited several times a year to ensure they're following all financial laws.

You're absolutely right on that. They artificially lock out features that their higher-end non-gaming cards have (such as VT-d support, etc). Nvidia doesn't want YOU to use GTXs for computing or scientific applications...they want you to use cards like Tesla or Quaddro. In fact I bet the biggest difference between the GTX Titan Z and Telsa K40 is less price and more specific features. In fact when I looked the K40 was a bit pricier but was outranked in sheer performance (CUDA cores, pipelines, etc), but you can't virtualize GTX, it doesn't work with GRID computing, and a few other features.

Ol' Mother Russia should not forget that NASA pays them good monies to send our astronauts into space. Space X is slowly becoming a viable option and American commercialized companies will carry far more weight with NASA than Russia will. Putini should also strongly consider the effects of the US (and US's allies) in implementing trade sanctions and embargos on his nation and how quickly things can go south without a single bullet needing to be fired.

First of all I'm neither an authoritarian nor a hack. Name calling doesn't get you anywhere. Secondly I never said I agreed with the NSA's spying on American citizens, because I don't...but I'm also not one who says that it's acceptable to break a law to show another law has been broken. He didn't go through proper channels or even TRY to work within the system first. In fact he's recently came out and said he assumed a false identity and was trained to be a spy...this was never about him being a moral, upstanding, concerned citizen and I certainly wouldn't consider him morally superior to the NSA.

Lastly America is not a democracy. You and I don't have to agree to anything the government does, in fact the entire populace doesn't have to agree. We're a Republic and your elected representative is the one who has to agree or disagree -- which they did. Many times.

So before throwing out baseless insults and accusations you should take time to try and understand the situation in its entirety and not kneejerk into some reaction because "Gubmit bad, Snowden good".

Well he's already admitted fault...so in all aspects he is guilty.

It's more likely that the person who wrote the apple slashdot submission didn't apple understand the apple article and just apple wanted apple apple apple apple apple apple.

Your post is totally and completely irrelevant. This isn't about the content of the documents; it's about the fact that you cannot break the law to prove that someone else broke the law. It would be like me shooting a murderer, even if I had undeniable proof of the murder, without being authorized to do so by a court during his trial.

What Snowden did was wrong legally and ethically speaking (morally he is fine in what he did, but morality isn't everything). Regardless of anything and everything else he did break the law. He should stand for his crimes. Nothing else outside of that is relevant and everything else pertaining to the contents of the leak is a separate discussion.

That's assuming you get it as a child. If you don't catch chicken pox as a child and you don't get a vaccination for it you could catch it as an adult. It's much more severe as an adult and the chance of complications increases, even in healthy adults.

> If that's not competitive economics at work, I don't know what is.

It's more like AT&T being scared in a very specific market for a very specific subset of people. The majority of the rest of us have all of Crapcast, Frontier, Verizon, Cox or one of the other mid-level large size ones. Most of those don't even do FTTP and Frontier hates FTTP and their CEO is committed to selling DSL as "high speed" with a bandwidth of up to 7Mbps.

There really isn't much in the way of competition and what there is is very limited...almost as if to have juuussstt enough to ensure the FCC or other parts of the government aren't coming in to bust up a monopoly. In the unregulated ISP market there isn't competition...only the appearance of one to keep the peasants entertained.

Except ISPs are, generally speaking, not that regulated. It's the expense (which the government assists with) that is massive barrier to entry.