That is what confuses people. An iphone user sends a text to a phone number so they expect it to go to a phone number but that is not what happens by default.

The default behaviour once your phone number is hijacked by imessage is for the iphone to look up your phone number to find the apple account it is attached to then route the message to ANY device associated with that account.

As a result, if the recipient has any device associated with their apple account and they do not remove their phone number from their apple account imessage will NOT fall back to sms...it will consider the message sent!

Some examples of the confusion of crapple iMESSage default behaviour for the poor ex iphone users I know:

* wife replaced iphone with a Note 3. 3 days later she turned on her ipad and several hijacked texts sent to her phone number showed up there...on her wifi only device

* my niece upgraded from ipgone 3gs to a galaxy and gave the old deactivated/no-sim iphone to her son as a toy after wiping it. For the next few days her son was getting many of the texts that were supposed to go to her phone number

* A coworker received a blackberry z10 to replace an iphone and he started getting texts on his macbook air.

This is maddening insane default behaviour. Apple is supposed to be intuitive and this is the opposite. No sane person would expect to have a text sent to a phone number to get sent to some other random device that has no phone connection when they switch phones but that is what happens. Imessage is not as smart, simple or as sensible as you suggest it is.

We purged our household of iphones last year and went through this little "eff you" crapple experince. Nobody tells you that apple hijacks your sms permanently by default and it must be manually taken back if you switch platforms.

After 3 days of missing texts the wife turned on her ipad to watch some netflix and saw all these texts. After going on a treasure hunt we figured out how to free iphone-source texts from the imessage prison via the apple website as the old iphone was gone.

Apple makes this harder to find than it should be but it isn't too hard to do. You don't have to tell all your friends who still have iphones to mess with their settings but you may have to wait a day or two for the de-registration to propigate to all your friends iphones--the imessage system seems to work like DNS.

You are wrong. Quebec is not officially recognised as a distinct society since neither the Meech Lake nor the charlottown accords were passed into law. The only parliamentary motion that did pass specifically uses the word NATION.

Interesting...I prefer systemd over upstart and I know many others that do as well. So I know it is BS to day systemd is almost universally despised. At worst it is seen as the least of all evils.

It anything the debate is over retaining init.d scripts and systemd as upstart is somewhat of a single vendor stepchild. The main legitimate concern with systemd is its Linux-only implementation complicating the porting of packages to BSD and HURD based systems. The other might be a matter of taste but still worthy of debate--that systemd does not honour the 'Unix way' sufficiently.

...that pressing the super key (aka windows key) and typing is not an innovation exclusive to windows 7 don't you?

IIRC win8 retains that ability though I don't use that os. My regular desktop is GNOME 3 and it works just like that too.

The thing with Win8 and GNOME3 is that there is so much angst over what amounts to the introduction of a full screen launcher to replace a stale but familiar cascading drop down menu launcher. In both cases once you launch the same old apps all that crap is out of sight.

Of the two however GNOME 3 is clearly superior in my experience to WIN8. Microsoft went even far beyond GNOME in hiding functionality--at least GNOME retained their equivalent of a start button. Also windows is a confusing mess because it presents the launcher as the application environment...but just for metro apps. Then there is still the old desktop...but without a visible launcher (until 8.1 anyways).

At least in GNOME 3 there is still a clear division...it is clear when you are on the desktop running apps and when you are in the launcher/Switcher. It still hides a bit too much config but it is evolving faster than windows and plugins are quite useful.

In any case I spend most of my time in a handful of apps, text editor and terminal and just tab between them so the desktop environment makes little difference to me.

The one thing that actually surprised me was how much faster beginners and casual users caught onto GNOME than win8. The latter had them mystified, especially coming from XP. Despite being different GNOME was much more intuitive for the most part. Both, however, caused power users much frustration because of their instinctive desire to tweak their environment. Casual users have no such compulsion...their focus is the apps not the environment they are hosted in, and if apps are easy to find and launch that is all that matters.

The OpenBSD project is headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. The electrical grid is provincially regulated but owned and operated primarily by a number of different investor owned corporations.

Alberta residents can choose from multiple distribution companies-in Calgary Enmax is most common. Further to that you can lock in on a contract rate where the price per kwh is constant throughout, or you can avoid a commitment and pay a spot price called the "regulated rate option".

If you pick R.R.O. then it is really no choice since all Providers offer about the same price. Contract rates vary more between Providers but often the lowest contract rate at a given time can be more expensive due to long contract terms and bigger exit penalties.

Overall though the choices do not significantly reduce energy cost. The more effective solution is to reduce consumption. If the bill is too large upgrade to more efficient modern hardware where possible and do load shedding of sorts, powering off certain architecture machines and scheduling builds of different architectures on alternating days and off peak hours.

