I've been coding for about 30 years now, a bit longer actually. Something that's become apparent over the years is that there ought to be a law of conservation of complexity. You can abstract and then re-abstract, you can use well-known design patterns, you can write defensively, and you can document until the cows come home. All of these help, they help by spreading out the complexity onto a larger surface - it becomes less opaque as it gets "thinner", the more it spreads out.

However, it remains the case that some things are just inherently complex, that understanding them, or their particular interfaces and parameters, requires the understanding of the system as a whole, not the parts in isolation. Sometimes divide does not conquer, at least in the real world. There's not *many* problems like this, and I've no idea if this is the sort of thing Linus is referring to - I don't keep up with the Linux kernel these days, but there may be a good reason why he's done what he's done. You "calling him out" without explicit reasons why, or (better) giving a superior approach than what is already there is just showing ignorance, IMHO.

Personally I think you've already made the assumption that naked infant pictures are in some way embarrassing. To my mind, they're not. To most Europeans, they're not.

It seems I'm really struggling to say this sufficiently clearly: The difference between a photo of a naked 4 year-old and a clothed 4-year old to me is the clothes, that's it. I really don't care whether the kid has clothes on or not, it makes absolutely no difference to the photo, and the first comment that would come to mind would be something like "wasn't that Summer of '73" or "Hey look at the size of that sand-castle you were building", or something equally irrelevant to the clothing situation.

If someone wants to get all upset over the photos, then fine. It's a bit weird to make an issue out of it, but whatever. Similarly, if the parents don't want to take the photos down, that's also a bit weird, it seems like basic courtesy ought to rule here. As I said, I don't really care; I think it's a matter for the family to handle, and apparently they think it's a matter for the courts to handle. Fair enough. I don't really see why it's news, either.

[sigh] My point was that *I* live in the USA. If *I* posted pics of my 4-year-old niece naked, then *I* would be in trouble in the USA. Because nuts.

FWIW, I have no desire or plan to post pics of my niece naked, I see no reason to. I just don't regard it with the same level of apparent disgust that Anonymous Coward "Pics or it didn't happen" 2 posts up seems to.

I don't have a horse in the race here - I don't care what the parents or the child do in this particular case, I think they're both being stupid, but whatever.

The law in the UK is specifically *not* for this sort of thing:

"The most recent amendment to the law, outlawing the possession of pornographic photographs of children, was introduced seven years ago, amid intense lobbying from campaigners who included Mary Whitehouse. Although John Patten, then a Home Office minister, emphasised it was not the intention to catch innocent family snaps of naked children in the bath or on the beach"

I quickly googled. There *are* people getting into trouble for taking photos of naked teens etc. on European beaches, but the photographer wasn't related to those teens and that makes a big difference. Naked teenagers is also a lot different from naked 4 year-olds. I didn't find anything successfully prosecuted over naked infant snaps when the photographer was related.

Nope. I live in the US. You guys are nuts about this sort of stuff.

Maybe in the US.

It's pretty commonplace for infant kids to run around naked on the beach in Europe for example. My niece is 4, and when I'm iChatting my parents over in the UK, it's pretty common to see her wandering round the house naked (lunchtime here being bath time in the UK). I don't see why photos are any different. Nudity just isn't such a big deal when the kid is so young they're still "innocent", at least for most Europeans. As far as I'm aware it's the same in Asia. It's mainly the US that's so puritanical over the human body.

And (presumably) the photos aren't sexual in nature. If someone was jacking off to them, the fault lies with that person, not with the photo.

Well, you could always use a Samsung phone and burn to death instead, but hey, let's bitch about a fucking headphone socket...

A "failure" here includes an app that crashes. In your case you're saying the touch screen has failed to work, 4 times in a row, and somehow you know it's about to be 5 times.

The chance of a failure involving the touchscreen is statistically (from the report you didn't read) 3%. Raising 0.03 to the fifth power gives a failure rate of 0.0000000243.

Still going with Occam.

Well, literally hundreds of millions of people (per year) buy iPhones (last 12 months was 215 million) and don't have this problem.

I could see you getting a bad phone - shit happens. I could (just about) see you getting *two* bad phones out of two. There is no way I'd buy that you got three successive phones that failed in the same way, as for five ? Well, I'll be charitable and say you must be the unluckiest person on the planet. Is your name Brian by any chance ?

For reference: "In line with the firm’s fourth-quarter report, a study that analyzed smartphone failures during the first quarter of 2016 determined that Android devices cause far more problems for their owners than iPhones. According to Blancco Technology Group’s new data, 44% of Android phones experienced failures between January and March of this year, compared to 25% of iPhones"

Occam's razor says I still think you don't look after the phone, assuming you're telling the truth. Sorry.

Yep, in an nutshell.

You sell 215 million (how many phones Apple sold in the last 12 months) of *anything*, and there's going to be a tiny percentage of them that go wrong in some pattern-like way. Even 0.001% of 215 million is 2150 people with a problem, and although a failure rate of 0.001% is pretty damn good with such a complex device, that's still enough for "many" people to come up with a common problem and someone to get some ad-revenue from the click-bait headline.

(Also own an iPhone, a 6+, and haven't seen any issues)

Good luck trying to get *any* cell phone without BGA chips in them. Or any electronics component, really - maybe a toaster.

To be honest, I agree with the above poster. Absent any specifics, I'd say the problem is you and how you treat the phone.

*looks around*
*sees literally every single electronic item uses BGA chips*
*wonders what goes on in people's minds, sometimes*

Oh for crying out loud.

There are literally (and I use the word correctly) *billions* of BGA chips out there, in all environments from the most benign to the harshest around, from industrial levels of vibration to space exploration (including the launch). Shock, horror, in a sample size that large, some of them fail, well cry me a river. There is no human technology that is 100% perfect, but soldering chips, yes, even BGA chips to boards is pretty damn close.

As for not doing them at home, I've done BGA chips at home many many times - you can actually do them with a toaster oven, but if you want a good (i.e.: ~100%) success rate, you could always get one of these. If you look past the truly egregious website, there's a really well engineered product there, which guarantees alignment as the chip is placed. I've got one and frankly I prefer doing a BGA chip than soldering a QFP by hand (of course the machine does QFP too...)

Inspection, now, that's a different beast. I've thought about getting an old dental XRAY machine off eBay, but who knows if it's strong enough. One day I'll remember to take one of my boards along to my dentist and get them to take a snapshot of it. At the moment, I'm too busy building a laser-cutter anyway.