This becomes much more interesting in 2014 than it was when the DMCA was first passed. Back in those days, "mobile software" was typically shipped on a CD, and installed on a mobile device by way of a docking station. This is far less common now than it was at that time. Moreover, the "this product is yours" logic becomes murky with tablets and other similar tech. I ran into this recently myself. A friend of mine gave me a tablet. He got it in a BOGO sale last year at Verizon Wireless; said BOGO sale only required a one year contract. The contract was fulfilled, and he gave it to me as a gift. As a T-Mobile subscriber, I was hoping to put my SIM card into it and use my data plan. Despite Verizon having no further claim to ownership on the device, the tablet was SIM unlocked, but had the ability to manually add APNs disabled. Thus, they can legally claim "SIM unlocked", but without rooting and manually editing the build.prop file, I can't add an APN to actually use another carrier.

Even beyond that oddly specific example, many tablets are largely dependent on other services. Samsung phones, if wiped without some sort of 'blessing' from Samsung, go into a locked state that require either reflashing or login. This is all well and good, but is removing that restriction technically a DMCA violation? Is the existence of a technological barrier the correct means to determine ownership of a device? On the other hand, if one were to modify a phone's baseband in such a way that has it working on the wrong frequencies, or configured in order to make a mess of the cell tower, does the "it's my phone" argument still hold? If a device is symbiotically linked to online services (it's quite a pain to use an Android device without a Google account, or an iPhone without iCloud, in their default states), how does the use of those services come into play with regards to the expectations of functionality?

Meh, this is why I'm still a Windows Mobile fan at heart - for all its faults, it ACTED like the device belonged to the owner, not Microsoft.

Well, to be fair, it would probably take longer than that due to other constraints. On a mobile phone, it's not uncommon for my LTE signal to be faster than the write speed of my MicroSD card. No hard disk or SSD could write data that fast; even RAM would be a bit of a challenge to get to write all 800gbits in one second because the bus speeds on the motherboards don't usually shuffle data around that fast.

Yes, we're dealing with theoreticals here, but let's at least give credit to the fact that if it were possible that AT&T could get us 800gbits/sec, we'd be thanking the hardware companies for making sure that it took longer for us to hit the limit.

I'm only half-kidding. over the past year or two, there's been a nifty cottage industry of small storefronts that perform screen replacements on cell phones. If that number gets cut in half, things are going to get interesting for these store owners. Also, if the phones are not only more shatter resistant but scratch resistant as well, I wonder if it would (forgive the pun) make a dent in sales of Otterbox and other impact resistant cases. Not only would this impact Otter Products, but also many retailers, since cases tend to be a high-margin upsell, so their profits would slip.

Similarly, I wonder if the new glass will be reflected in Asurion premiums. If they're replacing statistically half the phones (I'll believe the "2x" number rather than the "10x" number for the sake of this post), shouldn't the premiums reflect this as the company is taking a lower risk? I know the general thinking is "zomg moar hookerz for the see-ee-ohes!!!111", but I generally don't know if there's some legislative edict that requires insurance premiums to reflect the risk being taken.

I'd love to be able to assist with this project. However, my issue is not advertising, but tracking. By using this method, one must, by definition, allow Google to see how many times you visit which sites, and how much time you spend on each.

Presently, I use FoolDNS and Ghostery, and intentionally allow ads through - I want websites to be able to get additional ad traffic. I'm perfectly okay with ads. Personally, I've got two rules: 1.) Don't track me, and 2.) Don't infect my computer with malware. I personally think that these are very reasonable requests to make.

Aunt Google will never make a system that doesn't involve tracking me. If the EFF or ACLU wants to make a system like this, I'll sign up tomorrow, NO problem. Google? I'll stick to giving them as little information as I can.

7.0.2 does support clustering - in theory. In practice, I've only got one device worth using as a server, so I haven't personally tested it out...but clustering is in its entry stages.

I will say though that OwnCloud is better at syncing phone-> server than BT Sync, as well as sharing files (just give 'em a URL). OwnCloud's shortcoming, at this time, is dealing with large quantities of files. It seems to throw up rather spectacularly if you're syncing a folder with north of 10,000 files, while BT Sync seems to happily do an order of magnitude higher.

One thing I do like observing from a distance is Pydio, which looks like it has some potential if it can streamline its desktop sync application.

I can't speak for the GP, but I do agree with him to a significant extent. Allow me to elaborate...

