I have had rather the opposite experience. I have a G2 as well, but mine is running Cyanogenmod 7 (one of the nightly builds, something like 220), and is overclocked to 1.5GHz (dynamic, on-demand governor). Despite that, even running at a straight 1.5GHz with no governor, all the latest builds still run slow as hell. And it's not CM, as my buddy has a G2 that is completely stock, not even rooted, and he gets the same performance. That goes for both the stable and the beta versions. I have yet to try the beta (alpha?) version which uses the native Android UI elements instead of XUL (which is insanely slow on Android thus far), but the builds I have tried were horrible. And, even if that version works wonderfully, the problem still remains that many addons rely on XUL for rendering their interfaces, so if they do away with XUL for the mobile version, that would mean addons would need to be re-tooled to eschew XUL (betting noscript uses XUL, from the looks of it). The only reason it is still installed on my phone is because I need to access an old sharepoint site for work (yeah, not happy about that myself, but that changes in two weeks!), and I can't use any of the other browsers I've tried (stock android, Opera, and Dolphin all fail, something about unsupported www-authenticate headers), but Firefox works.

Not all android is created equally. It varies from OEM to OEM, phone to phone, and of course there are all manner of highly-optimized custom builds like Cyanogenmod. Different default settings, different power consumption, different options for managing power consumption.

Thank you, glad someone gets this concept. This is why revolutions fail. Even if a revolution should succeed in overthrowing the institution against which it revolted, and even if the old aristocracy is actually killed off, the fundamental ideas which gave rise to those very institutions, and allowed that very aristocracy to assume such power, are so deeply engrained in the psyches of the revolutionaries that they erect new institutions that share the same systemic flaws that allow the same type of scum to rise to the top. "Hurray, the government is no more! All hail the government!"

This can be seen more regularly, on a smaller scale, by simply observing regular elections. Every four years, the public is presented with a new handful of politicians, all promising to right the ills of the nation, to end the mistakes of the previous politician, and to lead us all to a fanciful utopian future. And every four years, millions go out and vote for one of these politicians, fervently believing that this time it will be different, this time the system will work. Despite all available historical evidence, they believe that by voting in the "right" candidate, all will be remedied. Rarely do they consider that the system itself could be not only flawed, but systemically unworkable, and that by agreeing to participate in the democratic process, they sanction the results of that process. "It's not the system that is flawed, it is the people running it" they think. The same holds true of revolutions. "It's not the concept of sovereign government that is flawed, it is the specific implementation." To use a technical analogy, it's like finding out that WPA is a flawed encryption protocol, and your solution is to switch from a Linksys AP to a DLink.

First mobster: Hey, they's throwin' robots!
Linguo: They are throwing robots.
Second mobster: It's disrespecting us. Shut up a'you face.
Linguo: Shut up your face.
Second mobster: Whatsa' matta you?
First mobster: You ain't so big.
Second mobster: Me an' him are gonna' whack you in the labonza.
Linguo: Mmmm... AAH!... bad grammar overload. Error. Error.

Only if they're a virgin.

Remember remember the fifth of November...

WhisperCore is nice, basically uses the same approach as honeycomb. On capable devices, it uses dm-crypt to encrypt the mmc block devices, and they also have WhisperYAFFS (now GPL'd, I believe) for use on other devices.

I'd like to add this functionality to other ROMs like CM, but time forbids lately. However, since Honeycomb supports full disk encryption, and the tablet/phone forks are supposed to merge in the next major version, full disk encryption should be available for both Android phones and tablets soon.

No thanks, I'd rather make out with my Monrobot...

They're giving out the minor technical awards. I think they're up to "writing".
That just leaves "Best Actor" and "Best Soft Drink Product Placement!"

Seriously, though, how many Futurama references can we come up with for this one? I can think of a half-dozen Calculon references off the top of my head.

Me, I'd do it all over. And stay the hell out of any schools. Over the course of my "education", I became completely disillusioned with the whole formal education system. Crappy teachers who either didn't care about, or didn't know about their selected disciplines, teachers who let their personal biases lead to gross negligence in their teaching (my biology "teacher" was a proud member of the Promise Keepers. I leave it to your imagination, gentle reader, to picture my evolution education...), math teachers who couldn't add single-digit numbers, physics teachers who thought scanning pages from the book into powerpoint and reading from the screen constituted lecturing, civics instructors who would tolerate no debate of the subjects they taught, and the EXCEEDINGLY rare good teacher (four come to mind, over the entire course of my "education") who were always hamstrung by a dull-witted, overly-bureaucratic administration, counselors who didn't give a shit, and schools who could afford new football uniforms every year, but the anthropology teacher had to buy books for the class out of his own pocket, just to get started.

