Contractual, no, but there are practical considerations that make that difficult. The Android market gives you very little space to describe your app as it is; I doubt you could fit an entire compatibility list in there. And not many users will copy a link out of a marketplace description and open the Browser to see what a longer list of compatibility notes.

I think the problem is that most people are reading this as "apps are sending off the UDID" and going "eh, who cares" because the UDID doesn't have any real inherent useful meaning outside of iOS development provisioning. Even when they read that you can associate the UDID with a real name somehow (as in the Amazon and CBS apps), they still see UDID isn't really useful data. All you know is "this hexadecimal value -- which, for all practical purposes, may as well be random -- is Joe Public." If Amazon generated a blob of random binary data and used that to identify that device to the server instead of the UDID, but changed no other part of their protocol, you'd still be able to associate the random blob of data with Joe Public.

Where this becomes a privacy concern is that since multiple services take the shortcut of using the UDID as their tracking token, if you had, say, both Amazon's tracking data and CBS's tracking data, you could take Amazon's realname data and combine it with the CBS program's demographic data, and have a bigger, badder demographic database. Because they both use the UDID as their tracking token, there's a shared bit of data you can use to combine those sorts of tracking databases. But that's not really presented as the problem here, so most people just think "why should I care that the UDID is being sent? Thats no different than any other random data-tracking cookie."

In contrast, I think why people reacted more vehemently to the Android article was that the TaintDroid folks reported that Android apps were not merely using device identifiers as tracking tokens, but were also reporting back the actual phone number, or in some cases the IMSI. While I don't care much about my UDID being sent off as a tracking token -- it's not meaningful data in and of itself -- I am going to be a lot more disturbed if I find some app is sending my cellular subscriber data to a server without a damned good reason, regardless of what data they're tracking.

That said, the growing popularity of smartphones means that privacy and malware/trojan prevention on mobile platforms /is/ going to become more and more of a real concern, I think. There are already security suites available for them, like Android Firewall on Android, or FirewallIP on iOS; they all require rooting/jailbreaking to use, but they're there as an option. But because of how much computing people do on their mobile devices, I think eventually we're going to see -- of necessity -- these sort of privacy/security tools for mobile platforms becoming more common and mainstream, whether Apple and Google open up the platform to allow third-party security tools or whether they start providing a higher level of security themselves, /something/ is going to change in time.

I just downloaded 3 years of my savings account information on ingdirect to test. They offered it in CSV and two other formats (like Quicken probably, I forget specifically and already closed that tab out).

In fairness, the Lord of the Rings films were basically just one single unbelievably long movie, which happened to be broken into thirds for semi-sane human consumption.

Ah, then we can truly share the experience of those ancient Roman LINVX admins. :P

janus:~% perl --version

This is perl, vV.XI.I built for iCCCLXXXVI-linvx-thread-multi
(With II registered patches, see perl -V for more detail)

It's not quite /that/ bad; they're in a specific area (along the fence line), and so not terribly intrusive for anything I'm likely to do. But they /are/ just on the inside of my fence line, instead of out in the little 'private lane' easement. (Which is, admittedly, mildly annoying if not a huge issue... they couldn't have put this all in a foot south of where they did?)

At any rate, my point is that due to subdivision, you can certainly have utilities laid out in such a way that construction or work on one house /can/ affect others. :)

Some years before I bought my house the majority of the property's back yard was subdivided up and sold off to build three townhomes, and the side yard turned into a small private access drive to get to those homes. As a result, their utility lines run through my property; their water meters are actually on my property, rather than theirs.

The house I rented before purchasing this was a townhome built in a similar situation, where an older property had been subdivided up.

So, yes, wiring/plumbing two properties through one /does/ happen, especially in situations of urban densification where land that was originally just one property gets subdivided up into multiple plots. If I went randomly digging around my yard, I could very well take out my neighbor's plumbing or natural gas. If I do anything (like building the fence I did recently) I have to make certain everything's done to code so that I don't take out the gas or water lines that run under the edge of my yard to the houses behind me.

I now see a bright side to the 'touchscreen devices can't support mouse movement and Javascript hover behavior' complaints about web development for Android, iPhone, iPad, WebOS etc.

The Tenth Doctor did face the Valeyard (...sort of) in the tie-in comics, in "The Forgotten" story arc. So they've at least had a nod to the Valeyard. Of course, that story arc was entirely about touching on all Doc's previous regenerations, so... :)

Well, not the Cybermen; the original Cybermen of our universe were evidently destroyed, though we have seen the head of an old Mondas Cyberman in one episode of the new series ('Dalek,' with the Ninth Doctor) so know they once existed. But Cybermen were recreated in an alternate universe ('Rise of the Cybermen'), and then came through to ours ('Army of Ghosts'), and evidently stuck around. Presumably the majority of Cybermen we've seen in the new series are those Cybus Systems ones.

This is because of the Dunning-Kruger Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect), which has been studied.

The more you know.

Also, the fact that this is the immediate assumption of folks on the Internet nowadays is a little bit depressing.

Your quoting of Job's letter was a fairly obvious segue into what I had observed from personal experience -- namely, the issues that can arise when a third-party development tool becomes a critical component to a toolchain, and the first-party platform developer has to adapt. (Though anyone who had been in the Mac development world at that same time could probably have similarly observed this, albeit from the user side rather than the Metrowerks side.)

Are we really so jaded as a society that people believe only one person can ever have a specific thought, or only one person will ever have experience relevant to the topic at hand? Or have we reached the point where if any point has ever been made anywhere on the net, we have to Google it first and share a link to the closest match to our own thoughts?

On the other hand, I /am/ on Slashdot... ;P

Actually, I used to have to use Metrowerks CodeWarrior at my old job, when we were looking at using it as the IDE to target an embedded systems chip we were designing; they were already a leading IDE for embedded systems work, so we wanted to investigate possibilities there. I got sent to Austin to work with the Metrowerks folks there several times during 2002, before we decided to do our own toolset (and then failed completely and miserably, which is an entirely different story).

So I remember the PowerPlant headaches from having been /at/ the Metrowerks offices during those Dark Times, and overhearing a lot.

(However, reading Gruber's post, he's got a *much* more concise and readable summary of that situation from the general Apple community viewpoint than my write-up, so that's a good link to contribute to the discussion.)