20k seems steep to me but maybe not if it is residential rates...the picture looks like it might be in Theo's basement...

Yes, fire him but not because of incompetence in his surveillance ability. He is right that he needs metadata to do his spying, but the solution he proposes--to work with big tech to figure out how to spy with less metadata--is wrong.

The solution is to do less spying period. Put intelligence back into intelligence and target resources better, starting specific and expanding scope instead of casting the biggest net and picking through that.

Fire him and replace him with a director that does intelligence not merely surveillance. Same goes with people who handle air travel security.

Yes Sony and MSFT could do exactly that...not likely directly but I could see subsidiaries of each doing that. It has happened before. Atari made games for coleco and vice versa and Mattel ported some of their intellivision games to atari and vice versa in the 1980s at the height of their business. It could happen again through game publishing subsidiaries easily and in fact is a very likely future scenario.

...in high tech. That is the simplest explanation.

MSFT already makes more from android through its patent racketeering operation than from the sale of lumias. Nokia would have an advantage using android as it would not have to pay that protection money to a third party. MSFT can embrace and extend android like anyone else and it is a hedge against any possibility of failure for windows phone though I think the chances of winphone failing are diminishing over time.

This is just how business works. Apple made the II using a CPU from MOS which was a subsidiary of arch rival Commodore. Today the vast majority of android handhelds use ARM architecture which comes from a company who's largest shareholder is Apple and Apples biggest enemy has been its biggest component supplier in mobile devices over the years.

It is that simple. High tech companies are like the local yokels from Deliverance.

FAIRNESS matters.

The oil inudstry where I am kills less birds than the wind farms in the area, and the amount killed by wind farms is already quite small, yet the oil industry is required by law to be fully liable for all bird deaths and must, at their own expense, install countermeadures to drive birds away from hazardous areas (scarecrows, air cannons, supersonic noise makers, etc). Even if only a few dozen birds die in a year, and even though none are endangered they are rightly held fully accountable in that respect, as are all industrial operations in my juristiction.

So, tell me why being "carbon neutral" gives a wind farm a free pass to kill animals and destroy habitat?

...you just need to be aware of the bias. All articles have bias to some degree; writing completely without bias cannot effectively convey ideas--lack of bias reduces an article of writing to nothing but an enumeration of facts. Bias is required to support arguments and formulate ideas, or else you are just making the worlds most boring encyclopaedia.

Thus, it is best to actively seek out and focus on biased articles and apply critical thinking--and look at articles biased on BOTH sides. So, don't b!tch about the bias in an article being against your personal views, go out and seek another article biased towards the opposite side of the argument and evaluate each argument on its merits.

How many birds are killed by coal pollution might be part of a valid counter-argument but it does not invalidate the fact that wind tubines kill eagles and other birds, nor the fact that the government is giving the industry preferrential treatment. Where I live Oil Sands is a major source of energy, and upgrader plants (particularly the oldest ones) have tailings ponds. When countermeasures fail and several dozen birds land on the toxic tailings and die the incident is widely reported and the oil companies are held to account, paying thousands per bird found. If they are held fully liable and are subject to mandated full disclosure of all animal fatalities resulting from their operations then how come wind farms get a free pass?

Wind makes no CO2 and is renewable and that is good, but killing wildlife and destroying habitat is bad no matter who does it, and everyone who does it should be responsible for it. We don't give drivers of hybrid cars a free pass if they are at fault in an accident or let them pour their used oil into a storm drain because their cars have a smaller carbon footprint--that would be asinine! Just because an energy source is renewable doesn't mean it has no impact on the environment (just look at how devestating renewable hydroelectric power has been to the environment in China as an example). ALL energy development must be done sustainably throughout the lifecycle. You could never get a nuclear plant built adjacent to a residential neigbourhood, you couldn't get Keystone XL bulit across an aquifer and you wouldn't give BP a break on the cleanup costs of Deepwater Horizon. You shouldn't give a wind farm of hundreds of turbines covering hundreds of acres a free pass on killing birds, destroying habitats and affecting the health of nearby residents just because it is "carbon free".

...for about five desktop computers.

Hey, wise men have said dumber things...

Its not like Apple is a very good corporate citizen either...they've done their own affair share of stealing ideas too.

...in the Athabasca region where the Canadian oil sands are...literally the only people not employed there are not employable due to disability or other personal issues...indeed many workers live all over Canada and fly in for their shifts and stay in company work camps

Automating these trucks would free up workers for other much needed labour elsewhere plus make operations safer and more efficient.

We should do k to EUROPE?

Yeah, those big governments in places like Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal have been stellar examples of responsible and capable government. Perhaps you should take your own advice about the news.

Big intrusive government that actually works well in Europe has been the exception not the rule.