And by not being willing to consider it, you've shown yourself to be irrational and emotional.

Look, I am not trying to say that a business practice is anywhere near as bad as actually, physically hurting another human being. I'm even willing to leave the sweatshops out of this discussion. The point was not about severity, but kind.

Aside from the fact that being beaten and restricted in who you can talk to is far, far worse than being restricted in what you can install, the only other difference I see is what I said: The woman didn't necessarily know she was marrying crazy, whereas a person buying an iPhone should know what they're getting into.

And for what it's worth, I'm not done here. You could certainly convince me that I'm wrong. But writing me off as a human being, rather than even trying to explain where I'm wrong? That's cold, and a bit unfair.

Then I find it really hard to understand your attitude... I mean...

Well, let's start here. You have too much dignity to tell your wife that you won't fix her phone if she breaks it? That seems like just the opposite, to me. Frankly, someone I plan to spend the rest of my life with is at least going to learn the concept of re-imaging a device -- even if I'm the one to do it, that's how infections get dealt with.

It resets them? Really? And you must be very lucky to have exactly the same set of values that Apple pushes, if your claim is that the iPhone is exactly as locked-down as it needs to be for your purposes.

It affects me whether or not I buy it, as I discussed elsewhere...

Android's actually ahead, but that's irrelevant. Every person who buys an iPhone is, effectively, part of the problem of availability of iPhone jobs vs Android jobs. It's true that I'm much less concerned now than before:

Apple doesn't so long as they don't control a majority of the market, but since when is that less of a threat? Also, where in my posts are you getting that I'm "focused" on the iPhone?

For that matter, what about DRM in games? I do still comment on this, and try to keep up with it, and work against it, because it does affect me. It's true that I don't buy games with excessive DRM, but that's because I pay attention. For brief windows of time, it really did look like the industry was about to be taken over by DRM -- developers were either entirely going to consoles because consoles provide sufficient DRM, or applying so much on the PC that it took a massive Amazon rating campaign to get EA to back down.

Because of the persistent bitching of people like me, there are more games with fewer DRM, and there are at least a few decent games which are designed to fully exploit the PC as a platform, rather than being pathetic console ports.

But following your logic, I should just not buy DRM'd games, and otherwise shut up about it. Nobody's forcing me to use it, after all. (Where in the above rant about DRM did I mention anyone "forcing" me to do anything?)

Actually, no, it's worse than that:

At the expense of developers, and look at this same logic applied to the console vs PC debate. Microsoft is a sovereign company that does whatever the fuck it wants with its products. I wouldn't want to live in a world where they couldn't make the Xbox. It looks like their philosophy on Xbox pleases users.

Yet, even so, I would prefer DRM-free games, and I would prefer developers to actually target the PC, and people who get an Xbox instead of a PC, and only play games on the Xbox, are effectively working against that.

Now, would I tell someone not to get an Xbox? No, not really. Once they ask, I might tell them why I think they should get a PC. But if you look at my original post to you here, I think it applies -- Microsoft controls what you can and can't buy on the Xbox. It's therefore a walled garden. You may well like it, but I don't see how your use of the Xbox as a from-the-couch gaming machine would be hurt by, say, allowing third-party developers to burn their own games for it.

Because there could be a platform that fits both our needs.

In fact, I'm still not sure why Android doesn't do this for you. Is it because your "users" are so determined to fuck up their phones that they will find an online tutorial that tells them how to re-enable app installing after you disabled it, and then proceed to download the Android version of BonziBuddy or WeatherBug? If they're that determined, honestly, what's stopping them from jailbreaking their iPhones?

Finally, to wrap up...

Is the issue that my analogy was too harsh, or that it was actually inaccurate? In what way does this not apply? Seems to me the only issue is knowing about it up front...

For that matter...

Indeed, and I don't see why it would be so wrong of me to point it out.

Citation needed.

Yeah, and?

I don't have a problem with a browser logging information... on my own machine. If my machine is compromised, no browser will save me. If it's not, then having that information is actually really convenient to me.

And all this is assuming that they are in fact doing this -- you say "They don't even claim that..." implying that they must be doing this. Yeah, and Glenn Beck has never denied raping and murdering a young girl in 1990.

Now, if you mean to imply that Chrome sends a log to Google every time I visit an HTTPS website, then you're going to have to back that up. It shouldn't be too hard, anyway, if you want to prove your point -- set up a VM, use Wireshark to monitor all traffic into and out of it, ensure everything's up-to-date, and go browse around the Internet. Let me know how many times it phones home, and what it sends.

Ah, so you're responsible for some people who you presumably have no real authority over, but you're allowed to choose their technology for them.

Why not allow your users to do what they want after promising (in writing) not to bother you about it? Some users get hand-held, some get to do what they want. Or why not simply factory-reset their phones if they screw them up?

Or, if you must lock them down, is it really the case that Android provides no such security here? After all, these are presumably the same people who, if not you, then some IT department somewhere lets them use PCs. Surely, then, even if it's by locking it down yourself, an open platform is manageable.

