I love how /. has truly grown up from being the "Voices From The Hellmouth" crowd to the "waaah, poor baby can't handle a little teasing" crowd. It's the classic "fuck you, got mine" but for advancing through life rather than up the income ladder. Where's the line for deserving sympathy, or even empathy? Does she have to shoot some classmates and THEN kill herself? Does she have to play video games first, and do people have to make that a public issue?

Actually, their recycler is apparently certified by these guys:

http://e-stewards.org/certification-overview/

which looks substantially better than that.

Of course they do! The iPhone has gotten progressively better from the original to the current version; it's not like you're going to open the box for the eventual iPhone 5 and have it contain nothing but a loose collection of wires and poster tack, with a little sign saying "HAHA PWNED." My wife is squarely in this category, since she's still fighting with an increasingly balky 3G whose apps are getting crashier as they expect to have more modern amounts of memory.

They'd have to figure out who the insured is, first, as well as their relatives are -- I'm not sure it'd be impossible with a sufficient quantity of data, but the patient's name gets stripped out of the data in question. I think this is a bad idea for other reasons, but at least there's that. FTFA:

When filling prescriptions, Vermont pharmacies collect information, including the prescribing physician's name and address; the name, dosage, and quantity of the medication; the date and place where the prescription was filled; and the patient's age and gender.

*slow clap*

This belongs in the trolling hall of fame. I've read a lot of things on the internet, but this is the first time I've run into an anti-Hawaii screed. That's very creative.

Since you probably know more about this than I do, what are your assumptions about network topology for the nodes in your system? Ad-hoc? NAT? It seems like expecting address stability for a portable device is kind of a losing proposition.

Yeah, that was my reaction as well. While they've done a good job documenting the bug (and it really does sound like Android's DHCP client is broken), they sound like they're missing the forest for the trees. Why does Princeton assign such short leases, you ask?

"Shorter leases allow us to recover unused IP addresses rapidly, in turn permitting us to assign globally-routable IP addresses to clients without requiring Princeton to impose a NAT between wireless clients and the Internet."

So my smartphone can have a globally-routable IP address! You know, for the servers I'm going to run on it.

The price you pay for having a society that backstops the quality of life of its least fortunate is that you have a society that does the same for the occasional freeloader. That's the kind of society I wish I lived in, so I'll support changes to that end regardless of the fact that someone less deserving might benefit.

Do you think your utter lack of motivation to achieve anything beyond "continued metabolic activity" is the default?

That fits my limited observations pretty much exactly. We looked at their enterprise stuff during the same project and were completely confused why the straightforward, correct stuff over there didn't make it into the consumer version.

About 5 years ago, I contributed to a paper that brought up a particularly brain-dead thing they did with the auto-update mechanism for their then-current consumer version of VirusScan:

http://www.usenix.org/events/hotsec06/tech/full_papers/bellissimo/bellissimo.pdf

Long story short -- their ActiveX control exported a wrapper around the Win32 ShellExecute API. What could possibly go wrong? The XSS thing in their help here seems to be of the same "do the simplest thing, damn the consequences" variety; it looks like they've tried to patch the XSS issue but it's pretty weak sauce. Hint to McAfee: Did you know most browsers will load "HTTP://example.com" as readily as "http://example.com"?

Does the perceived responsiveness of the device count for anything? I'll happily eat that fraction of a second longer the app will take to start up if it means I won't be wondering whether or not I tapped the wrong icon (or missed completely) and the phone can't be bothered to tell me. Similarly, the feeling I get when I see choppy (or worse, stuttery) animation isn't "I'm glad they're using these cycles to compute something more important!" It's "I could be doing this faster myself on an abacus." This is, of course, utterly subjective and irrational, but it's the squishy human factors stuff that Apple's got figured out.

(Parent post is mine as well, wasn't logged in earlier.)

Yes, I have watched MSNBC, and no, I managed to miss the incident you're describing on CNN. This largely misses the point -- the fact that it's POSSIBLE to miss whatever "Bush=Hitler" incident you saw on CNN, while I can turn on Fox or spin the AM dial pretty much at random and land in a positive feedback loop of "liberals are destroying America."

I don't watch much Olbermann, but I have seen conservative guests on Rachel Maddow's show (plus a lot of "so-and-so declined our request for an interview"). You can object to her tone during her solo segments if you want, but I have yet to hear her be less than respectful to a conservative guest, even if she's doing her damnedest to dismantle his or her argument at the time (note: calling out bullshit is not the same thing as disrespect). Compare this with the O'Reilly "cut his mic!" shoutdowns over at Fox.