If it was only on ones bought through AT&T, this would be true (though not exactly fair unless they're giving you the function-limited device for less than buying an unrestricted one from Apple). But according to TFS, AT&T will lock a SIM you bring yourself, putting up a barrier to using your equipment bought from somewhere else with another carrier.

Non-sexualized nudity with genitals not emphasized or even visible does not exactly qualify as porn. For instance, a painting of a mother bathing a small child is not kiddie porn.

I was disappointed they didn't use Majestik Møøse.

I suppose I could download on my plunger, but then I would need to clean it up. I don't know how most people use their plungers, but I use mine to clear network congestion when downloading into my toilet. It is also fully compatible with all water/sewer carriers in my area, as well septic tanks. And yes, the wood handle can be unscrewed from the rubber bit, but modification is not typically needed to make it compatible with a given sewer system.

Unscrewing and re-screwing the handle does not void whatever sort of warranty it might have, but downloading on it probably does. Eww.

Or if you're okay with it being x86 Android, just install it in VirtualBox or VMWare.

Javascript modules are fine, and provide a nice way to do arbitrary customization (though I'm not sold on the choice of Javascript as the language for it). It's great if I want to implement something unusual. My problem with it is having to learn an API and write code to do something as simple as, say, change window border widths or set screensaver options. It's not that I can't do it, it's that I shouldn't have to put in the effort to do it when it's something that every other desktop environment for the past 20 years (minus OSX on many customizations) has had as a button or updown control and something I can change in 10 seconds with zero specialized knowledge.

You want to hide all the confusing forests of checkboxes and buttons to make the config dialogs as simple and accessible to newbies as possible? That's fine, but would it really spoil your beautiful simplicity to put ONE box for "show advanced options" that unhides all of what has just been removed? I think VLC is a fine example of this. The preferences dialog contains basic and easy to understand options, but you can still change the render API or mess with codecs if you need to, without writing any code. Just check "all" instead of "simple" and the dialog transforms from a pretty average number of options (though it could be made simpler still), into a tree view with dozens of pages of settings.

Oh, right, because they had to have the light shine through the aluminum instead of putting a bit of epoxy in a 1/16" hole and sand it flush with the shell.

NT itself is rock solid. It's the devices (and most of all the drivers for them) in most PCs that leave something to be desired. Just yesterday I had to reboot because my SD slot would no longer detect cards.

>games

Games are a different story. To pirate a game, you actually have to crack the DRM on it. You have to either produce a copy that's indistinguishable from the original, or modify the console and game code to bypass the checks, and probably decrypt the game content as well. You cannot simply play a game and record it. (You can but it doesn't make a playable copy.)

For music and videos, it's preferable if you can decrypt the original, but you by no means need that to pirate it. If you can play a song, you can record it with any common sound card. If you can play a video, you can record it with an HDMI capture card, and you'll likely need an HDCP stripper too. Admittedly these are less common and more expensive than sound cards, but they exist and only one person needs to record it and post the torrent.

Encrypted digital audio to headphones? I'll buy a cheap pair, rip the cones out of the speakers and connect the wires that go into the electromagnet up to line in. No matter how you make it, if I can listen to it I can pirate it without resorting to playing it into a mic.

Not sure what you're referring to, but I've yet to encounter a DVD (not Blu-Ray) that Media Player Classic and VLC can't play, and since they aren't officially licensed players that means they're cracking whatever DRM is on the disc.

If I'm remembering correctly, there was the original CSS, and then after DeCSS they created a modified CSS that uses different keys and even cycles them every X minutes of video. These discs have a "copy protected" symbol on the back (two discs with an arrow between them in a "no" sign), with an explanation that if your player is really old and doesn't bear the same logo you won't be able to play it. Theoretically if you aren't a licensed player you can't complete the auth sequence, can't get the set of keys for the disc, and can't play the disc. In practice, computers are fast enough that they can forget about the auth sequence and bruteforce each key in under a second.

DVD DRM is endgame. For Blu-Ray you still need a not-yet-revoked player key, the disc-specific title key, or a master key.

First, I don't know how any of this is handled in Windows Phone or if there are any hacks or workarounds. All my smartphones have been Android.

Android (at least ICS) does allow this, though in a somewhat limited form, and it wastes^H^H^H^H^H^Huses more space than storing them on the phone. Another way if you have it rooted is the Link2SD app, which does some symlink trickery to put the app on the SD card exactly as it is on the phone. None of this allows easily transferring purchased apps to a new phone though. With the official way they're encrypted, and with the Link2SD way there's no easy way to transfer the links and the stub that says it's installed.

However, moving purchased apps to a new device is already pretty easy. I associated a new device with my Google account, went to Play Store, My Apps, all. It listed all apps I had purchased for my old phone and gave me the option to install each of them on my new one.

This is a full-size SD. Current largest MicroSD available is still 128 GB. The only difference between SD and MicroSD is physical size, which limits how much memory they can fit due to flash die sizes. The cards are the same interface as each other. MicroSD has an extra pin, but it's a second ground. Adapters exist to convert either way, but the one to put an SD in a MicroSD slot obviously sticks way out.

Bogging down the scammer for an hour puts a far larger dent in their profits than hanging up on them, letting them move onto a more gullible mark, and telling one other potential mark to do the same. This isn't about which activity is more enjoyable to you, this is about damaging them and their ability to hurt others.

And if even just a handful of people use the metasploit this article is about with an OS-killing payload*, it would probably put them out of commission for a good bit longer than trolling them, and at much lower time cost to you. *--or even just things that flip the display output, change mouse speed, force 16 color mode, set a 1 second screensaver timeout with password protection, or other general annoyances.

I've been thinking about installing Win98 (which I believe is the minimum requirement for Ammyy) on my 486 DX/33, and then installing a bunch of toolbars and adware to make it even slower. Win98 minimum requirement is 486 DX2/66, but I've gotten it to run slowly on a 33 MHz one. Let them suffer trying to install their probably XP-minumum-requirement viruses on that for a while.

"Thanks, I'm glad you called! My computer *has* been running kinda slow lately."

Two issues with the $25 graphing calculator are build quality and software.

While it doesn't have exactly state-of-the-art electronics in it, the TI-84 is a beast. It holds up to the abuse most students put it through. If you made a $25 one, it would probably be built like a cheap Android phone. Those don't last nearly as long as a TI calculator, even if cared for really well.

As for software, I've seen plenty of graphing calculator phone apps, but none of them can hold a candle to a TI calculator. Color and the higher res screen are both nice, but they simply don't support the quantity of functions or programmability of the TI calculators. Someone else suggested R, which has a different problem: It can do all the things, but it's far more complex to pick up and use than a TI calculator.

There's a reason the graphing calculator app on my phone is a TI-89 emulator.