Dropbox/GDrive/1Drive charges a subscription to keep devices synchronized, as well as a slice of storage space in their datacenter. They pay for bandwidth and hard drives, and forward a chunk of that cost to me. This makes perfect sense. Their advantages are that they are keeping a copy of your data on their hard disks (in the event of a catastrophic failure on your end) and the fact that they don't require all devices to be online concurrently; each device pulls and pushes new stuff when it connects.

BT Sync's major advantage over these services is essentially the opposite: while devices need to be online concurrently, they don't require a centralized server, though BT Sync provides one for NAT traversal and similar. Even with their tracker and DHT services fully disabled, their bills are a small fraction of Dropbox and friends because they're not actually shuffling data around. But yes, even these cost money. Fine. It's still possible to sync over a LAN, or a slightly-configured WAN connection, without ever touching their servers.

I'm completely fine with them needing to charge for the software - it's a great utility that I really like. Neither the summary nor the article do a good job at explaining what would be the difference between the free and paid version. "Support" is a great answer, and I'm definitely in favor of that. However, is it *only* support? The nature of this program means that per-device licenses get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. I've got a few friends who sync to my FreeNAS. If it's $40/year/device, that's $360/year...and they only "support" I've ever needed involved Google searching and feature requests in the forums. $40/node for a perpetual license is a smidge steep, but I'd be somewhat-more-willing to pay it...but the annual price tag is on par with other services that offer storage and lots more bandwidth usage, making Sync a whole lot less competitive. The fact that it's a subscription cost with no clear benefit over simply keeping the older versions running, or using an alternative application, is a viable concern.

tl;dr: no one owes me anything for free, but the cost their looking for isn't matched with a good comparison against either their current free offering or competing products that have a known and significantly higher overhead.

Star Trek Voyager: Say what you will about the series as a whole (admittedly having problems whose root cause starts with the words "Brannon" and "Braga"), but Janeway generally had the respect of her crew, spoke to the other female characters about whatever the relevant topic was (engineering, Seven of Nine's character development, etc.), and ultimately got her crew home.

Mass Effect: FemShep does her thing the same way male Shepard does, by diplomacy, by 'bigger gun diplomacy', or both. She speaks to whoever she wants, however she wants, and gains the respect of virtually everyone she crosses paths with...ironically, most anti-Shepard sentiment is based upon her being a human, not her being a female.

Metroid: you kick butt the entire game and THEN find out that Samus is a girl.

Clearly not an exhausive list, but off the top of my head, there ARE examples of strong female protagonists that aren't vapid caricatures.

It's even more difficult than that. Movies like "Star Wars" lend themselves to video games, because it's "an expansive universe in which stuff happens, including the movie". Tie Fighter Wars was a fun game because you were flying a Tie Fighter, and shooting other ships. The movie tie-in was "the ship you were flying" and "the ship you were shooting". "Jedi Knight" was a fun game because you were using blasters, thermal detonators, and lightsabers in an FPS - they also kept the costumes, force powers, and good/bad guy entities, but you didn't actually play through anything that happened in the movies.

Movie-based games that don't involve an expansive universe like Star Wars or Star Trek are a bit stuck in that players need to be able to see things that happened in the movie, and somehow participate, while still advancing to the next movie scene that needs to be added. Thus, we end up with a very "on the rails" situation of leaving users to "do something" that will involve them doing what the protagonist did, but somehow making the player responsible for it, without making the game a movie itself. It doesn't need to be a Mass Effect decision tree, but it's the RARE gem of a game that's directly based on a movie (instead of tangentially so) that has a core gameplay worth playing.

Finally, movie-based games tend to happen more toward the lower end of the MPAA rating system than the higher end. It's amazingly difficult to make a Toy Story game that's fun to play, and is also easy for children to play, that doesn't simply end up being a platformer like every other children's game.

On the other hand, since movie tie-in games tend to find themselves more on the mobile side of things these days, we end up with games like "Temple Run: Brave" and "Angry Birds: Star Wars", which seem to do alright. They're certainly not new, but they don't have to justify a $40-$60 price tag, either.

OSX is its own vertical silo, so the hardware/software/driver/OS integration is completely seamless - it's the benefit of the Apple approach. Windows 8 kinda-sorta has this, but for the most part those gestures are handled by the Synaptics drivers and software, and are configured as such. In other words, Windows 8 will see a touchpad as a garden variety 2-button mouse. If you want pinch-zoom, swiping, and all that other crap that I disabled on my touchpad anyway (except edge scrolling), it's all a result of closed source Synaptic driver magic.

