Yeah, Apple can't do anything about it on these older devices, because it was an exploit in the bootrom. You can't modify ROM (hence the "O"). There's no way for them to fix the exploit on older devices. What they can, and did do, however, was fix the exploit so that the same hole couldn't be exploited on future devices. One such exploit is commonly referred to as "24kPwn", and it has been patched in the newer devices (3GS and newer).

There is, the fact that Apple continues to patch these holes in their software to prevent exploits that allow installing other operating systems. If they're so "open", why are they actively combating the issue?

Even if (or, when) Apple rejects it, they can put it on a Cydia repository. When Google Voice came to the iPhone many people jailbroke for it. I'm sure Apple is weighing in these consequences, but I'd almost like to see them reject it just so more people jailbreak.

Nope. Wait for jailbreak. (Isn't it annoying that you have to hack your iDevice to make it do what it should already?)

At least you knew it's not a big truck.

TheRaven64, I'm interested to find out that Adobe's Flash Player is implemented in a Smalltalk VM, but couldn't find any verification of this. Do you have any links showing the Smalltalk connection to the flash player?

No thanks, I waste enough time in school already. Of my 6 classes (3 of which are AP) and can already get my normal day's worth of homework done during downtime before I leave school. If anything, get better teachers and better courses. Don't waste money on longer school hours.

No, you're not :)

It's astounding how the group that produces and supports Conficker can do so many things correctly, from cryptographically signed updates distributed P2P to blocking cleaning software and DNS access to antivirus vendors, it's pretty spectacular.

They definitely get the easy way out though, with such a narrowly defined scope. Without having to mess with users' input, GUIs, and all sorts of other peculiarities, it's a lot easier to get your code well-secured with malware than if you were writing a traditional application.

The problem you're describing is known in the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) world as content-based recommendation (CBR). There are a number of ways to do it, but they're all based on measuring similarity.

The idea is that people perceive songs as similar based on the characteristics they have, which are termed features. By representing a song's features in a model you can compare the models to see how "distant" they are, and then choose songs from a set that are least-distant. The work that my research group is pursuing represents songs based on timbral features (MFCCs) and rhythmic features (bpm, pulse clarity, syncopation, etc).

If you're interested in the approach, see http://paragchordia.com/research/cbr.html

As a student of mathematics, I say that it is much more difficult to manipulate data to legitimately suggest different results that most would suspect. As they say, the numbers never lie. Of course, the statisticians might lie. Or the statistics might lie, in the sense that there is always a chance of a biased study. But the numbers never imply causation, merely correlation.