it's not necessarily the regexp comparisons, but that DOM manipulation is pretty slow in Firefox.

so if you spend millions/billions developing a microchip, then sell a phone that uses it..

you'd be okay if I just opened up the first phone that rolled off the assembly line and duplicated your chip? then started selling clones for a tenth of what you charge?

that's what happens when there's no [reasonable] patent protection for hardware. see: China.

a lot of the time this can point to patent issues. there might be chipsets (often the radios or something else fairly narrow) that prevent legitimate US import.

I'm having trouble finding it now, but sometime in the last few years there was a pretty major seizure by Customs in a situation like this. I believe it was related to this, if memory serves.

What if I sniff all the guests' network traffic in a hotel? (via ARP spoofing or otherwise)

There's certainly no warnings presented in any OS when you plug in ethernet and grab an IP, and the average computer user certainly doesn't know that it's possible to do this.. so, how do you feel about that?

There is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_Dev_Phone - you can buy it directly from Google. Sign up as an Android developer for $25 (one-time fee that gets you access to submit apps for the Market, required to purchase the phone unfortunately). The latest version of the phone is actually just a completely unlocked HTC Magic; it costs $399 from Google (no contract subsidy here obviously.)

If you're interested in a "solution" (only workable to tech savvy folk, really) for from-carrier devices you can pick up any Android device you'd like, root it (attain su via exploits, there are one-click scripts for every popular device) and install whatever OS version you'd like on it. XDA-Developers forum has hundreds of custom Android "ROMs" that have been developed by regular users with no more access than the phone they bought and the Android SDK.

You can install a regular 'vanilla' release of Android OS from source and customize (or not customize) to your heart's content.

They _are_ only storing a thumbnail; the article just sucks.

C:\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb shell
# cd /sdcard/.bo*
# ls -l | wc -l
62
# du -h .
2.0M .
#

Here, I uploaded the largest one out of the 62 for your review.

I really wish you and that commodore64 kid would leave the Slashdot I know and love with your paranoid delusional trolling.

C:\android-sdk-windows\tools>adb shell
# find . -name *.jpg | grep -v -e customize -e contacts -e wallpaper -e DCIM | more ./sdcard/.footprints/thumbnails/1272099190529.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/mcd0bb890.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/scd0bb890.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/m46bb1b3c.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/s46bb1b3c.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/mdabb3bb3.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/sdabb3bb3.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/m66c70c76.jpg ./sdcard/.bookmark_thumb1/s66c70c76.jpg

[snipped for brevity, more of the same follows]

the /emmc/ folder that's present on some Android devices (including the incredible) is a mount point for the internal eMMC storage. it's a bus for a type of embedded flash memory (like SDHC for removable cards).

when there's no SD card, the phone might choose to use this embedded storage (or might choose to use it for other reasons).. it's not really the same as the "internal storage" (which is wiped in a factory reset).

this is a simple oversight on the part of HTC and/or the Android team - not making it more obvious, on devices that have eMMC (very few models of which exist yet), that this is another persistent area of storage that needs to be treated like the SD card when it comes to privacy concerns.

there is no conspiracy here, just innocent mistakes in a massive contribution-driven software project.

CPM

They're used to make thumbnails for bookmarked pages (and maybe frequently-visited in some versions, I don't have access to >2.1 now.)

This is exactly like the start page in Chrome, where it shows thumbs of recent pages.. they're at an infinitely small resolution. The entire screen on the EVO is only 480x800px wide, and they cram like a 9-thumb grid in 50% of the screen.

I wish I could downmod this submission.

do you have his phone?

you're climbing up my "most obnoxiously narcissistic posters" list.

every android device i've used has exhibited this password-masking behavior. it's common for mobile devices with low-confidence keyboards.

see your parent post's sig, please.

That's interesting to me for a couple reasons.

I loathe that show. I'm not part of the anti-pop-TV brigade, I just find it incredibly boring. I tell my wife it's like watching someone throw dice against the wall for 42 minutes (DVR!), interspersed with crap dialogue.

Having admittedly never thought about the last two cases scenario (the one you started with, and a final model's case). I would have thought that the probability maths behind this would be pretty simple.. do you have a link for that H&R block conclusion? I'd find their reasoning for it being unclear interesting.

My math is as follows.

- You pick one of the [26] cases at the beginning. Instead of focusing on amounts let's call one a "winning" case (top prize), all the others losers.
- This means you have a 25/26 (P=0.96) chance of selecting a loser.
- If you open the 24 cases on the stage, and one remains in addition to the one you're holding, and you haven't 'cleared' (opened) the winning case.. you're now left with a 1/2 (P=.50) chance at picking the winner.

This is part of the reason the show bores the crap out of me. :)

Thanks for sharing. I'll look for next week's post about you not watching TV.

this is one of those classic mistake posts with an added arrogance bonus that will haunt that UID forever..