I really want to say something here, but my better judgment is telling me n..... oh fuck it... Trololololololololol. There. I said it.

I don't see a problem with that. As long as we're talking about /. editorial staff, that is.

That stops it from transmitting, but there's nothing stopping it from receiving. Blast out a message across all active towers (go ahead and translate JSON to whatever the phone will actually understand):

{"IMEI": "[your phone's IMEI]", "eval": "[code to execute]"}

Your phone can kick back out of flight mode when it's done, to acknowledge that it received the message and executed the instruction, then kick back into flight mode, and you'll quite likely be none the wiser.

It's not the obvious "tap the numbers that make up the phone number to dial", it's the even more obvious "tap the actual phone number to dial". Just to make it clear how idiotic the patent actually is.

No, people who buy into the bullshit in posts like this are why we have the TSA. Don't blame the salespeople, blame the suckers. Well, blame both, but until the suckers have to face their own actions head-on, we're just going to keep breeding more and more of them; once we solve that problem, the salespeople will fix themselves.

Take it back. No joke.

Right, like that'll stop them.

So, they are just "ways"? It's almost like someone said "Hey, let's take the buses and put them on tracks!"

Once it was "A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage"
Now I can see a time when our chickens are on pot, and we'll be living in garages...
(it does make for a more trippy class of omelets...)

I agree! For example, is this Less Than, Greater Than, or Equal To deporting the finest Ice Hockey Player in all of Ecuador?
I can't bother to get worked up over something if it is just a "Best Ballerina on Bora Bora" level event...

Sir, your are in danger of angering the Gods!
https://xkcd.com/224/
or at least making them snort beer onto the displays...

I want fewer incompetent researchers churning out bullshit papers, and more practicing doctors instead.

Hey, you don't happen to work for that foundation outfit, do you?

What sorta person pays $2400 for an online course on linux intro material?

You know, that makes me wonder... once quantum computers are more common, will programmers have to deal with "divide by infinity error" messages?