Recall the existence of all those xenon arc bulbs in photo flash and strobe lights and the answer is obvious...

I suppose this announcement kills the future continued usage of all of my WM6.x phones... no more wireless calendar sync for them (which is essential for me)...

uh... because the update is FIVE GB in size, and with some people's connections, can take hours to download and install. A broken connection within these HOURS, not just a few minutes, can brick the Wii U. Seems like they should have just sent out/distributed update discs instead...

what's this mean about various versions of Android using ext4? I think I just flashed my tablet to use ext4 (ugh)... really don't want corruption my tablet...

ugh, and I suppose you want SSN's to be like DNS, and invoice numbers to be like DNS too...complete with tinyurl's to shortcut around the very thing you think is great about DNS...

sometimes numbers are just easier

I really don't get **ME as being "vanity" numbers...

as long as phones still use a 0-9#* dialpad for dialing, vanity numbers will be numbers that are easy to remember AND dial, like 111-1111. Having to dial **ME XYZ is hardly an easy thing to dial, particularly if you are doing it by touch (no seeing) and with one hand. And worse, its not your real number, just an alternative alias. Texting, etc still comes under your real number.

finally, I think speed dialing combined with contact lists pulling up the caller's identity, plus CID pretty much has all the bases covered.

But I like my "vanity number", a XYZ-9000 and wouldn't give it up anyways...

Survival of the fittest doesn't mean the organism that is at the top of the food chain actually survives...

look at poor T.Rex...

Ebola is one of the deadliest viruses known, but its TOO deadly. It kills to efficiency and quickly and therefore has little chance to propagate far and wide.

When a strong organism dominates too effectively, it may have no one or thing left to support its dominance.

I "cut" my teeth on Bell Labs Unix, beginning with Version 5 in the universities (circa 1974). Migrated through most of the Research versions of Unix and BSD's. Played with the PWB line of Unix, which sorta led to System V, but hated them compared with the BSDs. So it was natural to stick with the BSDs (and SunOS 4.X and now FreeBSD) rather than jump to Linux.

Back when I was deciding between the free Unixes, not only was it more natural to choose FreeBSD, but at least back then, Linux was a mess in terms of documentation and consistency of the distribution(s). I chose FreeBSD and never looked back.

... which isn't to say that I *don't* use Linux, of course I do, hard to avoid, between Android, Tomato, webOS and just times when Linux has better driver support, etc. But by in large, still a BSD guy...

'How long is it good for? As long as we exist.'"

I think this statement is fairly clear as to the definition of "lifetime". No they could re-incorporate, etc so that the old "they" no longer exists, but otherwise... I'd say that its time for a lawsuit, or at least start by having a lawyer-friend draft a simple letter that threatens a lawsuit...

uh VM is a Sprint MVNO (owned by Sprint itself), which is CDMA, which means that the OP could not use his GSM phone, as he specified...

uh Ting is a Sprint MVNO, which is CDMA, which means that the OP could not use his GSM phone, as he specified...

the better options are Tmo, Simple Mobile or Straight Talk. You probably want ST with the AT&T SIM for the best coverage... that is what most iphone folks go for... a Tmo plan or Tmo MVNO will not support 3G data (yet) on most non-Tmo phones.

There *is* a certain logic to this ruling. Supposing I communicated to my friends with smoke signals, or a searchlight in the sky (Bat signal?), would I expect privacy for my broadcasting these "signals"? A cell phone does the same thing.

OTOH, the same could be said of radio signals, TV broadcasts, HBO via satellite, etc. These are also broadcast whose raw signals are available for ANYONE to pick up. Yet it is deemed illegal to decode these radio signals, or listen in on cell phone conversations.

These two notions are contradictory to me. Either broadcasted energy/information has NO expectation of privacy or other limitations that prohibit listening, decoding, etc. *or* broadcasted signals of whatever type *do* represent a PRIVATE, non-public channel of information that has an expectation of privacy. Can't be both...

So is it possible to somehow grab a copy of Android Flash now that would be installable in the future?

- no way it will reduce cybersecurity issues down to anything close to zero.

- will isolate not only the people, but those Iranians working on science and technology, which will slow down their progress dramatically. Can't have it both ways...

Our future predictions are largely based on extrapolated endpoints which are at least somewhat reliably based on understanding the potentials of known science and technology. However, we are much worse at predicting RATES of progress, i.e. how long it might take to get to these endpoints, because the rates are not based on known fact, but on things like politics, social trends, economics, etc, that in the best of cases are themselves rates, and therefore you are trying to guess about rates based on rates -- huge errors there.

We can't even predict the stock market a year in advance, or the results of political forces, so we can't possibility predict rates and the timing of endpoints that are based on such factors...