Let's hold a hearing on scientifically driven politics, and don't invite the politicians!

Great, lets just look in on this group of scientists I found that are not funded by government money:

*crickets*

1) The app has to declare if it's going to be doing background processing, and you have to give a reason why they will accept. So not just any app can do that.

What we really need is the ability to turn on and off specific permissions by app. Perhaps with the ability to limit internet permission to certain IPs/URLs per app. That would solve most of the problem.

I thought Google added that ability in an early 4.0 or 5.0 version of Android, but then backed it out... Sadly I think because too many apps react badly when permissions are withdrawn it expects to run. The whole model creates a bad precedent I think where you assume you'll have all the app permissions you requested and so if any are withdrawn individually (which advanced users can do) the app is prone to break even though it could carry on just fine if it had been coded to detect that one permission was disabled. Google is going to have to bite that bullet at some point.

No, the destruction of nation-states (Libya, Syria, and Iraq) that created the conditions for ISIS to flourish are Clinton's responsibility. She was a policy-maker, not the policy-maker, but a policy-maker nonetheless who was in the room when these decisions were made.

Basic fact fail. The vote was 297-133 in the House and 77-23 in the Senate. There were plenty of brave voices willing to stand up against the Iraq War. HRC was not one of them. She does not get a pass for that clusterfuck, nor any of the clusterfucks that occurred while she was serving in the Obama Administration.

Good for you. You're also adept at putting words into my mouth. But feel free to excuse away HRC's bad judgment if it makes you feel better.

One of the things I was thinking the port was there for, was probably when developers could build native apps for the phone - since it would be a little pokey to ship debug builds and running debug info over wireless to the watch, a development cable would be a great idea.

It's probably also for Apple Store employees to run diagnostics (not sure if they have equipment for that yet).

The diagnostic port is hidden by a cover. I'd be interested to see if removing the cover adversely affect's the watch's water resistance.

It may somewhat, but given that the port itself is located under the round part of the band that slides into the watch, it seems like it would be sealed away fairly well (especially if you designed the strap with that in mind).

It seems pretty sure sweat would not be able to get in there, really only submersion would have a chance.

;)

Excuse me sir, but I could not help heartily agreeing with the veracity of your statement and wondering just why it was your signature for at least that post is not "Ha Ha!".

I agree it would have been really illuminating to do the same test for a large range of free iOS apps.

However I think that you wouldn't see the most egregious of tracking stuff going on in iOS, for two reasons:

1) iOS reviews would I think alarm on something connecting to 810 different tracking sites. Definitely f you were trying to do anything like that in the background.

2) There's simply not as much data to gather. Most Android apps ask for all possible permissions, because why not? You're probably not going to read it anyway. With the iOS permissions as they are the user is going to think "why is this app which has nothing to do with contacts, asking for contacts" (or location, or photo library, or health data, etc).

That said I'm sure many free apps on iOS are doing everything they can possibly get away with, and I would love to see quantified just what that is.

Stockholm syndrome got its name from a bank robbery that occurred in Stockholm; it has no real or perceived reference to Swedish soceity. Incidentally, that society is a social democracy and there's a huge difference between that and socialism by most definitions. Despite what you may have "learned" from cable news there's plenty of capitalism going on in Sweden....

Oh, by the way, your criticism of GWB, that he deposed a regime and created a power vacuum leaving an opening for Islamic extremists:

Did you pay attention to what we did in Libya? Or who the Secretary of State was while we were doing it?

Which part did you miss? The part where Senator Clinton voted in favor of the AUMF that authorized the Iraq War or the part where she served with an administration that made "regime change" in Syria national policy? Perhaps both?

You may be willing to stick your head in the sand and forget about the AUMF but I'm not. HRC was a policymaker when the seeds were laid for every problem that I outlined. She does not get a pass. Your knee-jerk defense of her suggests to me that you're a Democratic partisan and not worth taking seriously.

If she disagreed with the policy and had any backbone she would have resigned. Since she didn't we can conclude that she either agreed with the policy or she didn't have enough courage of conviction to resign. Neither one of those options suggests that she's fit to sit in the Oval Office.

You know what motivates scientists? Science. And to a lesser extent, their ego.

It's amazing how all of these pure Beings of Science can exist without any sources of funding, or motivation deriving thereof...

Oh wait.

Science if hard work for little pay

Little > 0

$500k is also > 0

I'll let you have the last response. Just thought someone should, in the name of scientific accuracy, throw actual truth into the froth.

Oh, one last truth...

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it's clear that the phrase "liberal media" was a conservative talking point

Only 7% of reporters are Republicans.

I would say to draw your own conclusions from that glaring fact but you already have, and you got them wrong.