I vote for stupid stuff. My Droid M works fine for two or three days after reboot but gradually gets slower and slower until the touch screen no longer responds.

But I don't play games, and the only games on the device are the bloatware installed by the carrier. I suspect that the device's entire problem is related to bloat.

This hadn't occurred to me before. I wonder if viruses are the reason those stupid bottle deposit machines are always out of order. I swear to Fudd, I've seen them reboot, usually just as I'm dumping in the last bag of soft drink cans, and they display the Windows 98 splash screen.

That hadn't occurred to me before -- keep a Windows 95 box on the network as a canary, expecting it to crash if there is an intruder on the network.

Only problem might be too many false positives.

Agreed, but we are talking about content, not apps. Ram is dirt cheap these days -- the cost of ram in portable devices is largely artificial. There's no reason why a large amount of ram couldn't be provided at a reasonable price for apps, and still have a slot for content.

The reasons you want a slot for content are (a) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary by individual (some of us only put a few songs on there, some don't use it at all, and some think they should carry around the library of congress) (b) the amount of storage needed for content tends to vary with time. (IE, when I realized how much more convenient my Bionic (for instance) was than my ipod touch, I just got a larger chip, transferred the music to the Bionic and retired the Touch.)

...and (c) most importantly, recent versions of Android have for inexplicable reasons disabled the "mass storage" option when connected to a computer via USB, and the only ways to get music on them now are buy it in the store, use some stupid-ass dedicated app to manage the music on the device, or yank the chip and put your content on the chip directly. Re-buying music you already own on CD is unacceptable, content management apps are a HUGE fail, and that leaves you with removable storage. Ergo, a phone without removable storage is not a valid choice, despite guaranteed OS updates. (Besides, I wasn't very happy at all with that "os update" that disabled USB mass storage. Jerks.)

Very specifically not like those two. Hence "most".

Meg, is that you?

One can hope.

> who do you think will fall next [?]

I'm probably the wrong person to ask. I've been predicting for awhile that HP will fall next, it just seems so obviously likely, but I continue to be wrong. At least, so far. Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part.

I guess I can see that, for a few years ago. But most non-Apple smartphones use micro-SD these days, and a 64 Gbyte card is $23 on Amazon today. (Or $120 for similar capacity in an Apple product, of course.) The first thing I did when I got my replacement phone (the previous one not having survived a motorcycle accident) was replace the paltry 8 GB micro-SD with a 64 GB part. And then it took almost an hour to download all my music to it.

One annoyance -- one of our vehicles with an older radio supports stereo Bluetooth, which means I can just play music from my phone through the car stereo, and manipulate the phone through the stereo controls.

In contrast, the radio in my 2014 motorcycle, which supports thumb drives and other neat stuff, will play music from the phone but will not control what is being played. Annoying.

That's it. It's been awhile, but I think I got the gist right, even though the details were off.

Um, this is the California school system we're talking about...

Well yes, I think I would like to keep all my appendages. (Cue OB XKCD, where a $7 crowbar is more effective than a $100M password cracking array.) I have thought about this, and I think it can be solved by having two accounts -- your "real" account, and a "hostage" account, which looks a lot like your "real" account (kinda like keeping two sets of books) and takes the same biometrics, but upon providing a slightly different "something you know", raises (silent) alarms everywhere it would be appropriate to do so.

I think I have about six songs in itunes that are in "protected AAC" format, as I stopped buying stuff in that format early on, as soon as I realized the limitations. I still have a (gen3) ipod in the truck but the sound system in the other car and in the motorcycle understand thumb drives, and once you have that why the heck would you use an ipod? Most phones these days will play music and have removable storage -- why would you carry an extra device?

Once you realize that only Apple products will play "protected AAC" files, why the heck would you buy content in that format?

I guess the point I'm making is that if you lost access to content you paid for because itunes no longer supports your OS, this might be a good time to at least re-evaluate how you purchase content. If you must use itunes, it'll rip CDs just fine, and used CDs are available, often for a pittance, at Amazon and other places.

I can't believe in 2015 we're still saying "just say no to DRM content". That question should have been settled a long time ago.

I intended that as tongue in cheek. As I said in a different thread, my (vaccinated) daughter was homeschooled through most of grade school, (due to a difference of opinion between her doctors, who diagnosed her as severely dyslexic, and her teachers, who diagnosed her as ADD and prescribed Ritalin) and she later interviewed and got accepted into a somewhat exclusive high school.

Other members of my family (who happen to live in California -- I live in a different state) were very vocal in their disapproval of my decision to homeschool, saying that "everyone knows homeschooled kids don't have any social skills or any education and they're a burden on society". (Apparently there's a pamphlet I didn't get.) To which I say, anything can be done badly. The trick is to do it well.

> You do know that thimerosal has been out of all vaccines used in the US and Canada since the early 1990's right? [emphasis mine]

Apparently not. If you have evidence to the contrary, here's your chance to update a wiki entry.