They could take lessons from Bush on removal of private rights

How little you know about both the "religious types" and atheists as well. While I will admit that there are some "pure" atheists that don't accept any religion at all, there are certainly some self-professed atheists who exhibit a display of worship for some things that in almost every aspect but formal profession... sometimes even engaging in a sort of formal religious ceremony.

I've also seen some narcissistic behavior from many self-professed atheists, but then again I've seen that even from those who have professed religious beliefs. The more public you find the preachers, the more you find this tendency as well, so it isn't surprising that it becomes something to attack in terms of being critical of organized religion. To say that atheists are immune from this kind of behavior simply ignores human psychology altogether.

BTW, the correlation between religion and the persecuted groups was not just incidental, it was essential and explicit in the case of both the Chinese and Russian programs of extermination. I suppose I can't convince you otherwise, but for somebody else reading this, look up your history. You will be shocked... except for those kind of folks who are also German holocaust deniers. Instead of sending folks into concentration camps, Russia simply marched whole villages to the Pacific Ocean at gunpoint.... from the Ukraine, in January, without food or drink other than what they found enroute. Needless to say, few got past the Ural mountains, if even they got that far.

The difference between what Russia did and what Germany did during WWII was that Russia didn't bother with things like keeping records of who died. The Germans, on the other hand, kept detailed records of their genocide so they end up being considered the bad guys of history and the Russians as "liberators".

there is certainly some truth to this. If the cell tower's antennas are high enough and directional enough, it could just be shooting right over your head annoyingly. If it's still not working farther out though, then there is certainly an issue.

Somebody mod him up.

Of course the smartest thing to do would have been to never engage in Internet Explorer specific time wasting hacks to begin with. Many of us recognized this truth at the beginning and did not bother going there. Every minute another designer, coder spent doing browser specific hacks is a complete waste of time and money.

Same is true for Active X BS. Another Microsoft specific blunder like .NET. When will they ever learn.

The real story with the stats is not IE or FF, but Chrome, steadily climbing. I currently do not use Chrome and I WILL NEVER go to an IE browser, ever. It just is NOT an option. I will consider moving from FF to Chrome, Opera or one of the other 100 browser options out there. Yes there are over a hundred others...

IE is not an option any more. Firefox might find itself blacklisted as well if they can not get a handle on taking over a Linux desktop's processor. I use to think the Microsoft memory creep was bad, wow. I am sticking with Firefox for now, love it, but All the Microsoft BS bleeding into the Linux platform via Flash, .NET, Wine, Java, Active X and now Moonlight, is getting really, really old.

As far as making Web not war, open source never fired the first shot. Give me 7 years of changed behavior, based on your ACTIONS, not marketing BS FUD, and perhaps then I will consider a Microsoft product again.

Microsoft, Adobe You have lost my TRUST, time to earn it back. First you must try....just not seeing it.

This is GREAT news. And I do not even have to mention European, Asia or Africa stats.

40% to 60% usage is way below what it use to be. Didn't IE usage hit either 80% or 90% at one time? Regardless IE usage is trending the right way, down.

So the problem is some dev head developed in Active X and now you are stuck with IE. 6. I hate IE 6, but you need to blame the development weenies that stupidly used Active X. There is a reason that many people did not use what was "easiest" and start using Active X. Same is true for Adobe Flash....hello! Its easier, not better.

Great post and first hand actual experience. The only kind that is ultimately respectable as too much marketing FUD gets in the way. (Both Java and CMS come to mind with respects to marketing FUD)

Java will have its place, just not everywhere! Java will never be faster than alternative solutions that are optimized, just accept it. And reusable code is great, but not if it is recreating code that already works and exists in a faster lower level on the server. I learned this the hard way when writing MVC controllers in PHP, sorry but why do I need to re-write functionality that exists already in apache and http in Object Oriented PHP...of course the MVC is going to be slower...

I like that you took the time to benchmark and get the facts first hand. Cuts through the BS that people always throw out there. Yes language X is faster if you spend thousands of dollars on extra memory and memory cache tools that you do not make available to language Y, another duh moment there.

To date, no .NET solution or IIS server solution can touch Linux and better solutions. No amount of wining, no pun intended, can change the facts of this. And as for scaling the same is true. Else you would see Microsoft servers at one of the many financial exchanges around the world, but they lost their last one last year didn't they. Another duh moment.

This is what I also know to be true, if you are in the market, for years, first using that, how the heck could another company get "trademark" over you, no matter when you and they file. Even if the St Louis company files (for trademark) after Microsoft, they have been using "Bing" for almost a decade longer. Its game over.

As for enforcing their rights to the term, they are doing it now.

And do not forget that there are two other players involved per the article as well. Per the article:

So today we know about three possible claimants. Do you think we will hear about two more tomorrow? Three? Four? After all the term "bing" has been a huge part of the RAP scene since the beginning; probably apart of some other scene before RAP. This is all too funny, or err ironic.

