Correct. You flash the gapps and some of them are installed as system applications. However, since CyanogenMod has root and busybox built in, it's fairly trivial to remove unwanted system apps.

Terminal Emulator
$ su
# cd /system/app
# rm [app you want to remove].apk

Maybe, but considering that Google pulled the exact same trick, I think they're probably wise it.

Maybe the carriers think they can strong-arm Canonical into doing their bidding a bit more than they can Apple or Google, but I doubt that will be a selling point in the long run.

Do it. The S3 is well supported, if you're willing to put in the initial legwork. Other than a random bit of bluetooth flakiness (which seems to be mostly resolved with 10.2,) I've had no problems with it.

If you're brave enough to try the CM11 milestone releases (I am not,) make sure you have a sufficiently new radio and recovery flash.

Not that I would call Apple and Google *good* stewards of their mobile ecosystems, but they've done a lot better job of it than the carriers ever did.

"We'll let you do whatever you want, so long as you let us watch and sell the resulting data to advertisers."
"We'll let you do a small amount of things that we'll charge you a premium for every time you use it. And also, we'll lock out phone features like GPS from third party apps (what few there are) so there's no competition." (VZNavigator?)

Neither are great choices, but I know which I'd choose.

Yeah, really.

I mean, I know it's not US carriers yet. But when (if) it is, he's essentially just saying "Ubuntu puts the control back into the hands of Verizon Wireless, at&t, T-Mobile and Sprint."

Sounds like a platform I totally want to sign up for.

Yeah, I saw that. I wasn't surprised. That seems to be the common configuration these days. (AMD is guilty of it, too.)

Fortunately, the days of packing my computers with expansion cards are long gone, anyway.

Won't stop me from make a cheap joke about it, though.

... five expansion slots to fit the fans, this time!

Many (most?) programmers are salaried and exempt from overtime. If you or someone else introduces a bug that stops production, you fix it.

If you can do it in your 40 hour work week, good for you.

If it takes two weeks of 12 hour, 7 day weeks to fix it, then it sucks to be you.

If it doesn't, I don't see how it saves much typing.

$ vim -p file1.c file2.c file3.c
$ make
$ ./a.out
$ gitsh
@ add file1.c file2.c file3.c
@ commit -m 'some crap'
@ ^D

$ vim -p file1.c file2.c file3.c
$ make
$ ./a.out
$ git add file1.c file2.c file3.c
$ git commit -m 'some crap'

Net savings of what, one keypress? It's rare for me to issue more than one or two git commands without issuing a non-git command. Unless the intention is to have a seperate shell up that you switch to whenever you need to do get stuff, maybe?

I tried to install it and verify for myself, but it required a newer version of Ruby than is available on my distribution. (Thanks, Canonical.)

...don't give two shits about us or the company they work for for credit card security.

Signature vs PIN: The thing you know.

Try signing with a line or an X sometime. Try writing expletives into the signature pad. Try writing "SEE ID" in the signature area of your card with a sharpie. The cashier that will notice and/or comment on this is far or few in between. What difference does it make to them if you're committing fraud? None. They still get paid. They (probably) won't be fired. The pin is marginally more secure, if only because it has a computer actually enforcing it, rather than a minimum wage cashier who can't be bothered to check.

MagStripe vs Chip: The thing you have.

The important part of the "Chip and Pin" system is more the "Chip" part than the "Pin" part. It's meant to make the cards far more difficult to duplicate. Right now, it's trivial to duplicate a magstripe. A few hundred bucks worth of equipment and a strategically placed skimmer and you can have your own private criminal enterprise. As I understand the weakness that's been described, it's a replay attack that only works once. (This may be incorrect. It's just what I remember.) That's a damn sight better than the the mag stripe.

Is this some excuse for the banks to push more responsibility onto their consumers for their own data security? Yeah, it is. But I'll take the higher security.

I'm not too worried about having chunks go missing. The moon has enough gravity to hold itself in in a sphere-ish shape. The mines will collapse in on themselves long before a huge chunk goes missing. (Plus, if we have things that can do that kind of damage to the moon, damage to the moon will be the least of our worries.)

As for knocking it out of orbit, the moon weighs 7.35*10^22 kg. The largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, Tsar Bomba, had a yield of 2.1*10^17 J. So, uh, not too worried about it. We're a few orders of magnitude off on that.

There's some legitimate concern about scarring the face of the moon for future generations. Yes, the moon is really big and really far away such that you probably wouldn't notice even a very large mine with the naked eye, but telescopes are cheap and plentiful. Possibly something you could deal with by treaties limiting the size of mines to less than utterly huge? At least there are no indigenous people to worry about. (Or, as history has demonstrated, not worry about.)

From reading the article, it looks less like "getting a permission slip from NASA" and more like "agreeing to cooperate with NASA." This seems reasonable to me, for US companies. Obviously, if commercial space exploration takes off, we're going to need some international agreements in place.

I mean, I've always fantasized about being able to run Windows applications on Windows!

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This previous line was supposed to read "Like UTF-8 Support." in Unicode look-alike characters.

Incidentally, I don't think they need to throw out the new layout entirely. Just fix the things about it that are horribly broken. Like the huge swaths of empty space at the sides of the screen. Especially the right. Also the comment system.

Alas, I fear that it's only marginally less likely that Apple would build an Android phone than Slashdot is to address any of the community concerns about the layout.

... that's about the only nice thing I have to say about them.

It's been a good five years since I worked in computer repair, but at the time they are overpriced for their specs and incredibly difficult to repair. I don't know if this has changed, but a recent trip to a Sony store suggests to me that it hasn't.

Also, Sony's blunders with DRM and their ties to the content industry have not exactly helped their reputation with being trustworthy. (VAIO! Comes with rootkit already installed!)

Also, what is this beta shit? I can live with "Web 3.0: The war on saturation." But not all of us have 1920x1080 monitors sitting on our desks...