"system.what? system.ini is gone for more than a decade now."

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ -> shell (REG_SZ, create if needed).

Default is explorer.exe but you can replace it with any executable you want. (Have not tested this personally since the XP days, but the key is still there in Win7).

"I have not seen any viable shell replacement for Windows in the last couple of years, only half-baked unfinished solutions so far."

True enough.

http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/chi/chi.html

I agree completely with your conclusion, but this statement is misleading:

"background radiation (e.g. previous nuclear tests)"

Only about 3% of the background radiation originates from man made sources like medical radiation, nuclear testings and power stations.

Almost all of it is from naturally occurring sources like radioactive minerals in the earth crusts, the sun or cosmic rays.

The security is not any better for you, it is better for your corporate masters.

You see, they get to have complete 100% control on what you can or cannot do with the device. Event to the point of remote wipe if you loose the phone or decide to quit withouts giving it back.

That is the big difference and what they mean by "better security".

+1 Insightful

Do you happen to have the IP address for that server? I cannot even get blender.org to dns resolve anymore. I tried with several dns servers in different networks so I do not think it is a problem on my end :(

But by Vulcan standard he is barely middle-aged ;)

Were the phone and the service sold as separate deals? I think that might be an important point.

Many places in the world iPhones are only sold as a bundled device with a service plan from a specific provider and the phone and service can be seen as 'one product'.

I do not know if that is the case here, but in such a case it does not seem fair that the customer is charged for traffic he did not initiate. The provider who sold him the phone + service plan should be responsible for the behavior of the product as a whole.

Of course, if you buy the phone and service separately I guess you'll be on your own.

Disclaimer: IANAL and this post just reflects my personal thoughts and opinions on the matter.

Has anyone tried compiling the silence using whitespace [dur.ac.uk]?

Argh, thanks for telling, now how do I get this Russian super-virus out of my computer again? :(

:)

+1 Funny

BZZZZTTT WRONG!

and author of articles on how to use the legal system to get revenge on people [googleusercontent.com].

Did you use Google language tools or something to get at that conclusion?

I am not Swedish but as a Norwegian with a very similar language (to me Swedish seems more like a strange dialect of my own language) I can read and understand swedish pretty well.

The link is not about how to use the legal system to get revenge on people, in fact the legal system, police, prosecutors or lawyers is not even mentioned in the article. Neither does she suggest making false charges or anything similar. The only use of the Swedish equivalent for "legal" (läglig) is to say that your revenge must be legal, making false charges is not legal in Sweden and may in fact be punished with jail time.

The article is more about how to be systematic when you planning your revenge by listing your ideas and ranking them by probability of success and that your revenge should be comparative to the offense you want revenge for.

At worst the article is childish and a sign of some underlying psychic instability or immaturity in this woman. The worst thing she suggest as an idea for revenge is to make sure your ex-boyfriend/girlfriend gets a lunatic on his/her tail. That is at least of very questionable ethics and may perhaps be illegal depending on how you go about doing it, but she gives no details at all about how to accomplish such an act. In fact she is very vague on ideas for revenge at all.

I have no idea about the rest of your claims, they may very well be true.

Oh, believe me, they use that complaint here also.

I think the law they uses against anyone falsely accusing someone of rape is a generic law for making false charges to the police, it is not a specific law against false rape charges.

Of course this does not happen very often, precisely for the reasons you stated in your post. But surprisingly often the woman comes clean on the issue when the police starts picking her story to pieces. Most people are terrible at lying and the police have some training to detect flaws in peoples stories.

However I seriously doubt many get 1-2 years in prison, that sounds more like the maximum penalty for such a crime. I would guess most get away with 1-3 months jail-time or just a fine depending on how quickly she confess (if at all) and how much time and effort the police wasted on the issue.

Perhaps because I had not such good experiences with Microsoft and open standards in the past?

But at least that link seems very promising, then the only hurdle will be to wait and wait and wait for everyone to upgrade to IE9 or better.

And of course they have to actually finish the HTML5 standard first so we would probably be speaking of IE10 or higher, HTML5 is far from complete yet and in no means a viable Flash replacement for all projects.

There is a reason for my 3-5 year time-line and in some regards it is probably overly optimistic. After all we are still supporting IE6 for some customers.

I guess it depends on what your doing.

My company is writing interactive 3D-viewers, Flash on a hand-held just wont cut it.

Hell, Flash on a full blown computer just barely cuts it.

But for 95% of all other cases I concur. :-)

In the long run, maybe.

It will all depend on whether Microsoft will support it properly in their future web browsers, they might say their committed to supporting all kinds of standards right now, but I have heard that from them before, so I want hold my breath.

If you actually need to make something for a paying customer right now then unfortunately Flash is very often the correct (or even the only) choice right now. Silverlight may be good enough or even better in many respects but does not come anywhere near the reach of Flash. Flash is basically everywhere. The only exception is hand-held devices but on those I would in fact agree with Steve Jobs, it is usually better to make the effort to create a native version.

Really! I do wish html5 was ready and available everywhere, but it is not. Maybe in 3 to 5 years when it has reached something like 50% of the browsers 'out there'. Right now it is just a toy to play with to get a glimpse of what the future may behold.

This does not mean I disagree with the ideas behind HTML5 or open standards, by all means it would be perfect if I could use it in my projects right now. But my customers actually require something that would run on (at least) 95% of all Internet connected computers without the user installing anything Flash meats that criteria, Silverlight does not and HTML5 does not even show up on the radar yet.

At least there is some hope that the future will be brighter. :-)