My Pacemaker becomes Flash Updateable or "We found a bug in your Pacemaker, come in for a minor procedure to upload the fix."...just DEAR GOD don't make the fixes downloadable via wireless.

To clarify, I mean does the source have to be released under GPL? Me type crazy today...

So if I take an existing OS (Android in this case) under GPL and I alter for greater security, does that have to be release too if all I'm doing is some sort of internal release? I'm sure this has been answered to death with Linux but just curious.

Sorry I consider it unethical to deliberately introduce bugs to any software. Not that you need to provide any standard of QA for an open source product, but it's ethical to ensure that whatever you release conforms to a certain "level of fitness" in that it'll do what it is designed.

Furthermore bugs in general reduce my opinion of a product and the company around them, if I see such a shoddy open source product, what's the guarantee a commercial product we'll be any better?

(after writing all this I now sit and ponder if I were trolled...)

Piracy is getting worse the harder copyright holders try to restrict movement of their stuff. Probably borne out of a "perceived necessity" to do something they'd like to do, such as giving a copy of an E-book to a friend, install a restricted game on another computer, etc. Someone needs to tell the industry to just knock it off and stop making pirates out of everyone...

But I'm not telling the Slashdot crowd anything they didn't already know.

Interesting analogy, but I'd like to think the drones have other uses too....

So you've ran off some law enforcement with lethal weaponry...but then, didn't you'd think they'd come back in force? I can almost see them: Bad Guys: Hurrrr hurr hurr...you shoulda seen them cops runnin...they ain't coming back at us hundreds strong with SWAT Teams or Drone aircraft now....harharhrharrharharhar.... If it were me after having run off some cops with some lethal weaponry, I'd be running myself too.

You can't get Win95/98 on MSDN anymore, unless you have the CD, some sort of lawsuit settlement if I'm not mistaken. But yeah I have Win98 on VMWare too, I remember installing it, having it prompt me for a Win98 setup floppy disk and me thinking "great now what?" as my last 3.5" drive was probably purchased 10 years ago, fortunately a quick net search revealed a disk image of the Win98 Setup disk that I could mount in VMware with success.

From what I understand, China is one step ahead of that, there were reports of Chinese linguists visiting Navajo reservations not too long ago as a hedge against that sort of thing. My thinking: Find another language China hasn't catalogued yet, Ebonics, Jive, Klingon, etc... :-p

My contract with Sprint is up soon and I was debating new phones. So I suppose I can look forward to the following in the time to come:

1) An influx of Iphone 5 users saturating what is now a pretty decent network in my opinion, about to do what AT&T did when they got the Iphones in (aka fall flat on their back)
2) I'm a Droid user, and awfully curious as to how well Droid is going to be supported by Sprint down the line...will they still bother to carry Droids, is anything else besides Droid and Sprint even going to be an option (aka Windows Phone 7)?

I worry....

There are still plenty of smaller PC Makers out there, Falcon Northwest comes to mind immediately. But in the big name PC World, pickings will get rather slim...

Will Tablets and Mobile Stuff replace them? In many respects certainly, but until a Mobile Platform can build and compile their own applications. Frankly who the hell would want to write software on a mobile platform and watch the battery scream as the app is compiled? I do love my dual screens for development (true laptops can do this, but it's much roomier on a desktop).

Laptops still have a few disadvantages over desktops:

1) You just can't cram as much hardware in a laptop. I want 2 high power video cards , 192GB RAM, 2 Network Cards, 8 drives and 4 physical CPU's, sure send the bill to my company :-p no laptop can fit this and still be called a laptop.
2) Even if you could cram some of it, Heat would play hell....there's only so much you can do to cool laptop casing compared to desktop casing, again laptops will never hold as much hardware

Anyways I've made my point.

Think Apple, they wont stay #1 forever no matter what anyone says, my predictions... By 2015: Apple loses Iphone dominance in all respects and begins its downward slide, starts to focus on other products instead, some customers grow worried By 2020: Apple decides the Itunes store is no longer worth keeping up, stops all sales but keeps DRM servers functional, most customers grow worried... By 2023: Apple sees no further point in keeping Itunes DRM Store up, but enthusiasts of now classical music singers such as Taylor Swift, Spice Girls and Eminem begin rioting over the loss of all that music...oooooh the humanity...

Considering the fact that the majority of our computers, IDE's and compilers are powered by oil (or another related hydrocarbon product such as gas or coal whose prices are loosely linked), if the software you developed ain't worth the oil it took to write it, what was the point...

I would like to think a company as big and at least somewhat security savvy as PayPal would think to try and cross-check against compromised networks, TOR Proxies, etc...I'd be a little worried if I were one of these people...