This is pretty bad for an Ars Technica article. They usually do a good job examining both sides and avoid favoring one side heavily. This piece completely dismisses everything said by the other side. No mention of the possibility of raised fees, ignoring the burden on OSS developers, parroting Gruber's lines about how support Flash is hypocritical, etc. It's a sad day for the standard of Ars Technica's writing.

Is it just me, or are the people that constantly post "Hey everybody, this guy has a GIRLFRIEND!" far more annoying than the folks who mention their SO's? Dating someone isn't that big of a deal. It's not the people mentioning they've found someone that make it into an issue, it's the idiot who gets annoyed at their mention that makes it an issue.

What? I've used .apks to install a number of applications to my Android phone. I didn't have to do any jailbreaking to do so either, just tick a single checkbox. Are you seriously that ignorant, trolling, or did I just get whooshed?

They've posted about it on Hacker News, and yes it is word by word. They said they'd like to have better translation (Google Translate style), but it wouldn't be possible to do offline. Since part of the utility of this app is being able to use it in a foreign country when you're off the network, that would cripple it. It would also slow it down a good deal, as it would have to retrieve network results.

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm

"The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another."

Politics and the English Language should be required reading in schools.

(Yes, you may have seen me saying this elsewhere. It's worth repeating.)

It's as heavy on the UI configuration as you want it to be. I just used a default configuration and was done with it. Foobar2000 is to music players as Firefox is to web browsers: they can become a timesink or bloated, but it's basically your fault if they do.

They already had a guy for that; he was played by Harrison Ford.

Do you have any numbers to support this? Although government programs generally are horribly inefficient, do you have any actual data indicating that NASA is just as bad? You seem to be relying on the assumption that government programs are always wasteful inefficient messes to the nth degree. Private spaceflight seems like an interesting idea, and I know there are several companies already working towards it, but reaching another star is a long, long, long term investment. It seems to me that government funding is actually useful in cases where there is no immediate return for the investors. Otherwise, you're essentially relying on philanthropy, no?

"(X) is Dead" is just as unrealistic as "(X) is the Year of the Linux Desktop". I think the TFA is right that Linux may never gain a majority share, but that doesn't mean it's *dead*.

RSS readers. I scroll through the list and middle click the items that look interesting. I routinely wind up with 40, and occasionally have up to 60.