I'd rather have more accurate models than more precise models.

Bad models don't get any better by adding decimal places.

I expect that accurate modelling of something as complex as climate is really, really hard.

Indeed not. And they are quite deliberately absent -because I am very determined to resist the temptation to trade argument over features - because that's not the point I am making and never has been

Let me try and summarise how I see it.

1) You have made it clear what you like and find important.

2) I have said that those things simply do not matter to me, and that some of thing I actively dislike. I have read and understood the arguments in favour, and decided (as is my right) that I reject them.

Note I've NOT said "you're wrong" or "They're crap" - or anything similar. Merely that, to me, they are worthless or worse. And also that it would appear that I am far from being alone.

3) I've said there are other things which I do value which I don't find with Apple and do find elsewhere.

I have not the slightest doubt that these things will be of little or no value to you and, indeed, you will actively dislike some of them and reject all the arguments I offer in their favour. So much so that I concede the point without you even having to make it.

So let me go back to my key point: I will not buy a product where the choice of applications I can run on that product is limited to a "walled garden".

This choice is for both practical and philosophical reasons. It matters a very great deal to me on both counts.

I am fully aware of some of the implications and consequences of this choice. I believe I can cope with and handle those consequences and have been doing so successfully for some considerable time now.

During that time - I have seen, experienced and had to deal with some of those consequences. They were manageable. Those experiences have not (even remotely) caused me to question or change my views on that core underlying choice to reject "The Walled Garden".

I am also aware I am not alone in having views like this.

So, in practice, the iOS Style of App. Store is indeed a feature which attract many, and it will also repel many others - even people who have thought about it and heard all the arguments in favour. Ultimately who are you to say that they are wrong?

Put simply just one more case of "One Size does NOT fit all".

This is exactly what I meant by "controversial" and "divisive".

Fairly clearly you rate some of the things you listed as "important". Great. I'm really pleased it works for you.

And yet not only do I attach little or no value to them, I regard some of them as actively negative - the very opposite of a feature. For *ME* they are worthless and worse (a judgement reserved for me to make) - although I also know I am far from alone in this.

Meanwhile if I bothered to explain some of the features I find attractive in (for example) the Android Marketplace, I suspect you would attach little or no value to them and might also find some to be a negative feature.

We have a different outlook, we care about different things, we are probably working under different constraints, it's quite likely we are trying to achieve subtly different things, how we work is probably different too. Real differences which lead to real differences in the value judgements and conclusions we reach.

When I look at your reply I note you seem to have completely missed every single one of the top five key "features" offered by Android that I value the most. Given what I have just said above, this is not really surprising to me.

I'm not presuming to tell you what value judgements you should reach, please return that respect.

Yes. Apple has a Applications Market which is doing well. And there are others which are also doing well.

These are interesting times. Presuming to predict how things will look in even 5 years time is just indulging in glorified fortune telling and is likely to prove about as prescient as scrying would be.

Yes. There are real advantages. Which I believe to be worthless to me (and to many people).

There are also real advantages to the alternative approach. Advantages I happen to value very highly.

So to me (and at least some, probably many others), as a feature it's useless.

So, more generally, as a USP with which to take on the world it's erm... "flawed". If I were trying to sell iOS I wouldn't put it anywhere near the top of the list. I'm not sure I would even mention it.

I rather suspect that the choice of a heavy suspension for a downhill racing bike is more objective than subjective.

But the choices around App Stores are largely subjective. The choice of an App store and associated choices of business model are a complex set of trade-offs. Whichever choice you make you arguably gain in some areas and loose in others. Which of these matter the most to you depend on you: who you are, how you think, what you know, what you want to do and what other constraints you face.

In practice this means the Apple App store and how it works is a "controversial" or even "divisive" feature within the true meaning of those words.

I actively do not want a "regulated application marketplace".

That iOS lives in that walled Garden (and what Apple choose to do with their power) is the primary reason why I am not remotely interested in iOS.

In that case it's lucky the method in the article doesn't gain root access, and can do nothing beyond what the "shell proxy" app can do.

I've now read the original article a couple of times and gone through the main comments a couple of times. ...and I am confused. It seems that many people commenting have not actually bothered reading the original article to see what was being discussed there - and have jumped straight in with comments about what they (mostly wrongly) think or assume the article was about instead.

Many of the skills discussed in the original articles are about avoiding and/or managing a diverse range of real-world problems of the kind still regularly seen today.

1) Andrews & Arnold Ltd don't have 4 million numbers. They have fewer than 100,000 geographic numbers, plus a few tens of thousands of non-geographic numbers, assigned to them by the UK telephony regulator. I suppose it's possible that they could have agreed to use more through another provider.

2) Trapping a few telemarketers and tormenting them for entertainment purposes is fine, as is making money for receiving these calls, but what will happen in practise is that they will answer a lot more "wrong numbers" from regular people who have mis-dialed. If they search their existing CDRs for rejected calls to their unused numbers they will almost certainly find that there are a few numbers that already receive many call attempts because the number actually dialed is similar to some other genuine number. Recording and using mistaken calls from "your mum" for entertainment purposes and charging her for the privilege is somewhat immoral in my opinion.

3) The correct behaviour is to reject unused numbers with an NU indication. Anything else is antisocial and profiteering, but they would be welcome to do this on their freephone numbers (where they are charged for the calls).

Note: I work for a telephone company that does have millions of numbers assigned, including many premium rate and pay-per-call numbers. We could make a significant amount of money from caller's mistakes, but that would not be right.

Sure. Bubblewrap too.

I haven't tried for a couple of years, but accessing voicemail by spoofing CLI certainly used to work on at least two UK mobile networks (N.B. I tested it using my own accounts).

Many people are not aware how easy it can be to spoof CLI in the UK.

It was kinda hoping nobody noticed, but it clearly heard one of the other robots saying "Butter Phingers".

You still need all the mechanism of the machine to transport hundreds of feet of film past the scanning head at a constant speed without breaking it and keeping it nicely spooled. If the 35mm film had sprockets perhaps they could have used the mechanism from an existing 35mm film projector instead of having to make their own constant speed mechanism for the sprocketless film.

The phototransistor (photodiode, CCD etc) method is a long established technique for playing back an optical analog sound track from film http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound-on-film and I can't see any particular need to reinvent the wheel for this. If they considered that the film was too fragile to pass through the machine more than once, it would not be difficult or expensive to have 8 phototransistors so that all the tracks could be played back and recorded digitally at the same time.

Poor reception means that the phone has to transmit at higher power to reach the cell base station.