They have no reason to believe they should be unrecordable when they are out on the road or on the sidewalk.

Of course the police have a reason to believe that they are unrecordable in public. There are states with just such laws on the books. They may be unconstitutional, but they would need to be tested first...

One supports the other. If the phone is locked, customers care less that they're stuck in contract. If they're in a contract, it matters less that the phone is locked. They both contribute to lower competition in US mobile markets.

So what happens as you continue to use the flash and new error regions show up?

It might be nice to verify that you were given the same code as the actual... of course with all the hotfixes and SP releases, who can tell?

If you dislike Apple's restraints, all you have to do is switch platforms. There is nothing holding you here except the end-utility of the platform. If anything, Apple has made it easier the switch out because they support open standards.

The difference with Microsoft is that they used their market share to make sure there was little to no viable alternatives to switch to for quite a while. Vendors that offered alternatives were pressured to stop. That was the core problem with Microsoft.

A lot of people are confused about this distinction. I think that Apple should be free to restrict their offerings any way they wish within their own platform, it just takes away from their own utility and competitiveness. However, I take issue if they try to restrain my available choices of competing platform which is what Microsoft did.

I think that the problem is that the philosophy of business schools shifted from producing better products and services to profit optimization. For a while this worked as business did have some margin to coast on the level of developed of technology, but it increasingly is a direction that is stalling out as the proportion of rehashed crap product/services is rising vs new fundamental productivity gains.

Please explain to me why the USA, being such a puritan country, ranks a lot worse [wikipedia.org] in teenage pregnancy that European countries, that have a very liberal vision regarding sex education of teens I take that to mean that God has a wicked good sense of humor.

Given the membership and their statements, it actually sounds like they might be working on integrating/standardizing the access to underlying hardware. Most of those manufacturers make ARM chips with various added peripherals. It would certainly save time if I could grab a Linux distro that was everything below the UI level without having to spend time integrating the low level chip libraries to access the custom hardware functions in the chip.

When I was in grade school, there was Turtle, then I went to basic playing with drawing graphic lines and printing to screen. It all gave you a nice direct feel for what could be done. A nice place to start now might be Processing http://processing.org/

For other scientific data sets which are primarily tabular numeric data, I've always liked NetCDF and or occasionally HDF

I can't boot up, and I have one of those HP computers that has everything built into the screen, so I can't even take the hard drive out.

That's a start of a great joke... how many PhDs does it take to remove a hard drive? Actually try booting with some form a live CD or usb stick. Most let you access the drive. Try Linux - many like the Ubuntu flavor.

Oh I agree with you on the transparency issue. I was just (unclearly) commenting on the handwringing over possible competition with private industry.

It's OK, sometimes the peas and carrots mix a little, but it's still perfectly edible... I see this expenditure as a cost-effective, creative alternative vs. PR coming from a buy of ad-time on tv. It gets the army a little PR and introduces some realism vs most other FPSs. The only people to complain might be other game companies in the niche of providing semi-realistic miltary FPS, but all indications is that there's no real effect there, see Call of Duty and Modern Warfare sales...