Of interest: A group interview with the developers of SimCity months before the release date. They were told by thousands of people that DRM was a no-go.

Then you're using the term in a different way to everybody else. Safari running on iOS is a mobile browser. Every web developer I've worked with refers to it as a mobile browser. Popular web analytics systems refer to it as a mobile browser. Even Apple call it "Mobile Safari".

TFA says nothing of the sort; it was the submitter that said that. Safari on the iPad is a mobile browser (the actual name of the application is "Mobile Safari" FFS), and it is a bit more limited than desktop Safari, although it won't matter for the vast majority of websites.

However, for nominal 20/20 vision, the usual resolutions are the limiting factor, because normal people can read printed words substantially smaller than can be displayed

There is a world of difference between can read and can easily read. You can surely reduce the size of text while leaving the average reader able to read it, but that doesn't mean that it's particularly easy to read or that there is a productivity gain for exchanging ease of reading for a couple of extra lines of text/code.

As for the sizes people typically find readable, compare the text on a screen to text in the average newspaper or book. I think you'll find that on-screen text is usually smaller than text presented in other contexts. Going smaller would harm readability regardless of resolution. It's not the resolution that's the limiting factor here, it's the physical size. Print has a far higher resolution, but people still print text that they want people to actually read at sensible sizes. If resolution were the limiting factor, people would be taking advantage of print's higher resolution to print tiny text everywhere.

I have the up down space of a 1984 Mac for my code.

The reason for that is because the hardware hasn't improved noticeably since 1984. The hardware, in this case, being the human eye. If you are limited to the physical height of a laptop screen, it doesn't matter how much you can increase the resolution by, adding more lines of text/code makes those lines physically smaller. And the physically smaller they are, the more difficult they are to read and thus work work with.

You could have a 4K resolution on a laptop screen, and it's not going to solve the fundamental problem. The capabilities of the human eye and the physical size of the thing that you are carrying around with you are the limiting factors here, not the resolution. Sure, you can make slight improvements to the readability if you have a higher resolution, but you're not going to get more lines of text/code without it being counterproductive.

That's an awfully big assumption and you're basing it on nothing he's said except for the inconvenient fact that Android earns him less money.

My company does iOS and Android applications, and we always take care to respect the native platform conventions. Guess what? We see the same thing as him. Most mobile developers do.

It may be the case that you pay for Android applications, but taken as a whole, the Android user base spends less money than the iOS user base. No amount of baseless insults you aim at his applications sight unseen will change this.

It's supposed to say "Apple pushes developers to Android"

Not a chance. I'm a mobile developer, and Apple pushing people to keep everything up to date is a real advantage over Android for developers. For Android, we still have to support the 24% of people using Gingerbread, which came out in 2010. For iOS, 96% of people upgrade to the latest version of iOS within a year. iOS 7 is already at about 80% despite only having been launched three months ago, and that's already the cost-effective breakpoint for a lot of our clients. It's a lot easier to support a platform that is at most a year out of date compared with three years out of date.

No, you are completely misunderstanding that article.

Before mail clients stopped loading images by default, it was possible to embed a "web bug" image in an email. Essentially a transparent non-image that is referenced with a unique ID for each user. When the email was viewed, the mail client would request this web bug, and their server could record a) that this particular user opened the email, b) when they opened it, and c) whatever information they could glean from a normal HTTP request - where in the world you are, what software you are using to read the email, what language you have your mail client configured to use, etc.

If at any point you click "Load images", you will be sending this information to whomever sent the email. It's just that by default this would not occur in the majority of mail clients.

Gmail are switching to proxying the images and loading them by default. This means that email senders will get a) and b) by default. You can remedy this by switching your Gmail settings back to the old default of not loading images by default.

However because they are proxying the requests for the images, the people sending emails no longer get access to c) - things like your IP address, location, software, etc.

You seem to have invented some kind of nefarious arrangement between email marketers and Google, but that appears nowhere in the article you link to. It does not describe Google sharing data at all. All the article describes is the fact that by default, email marketers can now get a) and b) by using web bugs - this is something you don't need an agreement with Google to use, it's a natural consequence of the technology in question. It's your browser that shares the data, and it does so by performing a normal HTTP request - this is information you send to each and every website you visit. There's no http://google.com/download-private-data-muhahaha.zip link that email marketers now have access to.

This change improves privacy and has no loss of privacy if you change your settings to not load images by default. If you leave the settings at their defaults, you gain privacy in some ways and lose it in others.

The system would allow people to pay bills anonymously over the Internet through an electronic transfer of funds â" just like Bitcoin.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous.

It would allow for micropayments without processing fees â" just like bit coin.

Processing fees are common with Bitcoin.

And it could kill off wire transfers through companies like Western Union â" just like Bitcoin.

Wire transfers are largely an oddity of the USA. Most of the rest of the world doesn't use wire transfers anyway.

Meanwhile, it wouldn't hurt to have a bit of a side conversation with someone in legal (for a start), then escalate it to formal conversations with them via email (again, print those suckers off) should nothing get resolved.

You don't have to approach them as if you are blowing the whistle on your boss. Just tell them you are concerned about your personal liability should you get caught breaking the law.

the developers are always getting pressure from other departments for projects they don't have the manpower to even start. I'm not really sure how to convince them we need more people.

