zdouglas

I was mainly referring to the implication by omission that Blizzard had nefarious intent with its watermarking. Though, my comment was itself inflammatory; karma's a jerk.

I find the title inflammatory and ignorant; I would downvote this if I could.

While I applaud the tenacity in prospecting and divulging the methods at which Blizzard has employed to create such "tracking" "watermarks," I highly doubt this is to discourage or indict anyone. Quite frequently, screenshots are used during support requests.

As the author states, "we [...] verified that there is no pattern included in high quality screenshots." I find this highly suggestive that Blizzard was rather interested in an easier way to debug their program, and the mode slipped out in production.

There's a work around, please remove your tinfoil hats.

First, thanks for making this!

Just a little note, I think there's a bug in your profile picture retrieval: asker & answerer have different usernames but the same pictures; e.g. John Skeet & Remus Rusanu on p. 9.

> _I just want a device that works, and upgrades easily._

As a loyal TMo G2 (stock Froyo) owner, I wholeheartedly agree with that opinion. As other replies called out, TMo has a knack for luring you in and never releasing OS updates.

That said, I'm very happy running my "legacy" Froyo OS: My GPS is fast and spot-on, data pipe is 4G-wide, and my bit-laggy camera app is supplemented by dedicated hardware for anything cleaner than "LOL quality."

+1 (Funny.)

Edit & continue is available with the V8 engine as well, so add JavaScript to the list of languages being unrighteously ignored.

> The only way I could justify this is if I began developing a free replacement for that very program.

If the Oracle suit taught me anything, it's to be careful when using APIs.

> Jason [...] does not understand or respect his responsibilities in his business relationship.

This is indisputably the most succinct account of what has transpired. I would have presumed there to be laws governing a minimal merchant balance -- placed on Square, then in turn passed on to its merchants -- to be maintained in good standing, good faith, and so as to be lawful.

Additionally, I find a poetic irony in his account with his own bank:

> At this point my bank has levied an insufficient funds fee on my account, however I was [surprisingly] able to [...] get the charges reversed.

To which I'm led to laugh: "So, Jason, you want it your way on both sides of the argument?"

Arguably, such an obtuse implicit cast is failure at string comparison.

This is the binary-vs-plaintext argument all over again. Java's been through this once before, and they settled on .jar files containing bytecode (the author's ASTs, etc.), and human-readable source.

To jinshaun's point: I wouldn't mind requiring an IDE, but it should absolutely not be required to run in a window system. The overwhelming majority of administration is conducted over CLI, and if you've never had to hotfix something on an X-less production server, you're either a deployment rock star or lying to yourself and others.

I lastly want to reiterate that programming languages are "languages" by definition, and their syntax and terminology are what makes them universal. Using "dingbats" to represent functionality inherently breaks down the out-of-band communication of ideas. "Add a left-pointer-finger to pass the value to the caller of the function." WAT?

I greatly appreciate their honesty, prompt timing, and engineering lesson. That's above the call of duty, even for the best distributors.

Palpability is in the eye of the beholder. There's a lot of talk in the GH issue comments dismissing GH's "obvious" failure of not using `attr_accessible`.

[4tehlulz](http://insanepenguin.com/goto.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fejohn.org...)

A machinist I knew for an airline told me a story about how the avionics in plains in the late 80's could land autonomously in fair weather. The problem wasn't that the systems weren't smart enough, but that the tarmacs weren't robust enough to handle 'perfect' performance every time. After thousands of planes touched down within feet of each other, the pavement would crack and the systems couldn't be configured to inject variability to compensate.