I usually compare my computer desktop to my physical desktop.

In this instance, I think it's quite close to compare my smartphone to my pocket.

Sure, if I was walking along and someone handed me a free album, I'd take it. I'd probably put it in my pocket if there was room. But I would also reserve the right to say "No thanks".

What Apple/U2 did is tantamount to chasing you down the street trying to shove their product into your pocket. Sorry, you have no right to do that and it's damn rude, free or not.

People don't have free downloads everywhere, and those that do may not want this crap - whether through playlist OCD of just not wanting to see something they have no interest in or, more likely, BECAUSE it was shoved into their pockets without any option.

If free stuff's so good, I'll ship you a bunch of "free" cardboard box to your house and fill it up (removing it is another issue entirely if we follow the Apple/U2 thing too closely!). Hey, it's free! Why don't you want it? You might like it. You might be a cardboard fanatic. If I offered you a bunch of free cardboard at some points in the year you might tear my arms off to get at it (e.g. moving house). If you'd asked for it, it'd be great. But instead some guy showed up, shoved a bunch of cardboard through your door and said "Hey, it's free, don't complain!".

It's not WHAT was done, it's HOW it was done.

In a zombie apocalypse, all movies and games depict their being some kind of "safe-house" where all the uninfected will gather together.

This, it seems to me, is the most stupid idea ever. Heading towards that is certain death. The zombies only need to be able to read, or get lucky, for it to be game over - they know where the highest concentration of juicy victims will be. And that concentration will increase as everyone piles to go there.

Sure, that's where the firepower might be concentrated too, but that's not good enough when one breaking through is enough to create a game-over scenario.

It seems to me that when everyone is piling towards the safehouse, a prudent course of action would be to stay still / run the other way, unless there's something that stops you doing so.

If I was a zombie, I know exactly where I'd head first.

Similarly, when everyone tries to flee a city, the first thing they do is jam the motorways (freeways). It seems quite stupid to even try if there are really that many people headed that way. All you'll do is trap your vehicle in a queue that you can't escape and then have to get out on foot.

Go the other way, go down the backstreets and side-alleys, stay off the main paths is surely the intelligent thing to do (besides using a bike or other fast transport in the first place).

Non-user-replaceable battery, and no SD expansion.

Stick it up your backside, Samsung, and stop emulating the WORST features of your competitors.

Claiming, or falling for, any argument that "open-source is secure" is a complete failure to understand. Security is relative, not absolute. To get this ass-backwards just makes you look like an idiot. Believing anyone who says ANYTHING "is secure" is utter stupidity (rather than "is more secure", for instance)

It's like saying "metal's secure". No it's not. I can walk around a sheet of metal just as easily as a pane of glass. However, a metal lock built to the same design as, say, a glass one is likely to be MORE secure.

As such, open-source is not "secure". It's considered to be "more" secure if everything else is equal.

Tell me, how many Windows-based Blu-Ray players can you buy in your local supermarket? Zero? Shocking. Why? Because Windows is not properly designed for embedded use at all really, certainly not until very recently. There were ATM's that run on XP Embedded, and there were a few cars that had Windows-based control systems (I remember a story of some ambassador being locked in a car by it).

As such, a complete install of Windows would be vast overkill and a huge attack surface for such things because it's just not ready for that. So it's not a fair comparison at all, as Windows is inherently "less secure" in such circumstances as it's just not designed to do that. However, Linux / open-source Blu-Ray players are "more" secure than many of the alternatives still, everything else being equal.

And why - because not only can you see if your player would be affected by the bugs but, by the same licence that grants you the ability to see the bug, you can CHANGE THE CODE if you so want. No waiting for vendor updates. One person in the world who knows how to code can look, see the problem, fix it, publicise it and therefore purge the world's devices of it.

Tell me, how many "security patches" do you think other commercial Blu-Ray players ever get given? Even the ones connected to the net 24/7 for their "extra media" functionlaity. There's even a facility to update Blu-Ray firmwares via buying new disks (not unlike the Wii games that bundle an update of the underlying OS before they'll let you play them). It's rarely used.

If you're going to pick arguments, have some vague understanding of what the real argument is, not some child on the Internet's poor re-stating of it.

Open-source is potentially MORE secure than closed-source, everything else being equal.