You don't. You tell the people asking you for stuff that you don't have the resources to do it, and you let them convince your boss that you need more people.

Stop trying to do everything, prioritise the important stuff, say no to everything else, and if the things you say no to are important enough, they'll find the manpower.

If by 'encourage(s) users to void their warranty'" you mean "use the thing you paid for however you see fit in concordance with a thousand year history of English, Formal and natural law, then yeah, I guess you could say it voids your warranty.

Oh do fuck off. Warranties are limited in nature. It's got nothing to do with stopping you from doing what you want with your own property and everything to do with the fact that if you fuck up your own phone, it's not the manufacturer's problem to solve.

Seeing as the user is the product being sold, Google can't have their products (users vis a vie control of the user experience) just walking off the plantation, now can they?

Google deciding not to distribute an application is not akin to making you into their slave. Pointing out that a warranty might be voided if you do certain things is not akin to making you into their slave. All your analogies to "walking off the plantation" do is highlight that you have absolutely no sense of perspective on this matter.

Part of designing a car properly MUST include the safest reasonable behaviour following an accident.

And if a Tesla car can have its battery impaled with a massive force at highway speeds, remain controllable, warn its driver to pull over, and prevent any flames from entering the cabin, then I would say that is beyond reasonable.

Any amount of "well, another car would PROBABLY have also suffered horrible damage for maybe different reasons" is both speculative AND irrelevant.

If only there were some objective battery of tests we could subject cars to in order to gauge their safety. Oh wait, there is. And Tesla passed with flying colours. Tesla's Model S scored 5/5 stars. Ford's Escape scored 4/5 stars.

Let me be very specific: no car should catch fire as a result of running over debris in the road as happened wih the Teslas in question.

"Running over debris" is not an adequate description of the events. In the first case, the debris impaled the car with a 25 tonne force. In the second case, the car drove through a roundabout, through a wall, and crashed into a tree. In the third case, the car hit a trailer hitch that was sticking up with enough force to lift the car and gouge the tarmac.

Any similar car is going to be catastrophically damaged by events like this, including significant risk of catching fire. It is not reasonable to consider a car catching fire as a result of events like that as defective.

What sort of mental fault causes a person to argue that a fire which could have been avoided is okay because, well, at least nobody got hurt?

Nobody has said that. It's not reasonable to describe these fires as avoidable. You can't make massive, portable energy storage systems that are immune to fire in the event of severe damage, whether those energy storage systems are batteries or petrol.

Eh, which stats are we looking at? You're implying at least 4 accidents...

I'm not, you just don't know what you are talking about. The second accident involved a car driving through a roundabout, through a wall, and into a tree. You are counting that as two accidents because you aren't informed about the accidents you are talking about.

In the same circumstances, a traditional car would not have fared so well.

Evidence?

You require evidence that a traditional car impaled with a 25 tonne force is a fire risk, or that a car that crashes through a wall and into a tree is a fire risk? You think that a traditional car would have remained controllable after being impaled? You think that a traditional car would have stopped the fire from reaching the cabin?

The NHTSA has already reviewed one case and found that the car was not at fault.

Of course it wasn't the car's fault that it encountered debris.

Of course it wasn't. But that's not what the NHTSA said. They said that the fire wasn't a result of a defect in the car. Of course they didn't say that it wasn't the car's fault it encountered debris. You are just saying that to deflect away from the fact that they said the fire wasn't the car's fault.

Of course they're different things: the Ford problem is likely to happen when nobody is in the car (if the engine overheating which eventually leads to the problem occurs during driving, the owner will be warned to pull over and/or seek service, at least for current models); the Tesla problem is likely to happen during driving and without warning. So, the Tesla problem is more dangerous.

No, you still aren't comparing like for like. You are comparing two mutually exclusive things. You are comparing the likelihood of a major accident causing a fire with a Tesla to the likelihood of a design/construction fault causing a fire with a Ford. These are dissimilar, mutually exclusive scenarios. What you are failing to take into account are the similar scenarios on each side. The proper thing to compare the Ford problem with is the design/construction faults that cause spontaneous fires in Tesla cars. This number is zero. The proper thing to compare the Tesla problem with is the likelihood that a Ford car will catch fire after a major accident. This number is non-zero.

If you want to conflate the two dissimilar issues, you need to take into account the likelihood that a Ford car will catch fire after a major accident. This is not being accounted for in the fires associated with the recall. The reason for this being that nobody considers it to be a design fault if a traditional car catches fire after a major accident. The same should apply to Tesla cars.

When you impale a car in a minor collision, things like fires should NOT happen.

You're right, they shouldn't. And no Tesla has caught fire as a result of a minor collision. All the Tesla fires have been the result of major collisions that would catastrophically damage any car.

The main aims in car safety are to nearly eliminate the effects of minor accidents and to lessen the effects of major accidents.

Yes, and it appears Tesla have very much succeeded in these aims. In all three major accidents, the fire was contained and nobody was hurt from it. In the two cases where the cars weren't damaged by crashing into a wall and tree, the drivers were able to safely pull over. In the same circumstances, a traditional car would not have fared so well. The NHTSA has already reviewed one case and found that the car was not at fault.

since their failure rate on this model is half of Tesla's

It's not. The failure rate of a car spontaneously catching fire under normal operation and the "failure rate" of a car catching fire after being involved in a major accident are two entirely different things. You aren't comparing like with like.