Now that we know it's happening we can all join the class action lawsuit which will utterly bankrupt FTDI because what they are doing is illegal and they can be held liable for damages, which could easily run into the billions.

...when referring to connected/connectable devices as IoT dies.

"How is "OMG I can't afford to stream 8 hours of video a day any more" going to set society back 20 years?"

"Raise the price, they cut back and substitute another product (dvds..."

Which part of the 1990s did you miss?

Look - if there's one thing that humans need, it's one ass to kick. Some dude to be the top of the pyramid. A face of the effort. A single point for organization. President, CEO, Principal - it doesn't matter the organization, you need a person in charge. And a person to take the fall if things go wrong. What you want is someone organizing and coordinating all of the response to the epidemic (of three). You can call him a Czar, a Director, or whatever - you still want *somebody* in charge. And somebody to fire (and/or crucify in public) if things go wrong.

No, that's not leadership, it's damage control and/or preemptive excuses.

Do you remember the last time Obama declared that we "don't have a plan" because the conditions in Syria were complex and required addition time to evaluate the various options? Yeah, that honesty in leadership went over well, despite the fact that he made it clear that evaluating what was an exceptionally complex set of conditions could go horribly wrong if played incorrectly.

Ebola is just another disease without a (nearly guaranteed) cure. There are others out there, right now, which we know even less about (enterovirus, for example). This one is headline grabbing because you bleed out of your asshole. It's like "Ow, My Balls" but grosser for daytime shock newscasts. I mean, really - a facility takes on a patient with inadequate resources to do so, and fails. We're all somehow surprised.

Instead of stating that hospitals are, generally, bad places to isolate transmitted diseases and recommending facilities and transport set up for such work, we go into shit storm finger pointing mode and massive over-reaction. That's not leadership. That's damage control.

Wow, that sounded terribly elitist - sorry, it's been a long day. Seriously, though, we can debate all we want but human nature is going to push us to these irrational conclusions. I've learned to (mostly) ignore it and get on with life.

Look, every idiot out there wants to see a "response". Take anyone below the 90th percentile a they won't have the intellectual ability to process any probability less than 1 in 4. It's like the entire airline screening process - people feel safer if they see someone doing something. In reality it does little or no good, but until you figure out how to instantly make people smarter and less gullible you will get irrational panic and calls to "do something."

If they are violating the TOS, Facebook can simply ban them - no laws required. It's nice they've made a public display of calling them out, and it may suffice as a blanket "first warning" to all operations from the DEA.

And, of course, they could always take affirmative action against them by flagging DEA IP addresses if they should come up, notifying the user of the access violation, suspending the account until it is re-verified, and posting to the persons page that the page may have been accessed by the DEA. That's kicking sand in a bully's face, of course, but it could be done if they were serious about it.

So I'm going to install an app which is used to open a picture I don't know the origin of and which has been tampered with to append a second app, and if the first app opens the "picture" of choice it then installs another app which triggers a permission request (which they say they can work around).

I'd say this is implausible, but between porn and LOLcats there are going to be some unsuspecting idiots out there who might actually get caught.

I'm not sure the G3 should be held up as a poster child for good battery life. I have one, and when it's running full out it can chew through a battery. It's the downside of the hires screen. It's not bad, but under normal conditions I'll be at 35-40% after a full day of use, and if I'm going to be on it continuously I can burn through the battery in 5-6 hours. OTOH, it's got a replaceable battery, so there's never any real battery anxiety. I think the G2 was pretty good with battery life, though.

They should seriously try a Taichi*-like phone with a pair of screens. IPS/OLED on one side and eInk on the other. A B/W interface would work fine for 90% of the time, and the color screen would be there for camera ops, video, and the like. Apple put glass on two sides of a phone and it made for a pretty damned durable device, imho.

*Asus' dual screen laptop/tablet hybrid, with a screen on both sides of the lid (though both were IPS).

Power on a cell phone? Maybe to the rarified gamer on /. but to little Andrea or her grandmother all they want is a phone that doesn't stutter and plays music and videos. And they make up 90% of the market segment for smartphones. That's not to say having a fast phone isn't nice, especially since the UI designers seem to be determined to max the bling, requiring lots of processing for that stutter free experience.

And if you are worried about your phones power, then battery life matters even less when you can swap in a fresh battery in a matter of seconds. It matters a lot when a dead phone means an hour or two soak at a charging station before you can go anywhere, or so you can play your physics-charged games untethered. Apple was the company which has so famously cheered the "no extra batteries, no extra memory" mantra which has cause battery life anxiety over the past couple of years. It's the copycat part of Android I like the least. (okay, I like it as little as the fixed-memory condition)

I'm curious what calculations you would be doing on a smartphone which would take a noticeable amount of time on a regular basis. GPS is pretty intensive, though that's done in dedicated HW. Video playback and scaling is intensive, but that's done in dedicated HW. The only things you see on a regular basis, outside of games, are UI animations and JIT code compilation. Maybe long trip calculations in a mapping programs - those do take several seconds for trips of hundreds of miles - but those calculations are generally one once at the beginning when you notice, and then are optimized in the background (for traffic aware apps like Waze) with no apparent lag.

I owned every other iPhone from the 3G on. If I left it idle most of the time (take calls, check mail occasionally, get notifications), it could make it to the evening of the second day. I currently own an LG G3 as well, and under the same conditions it lasts almost the same length of time (last week I forgot to set it on the charger at night and when I went to bed the second night it was at 10%).

That's true of VoIP riding on both DSL and Cable internet connections (both wired and wireless) as well. I've had VoIP for my home and office line for almost 3 years, and in the beginning we definitely had issues with both quality and DTMF. I still have issues with DTMF occasionally, and echos and call quality (esp. outgoing) less frequently.