Move the mouse cursor to the top of the screen and you get a title bar with an "X" button which really closes the program (at least in 8.1).

There's nothing I want more than an Internet-connected phone keeping a record of my location and sharing it with some random app publisher. Nothing could go wrong.

No, you can't look at the history of early transatlantic empires and try to learn any lesson that's relevant for space/interplanetary exploration, period.

That would be a valid point if human lifespan was in the millions of years. Unfortunately, the oldest verified person ever lived for ~122 years. Globally catastrophic asteroid strikes of the scale that killed dinosaurs don't happen very often. The last one happened 65 million years ago. So that's a red herring.

An astronomer estimated the chance of being killed by an asteroid as 1 in 700,000.

As natural disasters go, any person is far more likely to die from tsunamis, earthquakes and extreme weather events.

I rooted my Nexus 4 and my Kindle Fire HDX using Towelroot (on the Nexus 4 it is extremely easy to apply - just allow non-store apps and install tr.apk; on the Kindle, I had to install HDXposed, the Xposed framework and Google Apps before I could do that). IIRC it worked fine on Android 4.4 (despite scary warnings issued by Google, which can be safely ignored). But it doesn't work on Android 5. Last time I looked into it (a couple of months ago), there was not an easy way to root Lollipop - you had to back up your data and settings and re-flash.

Not gonna happen. Planned obsolescence and all that. On a related note, I hear VMware Player Unity mode is pretty much the same thing as XP mode, only better - haven't tried it yet.

Not particularly insightful; the vast majority of all government-backed money in existence is "digital" anyway - i.e. it doesn't exist in any analog form (such as coins and notes).

Talking about VNC, it is worth mentioning that WM5/6 has a working, usable VNC SERVER, at least since 2007. I am still waiting for one for Android (I've tried the free ones on my rooted Nexus 4 - they're sluggish to the point of unusable).

The HTC Desire HD has those old-school virtues (SD card and removable battery), and I don't think it's pricey now. Of course it has to be bought second-hand or refurbished. If you can settle for even lower resolution, you can get an even cheaper HTC Tattoo or even older stuff.

You might want to have a look at VS 2008 and the .NET compact framework - I seem to remember the Express (free) version of VS 2008 supports it. It's pretty easy to develop. Expect far from fast performance and no easy way to scale across screen resolutions, but it should be good enough for things like "daily organizer / shopping list / memory games".

I wouldn't bother, though - I have a couple of those devices (a Dell Axim x51v and an HP). They probably work like new, but I haven't used them for half a decade. Where to start? If the OS's horrible usability isn't enough to put you off, it isn't fun to deal with the short battery life and the proprietary, clunky connectors which made them a pain a recharge (though in all fairness, the HTC smartphones were slightly less awful). Any el-cheapo Android device runs circles around those.

I guess this is supposed to be newsworthy because of this part of TFA, missing from the summary:

Financial markets and slot machines.

Furthermore, patents are public by definition anyway. GP might have a point if he meant "trade secrets" rather than patents.

Subject should have been "... for anybody" of course.

Signed 32-bit oughta be.