Nope, but I can blame them for setting up a situation in which a security vulnerability is what's required to "jailbreak" (read: liberate) my own device.

And where is that, exactly?

Motorola, among others, has pledged to ship unlocked bootloaders on new phones. You plug the phone in, run one command from the dev kit on a PC -- which will even work from a Linux PC -- to install an entire new copy of the OS.

Also, since when were we talking about kernels? I was talking about additional software. On iPhone, you have to jailbreak just to download an app that isn't from Apple's own app store. Not all Android devices require even the procedure I described above -- some allow you to download apps from a web browser the way PCs (and Macs) have for, well, forever. So, on some brand-new Android phones, I can take the phone out of the box, navigate to a competitor's app store website, and I'm good -- at worst, I download their app store client.

That's a bit like an abusive husband telling his battered wife that she didn't have to marry him. Yes, it's true that Apple can't stop me from buying Android, and no one was suggesting that they can. However, if I were to buy Apple, then I'd have these restrictions.

Furthermore, the more people who buy Apple, the more of a market there is for iOS apps, and the less of a market there is for Android apps. This affects me as a developer -- I don't want to be forced to publish through Apple, to submit every patch to their capricious review process. And before you say "Nobody is forced to..." Sure, it's not the case yet, but the smaller the iOS market, the more opportunities there will be for me to find employment, or for me to sell a solo killer app, to non-iOS platforms.

I don't know why *none* of these are getting reamed, but Chrome? It collects data and stores it *on your local machine.* It doesn't route every request through Google.

All well and good, but how would any of the above be threatened by allowing you to download third-party apps?

No one would care if it weren't for the fact that you have to "jailbreak" your phone in order to do so, and that Apple has expressed that it wants jailbreaking to be illegal, and short of that, they tend to do everything in their power to prevent jailbreaking from working with every update.

Or, take android. I could stay within the official Google store, though I agree that it doesn't seem to be as well-policed as Apple's App Store. But I can also install third-party apps, even entire third-party app stores. I can even download third-party remixes of the OS itself. The fact that Google's app store isn't as well-policed as Apple's has nothing to do with the fact that Apple forces you to use their app store or hack your own fucking phone, while Google gives you a choice.

Aside from the fact that he was quoting someone, I don't see how you can possibly interpret his comments this way.

It seems simple enough. He doesn't particularly wish ill of Steve Jobs. He'd much prefer, say, a quiet retirement to death or degeneration. But one good consequence of this is that Steve Jobs is not still working to turn every generic computing device into an iOS-style, approved-apps-only device.

Now, granted, this is almost certainly the wrong thing to say as a political movement, but I don't see anything wrong with the contents of the remark. It just could've been stated a little bit more tastefully.

And frankly, I'm sick of every even mildly relevant person becoming a saint when they die -- we remember the good and forget the bad. I have to imagine that if Glenn Beck had died while he was still an anchor, it would've immediately become politically incorrect to criticize him.

This.

I mean, if it was actually for the purpose of deposing Hussein, then well done, mission accomplished, but holy fuck that cost a lot of lives and made a lot of enemies for such a petty goal.

What I thought it was about was WMDs. What most of the US public thought it was about was stopping terrorism -- a majority of Republicans, in particular, don't understand that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are two different people, and that Hussein had less than nothing to do with 9/11.

Huh. It doesn't help that there's their signature on the contract with mine?

George disagree. javajavajavajavajava...

Depending on how thorough the company is, the SOP with paper is to just go through the document and strike (with a pen) the stuff you don't agree with, then sign it and hand it back to them. Chances are, they won't notice. Sometimes they notice and don't care. Very rarely, they notice and do care.

When it comes up, however, if they signed it too, then you're in the clear. If they didn't read your modifications, they're no better off than if you didn't read the contract to begin with.

The problem is whether anything like this could be an acceptable way of modifying a contract. It seems to follow a similar principle -- if the service in question isn't expecting it, then you modified the contract and they agreed also, so you win. But at the same time, unlike paper, there's no reasonable expectation at this point that the server will notice these headers, and if we either insist on some acknowledgment from the server that they like those headers or wait till this is well-known enough for services to adapt, then you'd be right and they'd be unlikely to accept any changes.

If that's really the case, I'd just mark the Windows partition bootable. Grub doesn't care. However, the DOS MBR can only boot when you only have a single partition marked bootable.

Still, I'm pretty sure my Linux partition was the bootable one... Oh well.

Is it that it never asks you to install, or that you get an error when you install?

It is, somewhat. But as much as I despise Flash, I'd still prefer that to a native client for Linux, also. I don't see why I should trust your service with local access to my machine just to show me a movie.

Or, for that matter, people who buy Windows with the device because it's cheaper that way, so they can dual-boot?

I like Linux. I use Linux as my primary OS, and I bought my most recent laptop with Ubuntu preloaded. I also like being able to reboot, fire up Steam, and just play a game when it doesn't have a Linux port.

It seems to me that the major Android manufacturers have been introducing unlocked bootloaders lately.