Those conditions and caveats make a HUGE difference to the intent, meaning, and truth of the statement.

Guess what, AES-128 isn't "secure" either. But it may be "more" secure than other algorithms, for example.

I couldn't do anything but reply (could not create a new post), there were only four of five comments when I did, and that was the one most off-topic.

Well, when they're only getting 20-30 comments on most stories now, of course they have to remove quite how few they get on each article from the front page listing too.

Someone had to tell me - It's there if you hover over the bar, but for some reason the "Change" button (which I've never used) is as grey and obvious as it ever was.

+1.

Damn, that's stupidly impossible to see on a whole range of monitors that I have here. I've complained to support, but I doubt they'll do anything.

It's like the Metro Start hover all over again - you have to play some kind of pixel-hunting adventure game the first time you do anything to work out where to go next.

I was LOOKING for it and couldn't find it. And why would you ever want the button to be the same colour as the bar it's in? It's there for a reason - to be pressed. Don't hide it from me.

Confirmed in the Vivaldi browser too, fresh session.

"Want to see Slashdot on your mobile device?" - No, I want it to fecking work on my beast of a PC, thanks.

No, I have Javascript enabled, have latest Chrome. It's just borked, and it only happened today (no updates to software between yesterday and today - same browser session still running in fact!) but the site now doesn't render at all nicely and it LOOKS deliberate, but I'm missing any kind of Post button at all.

Anybody else's Slashdot break today?

I've gone to this top-menu-bar thing, with no left gap at all, with no comment button at all (only Reply To This, sorry!) without warning.

Also, the content is trapped in the left-hand half of the page and won't stretch across.

Not only that, by on the same screen where I have "Ads Disabled" checked, I see an ad.

Slashdot, seriously, without a comment button, I'm gone for good this time.

Sorry, but I could live tomorrow on Linux.

I only use Windows because it was "for free" because of my employer buying me a laptop.

But for five years, I managed and supported a 90% Windows network with hundreds of devices primarily using a laptop which had LibreOffice, etc. installed.

OS - sorted.

Office suite - sorted (sorry, but it is. I used to get people envy my LibreOffice setup, as I could do everything they could do, and manage their same files they managed, and also do things like open ancient foreign formats that people emailled us still).

General apps - sorted.

Games - 1/3rd of my Steam account "just works" on Linux.

For years, I didn't have Windows or Office, as an IT professional supporting users on Windows and Office. Sure, it would have been nice to have a native tool occasionally, but for the odd things I needed (e.g. AD admin tools) it was always safer to just remote-desktop into a Windows machine, or use VM's (Samba tools just aren't there yet).

For everyday use, personal and business, I used Linux as the base OS and for the vast majority of tasks. Only when I was doing something very Windows-specific did I have to load up a Windows tool and always did it from a Linux machine.

Nearly one third of my 900+ games on Steam not enough for you?

Hell, the thing isn't even out yet and already it's prompted hundreds of developers to release their games on Linux too.

My thoughts.

If something had to be doing the maximum possible for its entire existence to get that far, chances are that's not the maximum possible, or we're measuring something wrong.

Not about cost. It's about value.

For that cost, for the price of a couple of drones you could put another couple of officers, stationed permanently to do just their job. And thereby free up whatever officers would also, presumably, need to be present to enable the original drones to operate too.

Simplify the choice - one drone, or two officers (maybe an officer and a half) on the ground doing the same job and NOTHING else - and the value motive really comes to the fore.

Law enforcement isn't about what it costs. Hence why the UK police are still sitting outside the Ecuadorian embassy at the moment waiting for Assange to move out of his personal prison to go to an official one. But it's about value. One high-profile "celebrity" openly-flouting the law is enough to encourage a whole spate of lawlessness in following suit, and you'll have every shoplifter and petty criminal claiming asylum in embassies to evade the law within a month.

So the cost motive would mean we'd leave him in there and forget about him because "he's too expensive to care about". And also that we wouldn't bother to deport illegals.

The value motive says we stay there to dissuade this kind of activity in future and make sure it doesn't cost more in the long run. And that illegals are deported at huge costs to prevent being seen as "weak".

Funny how changing one word (cost -> value) can change the whole intention of your post, isn't it?