Heck, can't VLC play damn near everything already? I half expect you could open a spreadsheet in VLC and have it carry a tune.

"Hey, we found Pandora's Box! Let's crack that sucker open!"

The GOP-controlled Congress will soon be zeroing-out the budget for the FCC to do any enforcement on this ruling. They do control the purse-strings, but it is the most cowardly, corporate-whore, Machiavellian play imaginable. Nothing will change and consumers will pay ever more to monopolies.

.... solution is more registration?

Solution is to switch them to Gemalto SIMs.

Because they already have major data centers in the US and want more of them closer to their customers in Europe?

Nope. These placements are being offered as bribe money in kind to lessen or totally eliminate the fines Apple should have to pay for playing a tax evasion shell game with their massive global profits.

If you really think these being placed in Ireland (Double Irish) and the Netherlands (Dutch Sandwich) just by sheer accident, you may be one of the most Pollyannaish fanboys queuing in front of the Chrystal Cubic Cathedral.

Lenovo is about to be wiped from the marketplace as a purchase to never make again.

Please tell me some academics / F/OSS folk / people who truly believe in rights and privacies are working on a clean-sheet, Security is Job One replacement for the now nearly useless sieve well call the Internet.

If they were cleaned per the Manufacturer's specs (which feels a little like the fox cleaning the hen house) then said company should be fined into oblivion and all involved with writing and approving said procedures held in gaol for quite some time.

But America, so jack shit will happen.

I used to think Canadians - even those out in the forsaken, endless prairies - were far more wise and progressive than us USians, but no. How long has GOP-backed and advised Harper been in power now? What happened? Was it tar sand greed? Pure apathy? The assumption they were all as 'funny' as Laughable Bublefuck Rob Ford?

Quite sad; I thought the Canadians were better than, well, just about everybody, but now no different than the rest of the Right-Wing Police State, Might Makes Right, Western world. [le sigh]

But consider this: the Chinese eat ducks. #ToServeMan

We need a sort of Kickstarter for consumer goods, such as "Okay, we want a tv / laptop / cell phone with these agreed-upon specs and we get all access to firmware / bios / baseband, etc." Once an effective number of folks 'buy-in", the group takes their big wad of sweaty cash to a Taiwanese contract manufacturer and a run of the product is made. AFTER the product and code is inspected for any corporate / governmental tampering, the product is shipped (with an option for the purchasers to pick it up directly to avoid the NSA shipping intercepts).

The one problem with industrial hard chrome plating (not the pretty, shiny, ornamental chrome in the summary which is rather useless) is that it has micro cracks that are inherent to the plating process. So unless you put a un-cracked corrosion-proof substrate (such as electroless nickel) on first, there will be plenty of paths thru the chrome cracks to begin corroding the base metal. Given the common presence of sour gas (high free hydrogen content), the oil patch long ago switched to non-carbon steels and plating to alloys, stainless, and flame-sprayed metal coatings (nickel, columbium, etc.) that do not feature microcracks (aka Polished Rod).

Stupidity is defined as mere elected officials thinking they have real control of the organs of state security. It wasn't true in the Soviets, it isn't true in the US.

I'd be much more thrilled if CDMA was banned, or rather the hardware mandated to be SIM-based, rather than incorporating the entire handset, ala Verizon.

As a species, we've reached our peak. But it's all down hill from here, dragged back down into the Darwinian muck by greed, ignorance, the lust for power regardless of consequence, racist nationalism, misogyny, religious-driven intolerance and murder...

It was a nice try. Perhaps the cockroaches or yeast will succeed where we failed.