Maybe. I believe the media exploit from a year or two ago on Android was patched on phones assumed abandoned by OEMs.

Sadly, for many customers they rely on the goodwill of their OEM and telco to provide serious patches. I expect shops like Samsung, Lenovo/Moto, LG, Sony, and HTC to patch pretty much any phone sold in the past 3 years or so.

Budget buyers, no-name brands, etc are most likely going to be hacked constantly until they replace the phone. KRACK is bad but WPA-AES means they can't inject data and that's on top of TLS blocking that as well. Blueborn, on the other hand, is much more serious and could provide root remotely.

> First, there is no reason to believe that we can built robots that can reproduce themselves.

What? This is exactly the technology humans are trying to reach! We're already a significant way down this path!!

> Second, there is no evidence that we or anyone else can build intelligent machines, as the original story seems to presuppose.

Nature did it. We can do it.

> Third, biological organisms are so many orders of magnitude more efficient and flexible than machines that it barely makes sense to put them into the same qualitative category "form of life".

This whole conversation is about extrapolating on the cosmic scale. If you look at the path robotics has taken in the last century it does, as pointed out, actually support the premise of this article.

> Hint: A human consumes only about 2.9 kilowatt hours per day, the equivalent of 1-2 light bulbs ...

Not relevant. Once machines are replicating and repairing themselves they'll do exactly what we do and find other sources of energy.

Frankly I agree with you that it's hard to picture Transformers inhabiting the universe, but OP did make a really good point that extrapolation isn't even in the ballpark of refuting this clown. Honestly I'm shocked he didn't come back with that XKCD cartoon.

Just wanted to thank you for the links. I was especially pleased to find that Python is supported!

Thank you! You've given me reason to sit up and pay attention when 3 rolls around, I appreciate that.

I would recommend against showing the more diehard Photoshop fans that link, though. It won't get you anywhere because what it really needs to be is a list like this:

- GIMP has a plugin/feature for automatically generating normal maps from elevation data.

- GIMP has a perspective correction feature that is superior to Photoshops in that it...

- GIMP's 'save all layers' button saves all of the layers in your file into seperate files.

.. or something like that. In the list you gave me, points 1 through 4, and 7, are irrelevant if somebody already has Photoshop. Given its de-facto marketshare, that is likely.

5 is horribly overrated. Lots of artists can script, but few (if any) can make actual plugins or modify the source code. (Even if they do dig in to the code how do they maintain those features when a new version of GIMP comes along?) I do want to mention, though, that there's another reply to my original post that seems to have covered the scripting point. I haven't checked it out yet but given that scripting is something I do, I'm certainly interested in trying that out.

6 needs an extra line, something like: "its better than Photoshop's Batch feature because...."

10... actually this is a really good one. In fact, just before this thread started, I went and found the portable version and downloaded in. Why? Welp, if the scripting that Culture20 posted a link to turns out to be worthwhile for me, coupling that with a portable version of GIMP is *awesome*. What that means is I will be able to automate certain tasks AND keep a fresh install on my DropBox account so I can even use it off-site. This is 1 out of 9.5 (I gave partial credit to the source-code bit) and, as you can already see from other replies you've gotten, most are refutable.

I'm a little worried you might read my post and think that I'm trying to perpetuate the GIMP vs. Photoshop debate. I'm not, instead I'm trying to explain what needs to happen explanation-wise to get more Photoshop people to try GIMP out. I think there's this mentality that people should switch to GIMP and that's simply not true. If you got the professional Photoshop users to start using GIMP for certain tasks, you may find that some studios may find it worth their time to invest some development time into improving it. Given how Adobe has been dicking around with the licensing, this would be a good time to get that ball rolling. Start touting the unique features it has that shave man-hours off a project. If those features don't exist, then the team needs to start talking to people like me and finding out what else they need.

Care to run off a list of ways that "GIMP doesn't come close"? If it's really so bad, it shouldn't be that difficult to name at least a dozen or so... In actuality, I expect that enumerating the shortcomings of GIMP will not be in quantity, but in terms of a relatively small number of particularly desirable features that many may perceive as critically important in such software.

Hi, professional artist here. Your latter point, at least from my perspective, is correct. I know Photoshop really well, but since I make my living doing this work I am not biased in a way that'd prevent me from using a free tool. Let me be extra clear: It would hurt me to be fanboyishly loyal to be any particular app. I do pick up and mess with GIMP from time to time, but it has two critical omissions from Photoshop that make it unusable in my field. First, it lacks adjustment layers. Second, it lacks Smart Objects.

These are both features intended to do non-destructive editing of imagery. Let's say you have a tree with green leaves. You can create a Hue/Saturation 'adjustment layer' that will turn all the green pixels beneath it blue. If you put a picture of a different tree below that layer, its leaves would turn blue, too. If you took that tree and made it a 'smart object', you'd effectively be snapshotting that image and every operation you do causes it to regenerate itself. In other words, if you shrank a Smart Object down, then scaled it back up again, you'd get all its original detail back.