Jury nullification, in itself, isn't going to get you in trouble. Getting on a jury with an intent to nullify, and answering 'no' to a question like "do you have any beliefs that would make it difficult for you to make an unbiased decision?", however, is perjury...and you'll still need the 11 other Angry Men to agree that the defendant is 1.) guilty, but 2.) shouldn't be punished, and 3.) it's a good idea to give a 'not guilty' verdict regardless of what the evidence is.

On the other hand, the judge disregarding the jury's decision would be a nifty tidbit to bring up in appeals court. The jury can say whatever they want, which is why they exist, and why they can't be punished for a 'wrong' verdict. If the defense says "The jury gave a unanimous 'not guilty' verdict, but the judge decided that they were wrong, so he overruled them", there may be grounds for a retrial or something...but I too am not a lawyer.

It's not always that simple with Aunt Google. If you have logged into Gmail with your browser, you're logged into Google. If you close the tab without explicitly signing out, you're logged into Google, and when you go Maps next week, you'll be logged in still. Even if you sign out, Google still seems to keep enough of a session cookie lying around that it shows you the last person to log in, so you just need your password. Depending on how tight your tin foil hat is, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Google is still tracking the movements based on that session cookie, so it's entirely possible that the logic goes "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN display_map_data='false'", rather than "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN collect_map_data='false'".

On Android, it's even worse. Apparently, the folks at Google don't seem to have a concept of "I just want to buy apps, nothing more, nothing less". It's impossible to get apps from Google Play without tying the phone to an account. Fair enough...but that also logs you into Gmail, keeps your search history synced with your account, syncs your contacts, and keeps your avatar on Youtube. I generally don't use Google Maps, but I did do so once a few months ago. I didn't explicitly sign into it, nor was I prompted for it...but when I got curious two months later, I went back through my 'travel history', and I saw exactly the routes I took, and exactly the times I took them. There is *NO* reason why that kind of data collection shouldn't be explicitly opt-in. Finally, you wouldn't believe how naggy Android is if you don't have a Google account tied to it. I'd liken it to Clippy in a new outfit, but that's an insult to Clippy - at least Clippy was intended to provide actual assistance to users.

The only way I've been able to feel reasonably certain that Google isn't collecting this kind of data is to root my phone, gut my phone of all the Google apps except the Play Store and Play Services, and then use Xprivacy to deny access to contact/calendar/location/etc. data to both.

I pine for a viable alternative to Aunt Google....

At first I was going to mod this up, but then I thought a bit more about it. Let me give you a better example of what the grandparent was likely getting at:

RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.

Let's face it, I sincerely doubt that ANY slashdotter uses Realplayer on a regular basis. Most of us file it under "relics of the 90's" or "squandered tech opportunities" or something similar. Had RealNetworks won that case, I sincerely doubt anyone here would have actually purchased or used this application. However, this court case was one where many of us were hoping that RealNetworks would win - not for the amazing software or for the continued growth of RealNetworks, but for the court precedent. If RealNetworks won, it would be the first piece to fall of the problem of legislatively backed DRM. The war would continue, of course, but it would be a start.

I can't speak for the GP, but I concur with his sentiment. I don't think that Apple, Google, or these retailers have my best interest at heart. Not in the slightest. However, they all want the same thing: money. Apple seems generally better about not directly selling marketing data, but there's also no guarantee that they're not doing it under the table. Even without the tin foil hat, Apple may keep all that data in-house, and if iCloud security is any indication, that database security is questionable. Aunt Google, we all know, sells marketing data - they compete just as much with ClearChannel as they do with Microsoft - arguably more so. Retailers have their own science about how to psychologically manipulate you to buy stuff in their store. Apple may be the 'least offensive' in this lineup since their biggest crime is still a matter of speculation, but they're still no saint, even by corporate standards.

Thus, we have ourselves a bit of a conundrum. Even if you and I continue to use cash, the order invariably goes "opt-in, opt-out, alternatives disincentivized, alternatives socially unacceptable, alternatives impossible/illegal". Thus, the question becomes "who do we want blazing that trail?" That's the true question being asked by the GP, and unfortunately, I agree.

Because before he started Tesla, he started Paypal.

From the summary:

Therefore, we can reasonably assume that CurrentC will take off like wildfire.

Is that seriously a federal law now? "Real-time traffic information" has been available on the radio since my grandfather was driving. Waze, Google Maps, and virtually every other software-based GPS provides traffic information. Can we all agree that this is allowed to be filed under "completely useless legislation"?