I call it ironic, considering how Microsoft is quick to threaten other companies, (Tom Tom, etc...) most of which if they stood up to Microsoft, WOULD WIN!, but fear the protracted legal fees to fight, thus Microsoft usually wins by default, which is what they are counting on in 98% of the cases.

I am still looking for the company they sue, that stands up to them and causes their flimsy legal house of cards to fold and drop. One day and when that happens, as Microsoft knows all too well, their ability to enforce their BS patent trolling will die as well, at least for that patent, get enough of them to fail and it will be game over for that Microsoft side business as well. Microsoft knows this and they are selectively selecting companies like TomTom they know they can bully, because without threats, they lose. The company that can afford to stand up to this BS patent trolling on Microsoft's part will win! Many of us will celebrate. For the company that fights, even negative advertising is still advertising and they will get a boat load of it! After all Microsoft's PR machine works in overdrive spreading their FUD legal arguments, spread that FEAR, UNCERTAINTY and DOUBT, losers.

Even better, we are starting to learn today how much GPL and open source code has been included in their new software offerings (Vista, Windows 7, Office, etc...). After all they did not invent the term kernel and we all know it! I keep seeing more terminology that originated with Unix, Linux, GNU, FOSS and Open Source, creeping into Microsoft PR and news releases...its comical! Guess they have realized that if you can not beat them, join them!

Its Ironic when their Copyright/Patent trolling legal business tactics bite them in the butt! And they can afford to pay, can't they!

If Microsoft never attempted these BS legal tactics with other players in the market, I would have sympathy, however that shipped sailed long ago. And that ship has sailed, many, many times. I hope Microsoft is held accountable, as they should be.

... but didn't the tobacco industry tell us for years that smoking poses no cancer risk?

For this reason, I'll remain skeptical about a position of denial taken by an industry that stands to lose billions should a link between their product and harm caused to the general public be found.

For the record, I don't support either stance yet, but I do remember the old-school phones from the late 80's to early 90's being differentiated by power and proximity to a person for safety reasons (I sold phones from 1990 to 1996 in a car audio shop). IIRC, ratings were .6W for hand-held phones, 1.3W for transportables (bag phones), and a full 3W for phones mounted in-car, with the tranciever, ideally, located in the trunk of the car.

I think there are some pretty serious structural problems with TPM. In part it's because they choose to introduce Anakin as a child, which, to my mind, makes a lot of what happens in the second half of the film more like some silly Disney film, where no matter how adult the situations (ie. flying a space fighter to blow up a huge enemy space cruiser/battle station), you have to insert a kid into it. Jar Jar is a symptom of that too. Star Wars was never what I'd call a grown up franchise,

Yeah, you do have a good point, though I think that could have been handled in a way that wasn't silly. Like a good child actor who played a melancholy, quiet Anakin. Jar Jar without the ridiculous accent.

voice was grating and incomprehensible at best.

My son and I imitate J^2's voice style all the time. To each his own, but I find it a fun and funny character, kind of like a stoned Kermit with taffy-like limbs, ears, and tongue. One expects the universe to have plenty of strange and stupid creatures. Perhaps by alien standards, us humans are really odd. Male gonads gotta be quite the silly sight for aliens with well-packed giblets, for example.
   

Seems obvious, but it isn't. The problem is that people tend to write software for free for themselves to use, and they write software for money for others to use. And most FOSS projects are not started by "the community", they are started by one very motivated person (or a few max) and then eventually snowball into a real FOSS "communbity project".

Most of the free (as in beer - there are very few open source, since Apple restricts distribution anyway) apps on the iPhone are either trivial, demos, or supporting services (Facebook, Google, Pandora, etc). Games especially are rarely free, since few people have any interest (or financial resources) in spending months developing a decent game without getting paid for it.

Anyway... I think the original question was a very good one, but maybe just needs to be restated: what needs to happen/change in the development tools, community, or something else for open source projects to flourish on the Android platform the way they have on the PC?

Well Mr. Historian, are you absolutely sure every prisoner in every country is guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted? What society in history never imprisoned an innocent person? What society in history has been so unwilling to make a mistake that they do nothing? Assuming you can think of one, how long did it survive?

It's called country music.

Well, technically it could be represented by sine waves, but the sine waves refused to represent THAT!

My point was the using the equals sign results in more readable code.

A class is not an abstraction over a set of data; a class is encapsulation of behavior. The data is only around to be able to peform that behavior.

If you want to be anal about things, there's nothing wrong with properties, because technically propertiers are methods anyway. There's nothing wrong with a plain setter either. Its changing state, and I'm sure there are plenty of methods in Java which only record a value for the object to use at a later time.

As far as your ambiguity is concerned, its really irrelevent. How do you know if a method is going to return quickly or not? Is the method just doing a quick few (but important) lines, or is going to take an hour to process? Given the state you call the method is, both could be true. Why do you think properties somehow change this fact? If the docs don't tell you, you'd still have to look at the code.

Your last statement demonstrates where you are going wrong; a class is supposed to be a black box. You ask it to do something, perhaps by also giving it some data. How it does it should not be important to you, only that it does what it says it does. You learn about what it does via documentation, not by looking at its internals.