Well, chances actually are, that some people that know gymel also have a wider understanding of the middle ages, and thus acquired skills, or at least know how, on how the middle ages work. So they might be able to build a fire with flint and steel, or produce pottery, and so on...

reenactors and experimental archeologists might be able to cope rather well without modern technology, because they already tried it.

...it is arguably "stealing reputation" (depriving another of their reputation and taking it for yourself).

I've referred to it as "reputation fraud," but yes, we appear to be in general agreement.

I see this old semantic game blooms anew on Slashdot. "It isn't stealing". Fine. It's fraud. Don't worry that your reputation is shot and/or somebody else is trading on your good name. It isn't stealing. Oh... the victim feels much better now.

I don't understand; what are you complaining about? You're correct. It isn't theft, it is fraud. So why call it theft when it's clearly something else?

If you call it by the correct name, you'll get community support, even among the "copying is not theft" crowd. OTOH, if you call it stealing, then you'll get mired in a gigantic semantic dogpile as hundreds of people re-litigate what constitutes "stealing."

We don't even need to raise the "Is it stealing?" question in this case. It's clearly fraud. So call it "fraud." Geez...

WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS DOING ON SLASHDOT?!?

You want to spread whiny, partisan, maliciously misleading horseshit? Go to RedState or Breitbart; that's their stock in trade. It doesn't fscking belong here. Get this garbage off Slashdot now.

The press blurb is full of nonsense. Not one real performance statistic. Not one.

-Matt

AppleTV had over $1B in revenue last year. It might not be a big segment of the market yet, but it isn't a small niche either and its growing like crazy. Plus the ongoing revenue from the product has insanely high margins.

-Matt

I had no choice but to deinstall it on all of my Android devices. The old version no longer works and the new one wants permission to access pretty much everything I own... all my contacts, all my accounts, location, phone numbers, make phone calls and texts, god knows what else. Everything.

It's insane. I will not give Facebook access to all of that stuff. They can go stuff it. Nor will I give third party sites FB access for validation since that also means they can snarf my friends list.

I'm still able to run the FB app on IOS because that at least allows me to deny FB permission the access. Android though is out of the question.

-Matt

There's no "app" for screenshots because it's built into Android itself, and has been since 4.0 (which was released many years ago). It's volume down + power button. Just Google for "Android screenshot".

And until late last year, you could get brand new Android phones with Gingerbread on them. Even older than ICS.

Assuming users all have ICS+ phones is not a safe assumption. At least Gingerbread users are unlikely to be accessing the Google Play store, so developers don't need to concentrate on it anymore. (The Google Play survey only covers phones that accessed the Play Store the past 2 weeks or so, so those ancient phones are not something developers need to worry about).

This is a classic solved problem in computer science: chose an algorithm that you can support in the generation of machines you plan to deploy, even if it's slow in the lab.

Yeah, and now computers are so fast, that the encryption is suspect.

Think about it - GSM has been around for 20 years and its encryption has been hacked.for the past half-decade, if not more. And why? Because back then, the encryption was pretty much unbreakable with equipment of the day and implementable on hardware available at the time. These days the computers are much faster and encryption hardware available that easily breaks it in real time.

TCP/IP is what, 30 years old now? Any encryption it specifies as mandatory would be equivalent to plain text now.

Fun Fact: OSI is actually a networking stack. It's not just the 7 layers you see on a networking chart. It was actually a real to life stack. And in the 80s, government computers were specifying OSI networking capability as a requirement.

So why didn't it succeed, and why is the only artifact we have that 7 layer model? Well, TCP/IP was written by a few scrappy people at DARPA. OSI was a consortium of dozens of companies all trying to get their own piece of the pie. Naturally, OSI's design by committee really lead nowhere as companies fought to have their own thing in the stack.

In other words, TCP was "good enough" and out there and working. OSI was complex and growing and being fought over. It got so bad that the OSI group imploded on itself. And TCP kept on trucking.

No matter who it is, how long it has been around, or what the service is... if it is a cloud service it will one day go away.

Actually, it's not just the cloud, it's Real Life(tm) too.

That coffeeshop you buy your java brew from may decide one day to stop serving it at all. Or it may close up shop. Or it may change owners and molest the brew to something vile and undrinkable.

The Cloud is not much different than anything else. Your favorite store might change hands, close down, stop offering the goods you want, etc.

Anything you buy from others is subject to shutdown. While unlikely, your ISP might decide to close up shop and stop providing internet service to you. Or your colo provider may not be able to renew its lease and have to shut down.

Yes, some of these companies have been around a long time, but remember they're survivors - thousands of other companies have came and went.

The oldest company in North America is the Hudson Bay Company (now a Canadian department store, formerly a fur trading business). Doesn't mean it'll be around tomorrow, and for every company that's been in business for 340+ years, millions of others have been started, closed and so forth.

Cloud companies are just the same - another service that can be here today, gone tomorrow.

Professionals do the job and get paid.

They did neither.

End of argument.

"Hey, kid. If you get down in that mine, dig out the coal, and bring it back to me, I'll pay you. ...What? You want a light? Why did you take the job if you don't have the tools to do it? Batteries cost money, kid. ...What? What's all this whining about dust and poisonous gases and how you can't carry more than two lumps because you're only six years old? I'm paying you; do your job. You don't want to be thought of as unprofessional, do you?"

What self-serving sophistry.

Newer phones have location chipsets that support both GPS and GLONASS. Do they figure out automatically that the GLONASS information is bad and switch to using GPS exclusively?

Given GLONASS is really only complete above the Russian Federation and spotty everywhere outside it, a dumb navigation chip would use GPS outside of Russia and GPS/GLONASS inside because it can't acquire a complete GLONASS lock outside.

A smarter chip may use whatever GLONASS satellites it does see to aid in reception, and the error would probably result in the software rejecting it as a whacked out satellite. (It happens on GPS as well - sometimes they screw up so the receivers know to discard the data received from a malfunctioning satellite). In this case, it would've seen the GLONASS was returning a nonsensical result and mark it as a bad satellite.

I've noticed much increased performance since I upgraded to a phone that uses both systems, especially in cities with a lot of tall buildings like NYC and Chicago.

Most likely your phone can properly extract the GPS data from the phone network via assisted GPS. In this case, you only need to see one satellite and the cell tower supplies the other satellite information.

Also, your new phone may have more sensitive electronics and more often than not, its wifi supports location assistance using wifi triangulation.

All that would combine to give you much faster acquisition than just pure GPS alone.

Both Google and Apple support WiFi location - Google is probably more question-response, while Apple sends you information and then a bit more to cache to lighten server loads. (That cache was the cause of the whole "iOS is tracking me" deal way back in IOS 4 because everyone believed Apple was getting the location data and stuffing it in the file, instead of what really happened in that Apple send more data for the cache in your phone to save data.