Apple keeping the carriers out of the phone operating system was by far the greatest contribution of the iPhone to the mobile market place, in my opinion. I'll take slavish obedience to Apple over slavish obedience to my carrier.

(And my carrier has never let me get away with anything so cheap as US$99/yr to develop and install whatever the hell I like on my phone - remember, Apple's restrictions all apply at the App Store's gates, as a tinkerer, I have no issues and no need to jailbreak my phone).

I guess, technically, bogans are a subset of real Australians.

And I'll glass any cunt that calls me a bogan.

That's only 10,000 combinations. Brute force script it. Don't bother testing for success, just blast 10,000 HTTP requests at them.

Feel free to adjust the original statement to "Macs (and the non-jailbroken iPhone) do not yet have any active viruses in the wild." I don't mind, I'm not here to attack or defend the iPhone.

I do find it interesting that a worm with limited scope and no stealthiness is still sufficiently active to attack new targets inside a short window of opportunity. One might say it's active in the wild, even :-)

Macs (and the iPhone) do not yet have any active viruses in the wild.

True, that. No self-replicating agents that infect host applications for iPhone or Mac.

But there are self-replicating agents that survive independent of host applications for the iPhone. The rickroll worm is still active and scanning network ranges frequently enough that you probably want to turn off 3G while you install sshd, so you have time to change the root password. And there's a more malicious but less common strain seen in the Netherlands that lifts banking credentials.

The particular vulnerability used by the jailbreak team is the type that's very commonly used to add a Windows host to a botnet, by injecting a malicious PDF or Flash object into an advertising network or through a hosted web exploit of some kind. It's disturbing to think that my iPhone could be added to a botnet by visiting a web site. It'd be pretty expensive to have my 3G connection flooded by spam delivery or a DoS attack. While I support the notion of jailbreaking, this is one hole I hope is closed very soon.

I also wonder if this problem applies to the Mac PDF software. Not necessarily true, different architectures and all, but possible.

It does mean you're carrying around that extra weight all the time, and your laptop has to accommodate both the extra size of the brick and the extra heat generated by it.

I'm gonna add to the masses praising Apple's laptop bricks. The magsafe connectors are great, but as a relatively frequent international traveller the swappable pins are a massive boon.

While it's true that the ocean is teeming with life, there's not so many human settlements out at sea, so an increase in the surface area of the oceans isn't really optimal for human life.

AGW means fewer humans can live on the planet at once. Care to volunteer your genetic line to be the fat that gets trimmed?

I don't really think the cost of supporting WP7 is likely to be met by the potential returns on the platform.

But if you really want to go there, and you really want to maximise code sharing, and you're OK with throwing away large feature sets of both platforms to achieve that, you can use C++ with #defines to work around the syntax differences for pointers. You can't use any of the other C++/CIL features, but then, neither can you use any of the Objective-C++ features.

I'm not defending Apple's policy. The Lemmings app was written in C, and does not fall afoul of that clause. I haven't seen a developer agreement for WP7, but if the platform itself forces you into vendor specific languages, it doesn't seem necessary to have it in legalese.

Dev environment, no. Code translator, no, if the project was originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript. Since it was written in C, it doesn't even come into play.

But bonus points for noting that Apple is fascist! Take that, The Man! Woo!

Sorry your boss sucks so bad, man.

They need to stop selling a product and start selling a service.

The product, a digital file, has no value. It costs nothing to make. Therefore, if you attempt to compete by selling your zero-cost item for less money than the other guy, you're in a race towards free. If the other guy has no production costs of offset, you lose. And there's no extra value you can add to a digital file that can't also be copied for nothing.

The service, distributing digital files, has value. The act of aggregating, recommending, categorising, and indexing digital files offers a convenience. You can charge for that service. iTunes charges per track. Some of these shadier places charge per month. Either way, the charge is really for the service, not the product.

The service itself can now compete based on its technical merits (imagine an iTunes store that wasn't locked to a tab-less embedded browser!) or on its content. Production costs are now an investment in providing the service with exclusive content. Costs sunk currently on buying chart positions become a marketing cost for the service, instead of the content.

The best thing about this is that iTunes has already proven that this service model works. It's been over two years since the iTunes music store passed Walmart to become the #1 retailer in the US. It's been over two years and the music distribution industry hasn't had the lightbulb turn on over their heads yet.

You can self-publish books to the iBookstore. When you can self-publish music to the iTunes store, the RIAA will die.

... you mean Disneyland?

The thing is, few people would ever pay a $2mil judgement. Most would be forced into bankruptcy. Many would be forced there by $54k - of the rest, most would be forced to sell their home to cover it.

I dunno about you, but in terms of generating fear, starting my life from scratch is nearly as bad as bankruptcy. I'd sooner boycott buying and pirating of RIAA labels than risk either one.

All well true, but I wonder why you think (pre-conviction) rapists and murderers aren't voters too? :-)

Sort of like the endless stream of touch-screen phones that launched in the wake of the iPhone, with vision-less product designers somehow thinking that it was touch alone that made the iPhone popular.

Except just copying the suck.

I expect next week we'll hear a leak about non-replaceable batteries.