FileMakerFeller

wg45678 said:

"…people who aren't criminals shouldn't be afraid of being surveilled."

Let's shorten that to "……people who aren't criminals shouldn't be afraid of <insert noun or passive verb here>." 

That's a form of what everyone says just before somebody infringes your civil rights. Every freaking time. I'm 65 and I've heard all my life with regard to the police, interrogations, bugging, etc. How can this total idiot not know that? 

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on him not understanding it."

A hat has a brim, the fish is a bream, and you have just learned of a homonym.

zimmie said:

In the trailer, they're clearly using some kind of cloning to have multiple copies of the emperor (Brother Dawn, Brother Day, and Brother Dusk are all clones at different ages). Rather like Duncan Idaho in the Dune series.

Dude! Spoilers! :P

Rayz2016 said:

larryjw said:

I think Apple's guideline rejecting executing code is needs to be eliminated -- an emulator is an emulator. 

In reality, executing code in an emulator is what programs do. For example, PDF files are themselves computer programs which instruct and iPad how to render a PDF visually.

Isn't programs as data and data as programs the basic principle of computing? 

No, PDF is a document format. It doesn’t run, it’s rendered, same with music files. But that’s not the real problem. 

The emulator allows apps to run code that can’t be seen or examined by Apple, and that has always been against the rules. PDFs, the other hand, are pretty benign. It would be quite hard to piggyback an App Store in a PDF document. 

So the real problem is the lack of consistency in applying the rules. This should never have  been allowed in the App Store in the first place, so they’re going to look like real dicks for removing it now. 

PDFs can contain Javascript, so while it would be a little tricky I don't think it would be too difficult for a determined programmer. Plus you've got the PostScript angle, which is itself a programming language.

The thing is, Apple have built a reputation for being trustworthy. Nobody believes that a company can be trustworthy, so they assume it's all smoke and mirrors because, hey, even the President of the United States was untrustworthy and you can't get more important than that. /s


Apple has justifiable reasons for restricting repairs to trained personnel, but they also have unjustifiable reasons for it. The decision that needs to be made is whether or not the level of harm from the existing situation is great enough to justify changing, recognising that unforeseen consequences can impact the balance of harm vs benefit. And given the energy stored in batteries these days, the potential harms are great indeed, both to consumers/users and the corporations that manufacture the devices - look at what happened to Samsung after the "explodophone" disaster, and imagine what could have happened had Samsung been an American company.