If you're creating imagery it doesn't take long for these two features to change your workflow in such a way that you gain a HUGE time savings. In fact I have created several templates to speed up the generation of images I do that I just plain cannot do in GIMP. Realistically speaking that is enough man-hours lost that I'd actually make a greater profit paying for Photoshop than I would saving the cost of the license in favor of GIMP.

With that said, I'd be *very* happy if you told me that version 3 would add these features. I'd also be very happy if somebody could tell me what GIMP does that Photoshop doesn't. It's free. if it shaves man-hours off my work, then load me up with the tips. I ain't gonna switch, but I ain't above using both.

But the suite of google apps aren't (maps, gmail, access to the market, etc). Google has tons of leverage.

I think the obvious solution here is to put in a simple skinning API and let the devs go nuts with it. Sense, TW, etc would just be apk's that skin the GUI elements. End users should be able to disable this if they wish.

Google could use its muscle to make this happen. Shame they won't. In the meantime, the released stats show a big move from android to iphone because people seem to prefer Apple's way of doing things. Heck, I had a phone with a published security vulnerability and it took almost 12 months to patch it. That's 100% unacceptable.

Yeah, its the whole anti-gay agenda that bothers rational people about the SA as well as they're close relations to their own evangelical arm and partners.

I give to secular charities, thank you very much.

Don't bother with this crowd. These guys clearly have no practical experience with Exchange and are the same people who have been yelling "ZOMG POSTFIX AND EVOLUTION/CHANDLER/THUNDERBIRD WILL KILL OUTLOOK" 10+ years ago.

As much as I dislike defending my vendors, I have to say the Exchange is surprisingly nimble and the number of devices I can support with a very modest server is pretty surprising. The idea that you're getting 10x the number of users on similiar hardware with a similiar featureset is the same bullshit these FOSS guys have been peddling for years. I just with the FOSS crew could write a usable, supported, efficient Exchange/Activesync replacement. That product doesn't exist and the current crop are all nightmares. Heh, there's a reason why they won't let you test this junk.

Considering no US money is being spent on this plant and they have bought a Delaware plant for stage II, my comment on your ignorance still stands.

Tesla managed to get around this issue by buying a retired Toyota plant in the US as a stopgap the same way these guys are using Finland as a stopgap.

You can argue whether or not the DOE should be making these investments, but not finding a facility here in the US is perfectly understandable. Regardless, in a year or two they'll be in Delaware and Tesla will move to its permanent factory in Cali. Yet guys like you dont give two shits about this, because you just want to complain about the government, not really understand or care how electric car investment works, or why certain decisions are made. Took yer jerbs, indeed.

This is too informative and logical for slashdot. Please instead stick to right-wing libertarian talking points, anti-government rhetoric, and stick to as much Ayn Rand as possible. Thanks!

The idea that this is a little more complex than "they too our jerbs" or "damn federal government is a scam" is too much for most people here. Just look at the comments.

Facts and reasonable discussion don't get ad impressions. Uninformed commentators on hot button issues do.

>This cancer is not "perfectly treatable".

Except this particular cancer was relatively easily treatable with surgery.

>And Jobs seemed to have waited with surgery only until it was clear that the tumour wouldn't shrink.

How was it going to shrink exactly? The homeopathic bullshit he was engaged in wasn't going to do anything anyway. He signed his own death warrant.

>But yes, maybe he would have lived longer if he hadn't waited. Maybe not.

All facts point to yes, he would have. Oh well, that's his decision. I can't stop people from killing themselves, but we can at least use him as a cautionary tale for those who are entranced by woo medicine.

Jobs accuses everyone of theft. He did it with MS and he did it with Google. Shame he was such an IP and patent fascist.

He was your typical American CEO. He's all take, mine-mine-mine, and fuck you. The fact that the base of all his OS's are built on open principles and open source doesn't matter to him. He's allowed to take and he's allowed to own ideas like sorting with a linked list, but no one else.

>Why is it so hard to accept that human actions can have consequences ?

Because big business and conservative ideologues don't want to pay the bills. Its the same with fighting the EPA. We're destined to fight this battle every few years because the conservative noise machine is so powerful and its followers are unusually credulous.

Its so silly. Just the other day I was using Apache Tomcat and Java and then later making a flowchart in Visio. Later I was using Firefox and Silverlight and chatted on Skype. Oh, I had to upload a large file using Filezilla, but only after scanning it with ClamAV to be safe. Last week, I was updating the FCKeditor in Drupal while chatting on Pidgin.

But Libreoffice! Ugh, what a silly name!

Look dude, just because you're scared of anything that sounds remotely foreign doesn't mean your position is valid outside of a Tea Party convention. Hell, considering most open source types think "The Gimp" is a perfectly acceptable name for software, Libreoffice is quite the step up.

>Current Speech recognition technology is still at the babbling three year old stage

Hold on here, I agree that AI is in the gutter for the foreseeable future, but I use google voice recognition several times a day and its absolutely amazing. It seems to understand my context and gets my voice to text right a lot more often than it gets it wrong.

Its not perfect, but its way past the level of a three year old. Right now, it beats typing on the virtual keyboard. If apple matches this quality then I can really see a revolution in how people interact with their smartphones, at least when it comes to voice to text vs keyboards.