On the contrary, malice is the intent to do harm. Without intent, there is no malice, only harm.

Yah, was about to post about the same. Spidey Super Stories are very good. Simple stories, usually two per comic, with a structure as much like an episode of Scooby-Doo as anything else. There are also kids involved helping Spiderman. I bought almost a complete set of them for my 4-year-old superhero-obsessed nephew a few years back on eBay and he's worn them out for years. You can also just read the regular comics and bowdlerize the content a bit where needed as you go along. I was surprised at how violent even some of my pre-Frank Miller Marvel silver age books were when thinking about them from a little kid's perspective for the first time. And all the taunting isn't so great either. It seems like half the dialogue is taunting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spidey_Super_Stories

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 has no face buttons at all. The earlier (7") Galaxy Tab had four face buttons (not one), and none of them looked anything at all like home buttons on iOS devices. Sure looks like Samsung changed (at least) "a single thing"...

As Notorious B.I.G. put it, Mo Money Mo Engineers. I'm just finishing a book that has a long section on this exact topic and I'll karma whore with a link to this excellent paper with handy charts:

http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/pr_rev2.pdf
"Skill Biased Financial Development: Education, Wages and Occupations in the U.S. Financial Sector." Scroll down to Figure 6 in particular, which compares the salaries of people with graduate degrees when they go into finance or engineering. They were roughly equitable for decades and then split in the late 80s. Currently, controlled for education level, people with grad degrees make 110K in finance vs 80K for engineers. Even the tight tech job market of the dot-com years didn't close the gap much. The paper also has good stuff on job risk and other factors.

After talking with plenty of people in both sectors, I was surprised the bankers are quick to admit that it's a "quants beget quants" situation. The more sophisticated analysis and arcane devices they come up with, the greater the demand for math and similar hard science PhDs to figure them out, improve them, and keep up with the competition. (MIT and other schools are now offering Financial Engineering, of course.) The managers of the banking companies have even less understanding of these things than the average Fortune 500 tech CEO has about the cutting edge engineering going on in the company he runs. They can only go on what the models and results say, which, considering how unregulated these markets are, means they are basically testing powerful new drugs on the general population.

All of this research hasn't made me think more regulation is the solution, however, at least not how people take that to mean. Monitoring and making data public is essential. Even the banks would appreciate an outside agency that could provide perspective on an industry that is still basically a black box even to the participants. (Current derivative market: $1.4 quadrillion. Enjoy.) That's really what is lacking, sunlight and the context to understand what is really happening system-wide. Goldman and others figure out ways to shave points here and there, but they're making money on concessions, not on the movie tickets.

Getting vaguely back on topic, the conclusion of the book I'm working on is that this is a cultural problem, not just a money problem. Risk aversion is at a peak after building for decades and the relative sure thing of a good salary on Wall St is beating out the chance to change the world or become the next [insert tech billionaire here] in Silicon Valley. This isn't about the current downturn, it's been going on for decades. The American appetite for risk is disappearing. In the same industry, this is why we see half of Valley startups being launched by immigrants these days. Not just because they are qualified, which of course they are, but because they have the entrepreneurial spirit.

Two of the book's co-authors are VC and angel veterans (Max Levchin, Peter Thiel) and they argue strongly that this is having serious effects even among those staying in tech. Instead of working on a big idea for years, some of the best and brightest are cashing out in various ways. Selling their IP, going with a quick-to-market improvement instead of the Big Idea, etc. It's hard to criticize someone for making a buck, but cumulatively it's a slow-moving disaster for innovation -- both by having less in tech and by having more on Wall St.

Your argument would hold more weight if it weren't for the fact that AT&T has had many negative effects on iOS despite the fact that iOS isn't open. (recent example: tethering) So yes, carriers can exploit the openness of Android to screw their customers, but they also can, and have, make Apple do their bidding. So it appears that the issue of whether your carrier will screw up your phone is orthogonal to whether the OS is "open". In that case, I'll take open.

A few things off the top of my head:

Install an alternate input method (eg: Swype), run an emulator that lets you run downloaded software (eg: Ftodo 64 or NESoid), automatically adjust volume settings based on criteria like location, time or phone orientation (eg: Locale, Off the hook or Volume timer), automatically upload photos/videos to sharing services (eg: Pic push).

Don't forget that it wasn't too long ago that you couldn't even play Pandora in the background on the iPhone, and even now the multitasking on iOS is bizarrely restricted (eg: you can do arbitrary things in the background as long as you also audio).

Yes it is. Type alt-+

Does he have a time machine? How did he write an article about XML that predates HTML by years when HTML predates XML?

Holy run-on sentence Batman!

Periods are a renewable resource. Feel free to use them.

Using that logic you could ignore the developer agreement restrictions entirely by having virtually all of your code in a "library". Your application would then be just an entry point that calls into the library.

Any libraries you link into your app are part of your app and are subject to the same restrictions.

The developer agreement says "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine". There are no provisions for using other languages for any part of your application. Need to use a numerical library written in Fortran, or a parser written in ANTLR? Too bad.

I love car analogies. No, Ford does not prohibit you from installing a Chevy engine in your Mustang. They also do _NOTHING_ to enable you.

Actual technical limitations are fine. Artificially imposed legal/contractual limitations aren't.

More specifically: I don't expect Apple to provide a compiler for my favorite language (which is not Flash, I should add). If they only provide an Objective-C compiler I'm fine with that. On the other hand, if someone develops a compiler that can convert code from my favorite language into Objective-C, then I am not okay with Apple saying "you can't use that tool - you have to hand-write your code in Objective-C".

I don't know that I'd go as far as to say that what Apple is doing isn't within their rights, but that doesn't mean I have to like what they're doing. They're handicapping their developer base by limiting the tools they can use. Some developers will stay and put up with the handicaps, and others will leave. I have a hard time believing that that will work out for them in the end.

You're thinking of Macs. This is about iPhone OS.

So if I write a C compiler in [insert slowest language you can think of here] then C programs compiled with that compiler would be no faster than [insert slowest language you can think of here]? Sorry, no, that isn't the way it works.

Something similar happened to me over a month ago. Two legit Skype charges on the credit card I have used with them. Identical, for a small amount. I hadn't made any purchases and was concerned about fraud. (Though I wondered why someone who had gotten my card info would spend it on $20 of Skype credit.)

I talked with the Skype support people, who were understanding and responsive, but not informative. I canceled my card, changed passwords, etc. Skype reversed the charges without my having to get MasterCard to do it. But they said only they would "investigate" how these charges appeared and would not give me any more information than that when I asked. So no idea if it was a Skype accident, fraud, or what. I don't use the automatic billing option.