In SEVENTH FUCKING GRADE, you know what we did for an entire semester in math class? We studied the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of FUCKING FRACTIONS. You know how we went about it? Playing with fucking colored wooden blocks. As I recall, a green octahedron was a whole, and a red half-octahedron was a half, and we would put the little blocks together to show what happened when you added fractions. Further, that teacher didn't count off points for missed answers, because, and this is a direct fucking quote, "checkmarks lower self-esteem." I shit you not. If you put some scribbles down on a page and numbered them in order, you would get a 100%, same as the person who knew what the fuck they were doing. My Algebra II teacher (the one who couldn't add single digit numbers) also spent the first semester of the class reviewing fucking addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of fractions. Why? Because none of the students knew how the fuck to do it. That's right, sophomores, juniors, and seniors enrolled in an advanced algebra class had no idea how to work with fractions. The reason? Because they had those same shitty teachers as me, because the administration only cared about getting good scores on standardized tests, so they didn't give a fuck if the kids knew a damn thing at the end of the year, so long as they knew it at test time. That same algebra teacher allowed, encouraged, even, her students to bring cheat sheets with formulas in for the tests. Said everyone could us a 1 square inch cheat sheet, which, given a half-decent printer at the time could hold everything for the semester.

As to the standardized testing, my high school was doing so shitty that the administration decided to have test "prep" sessions before third period. Guess what that meant? I got to spend the first 15 minutes of every single fucking chemistry class reviewing the meaning of "subject" and "predicate" in grammar, because none of the fucks I went to school with had ever managed to wrap their heads around the concept (my older friend, who had AP English 3rd period, was forced to do the same...). And I'm talking Dick and Jane style examples here. Of course, when we weren't wasting chemistry class reviewing second grade subject matter, we didn't study chemistry anyway. The teacher wanted to be popular with the cool kids (serious lost-youth syndrome there), so she let the preppies run the show, which meant linking up a bunch of gameboy colors and having tetris tournaments, loudly yelling at each other, throughout class. I ended up stealing chemical samples and equipment from the lab in a bid to do some self-study so I wouldn't be completely fucking clueless. So, all I learned in that class was how to be a sneaky thief (the most useful skill I picked up in high school).

Then, there's "group work", a fucking pathetic excuse for "teachers" to group the halfway bright kids with a bunch of fucktards, with the excuse that the smart kids would help their peers learn. Of course, since everyone in the group got the same grade, that meant that me and a handful of others had to do all the work if we didn't want to get bent over and fucked up the ass by these morons.

I could go on about this for pages. And, yes, I'm more than a little bitter about that shit. The moral here? I learned far more, at every single stage of my "education" from simply reading, studying, and experiencing on my own than I ever did in school. I shudder to think the kind of person I'd be today had my parents not encouraged me to read as much as they did. Basically, modern education isn't.

PS2 emulation is coming right along. PCSX2 just released a new stable build at the beginning of the month, and something like 65% of games are supposed to be playable. Yes, it takes a bit beefier machine to run than an old N64 emulator, but it works well on any recent machine with a decent GPU. My Core2Duo E8400 with an 8800GTX has no problems, and it's hardly cutting edge these days.

Sony's a late entrant to a market for playing its own games on mobile. fpseCE has been available on WinMo forever, and has just been ported to android. Android already had psx4droid (even though it was slow, buggy, incompatible, the fps counter was bs, etc.) for quite some time. fpse plays all the original psx games (you know, the ones you already have, already paid for years ago, and don't feel like paying for again?), it's fast, compatible, looks great, and runs on ANY android phone. By releasing a specific phone to run Sony's "official" psx emulator, they're shooting themselves in the foot. Even the gamepad will soon have limited appeal, as there are already several projects out there to make a good universal bluetooth pad for smartphones (I myself am actually working on a slide-out gamepad to clip onto the back of my G2, and am currently just waiting to have spare cash to buy some parts).

So, Sony can go ahead and put out an entire phone for a niche market (that phone, by the way, has almost identical specs to the HTC Desire Z/G2 that has been out for many months, but with gamepad instead of keyboard), while independent devs continue to make universal apps that do the same thing on ANY reasonably powerful phone, with no DRM (not announced for the Sony system, but knowing Sony, you can bet your shiny metal ass it'll be in there). Guess which strategy will pay off?

Currently connected to one circuit, computer (650W PSU, shitloads of drives), 24" monitor, printer, router, AV switch, 40" TV, surround sound, atari 2600, NES, SNES, N64, Wii, Genesis (with 32x, an extra outlet needed), Saturn, Dreamcast, PS2, and various chargers and external drives across three power strips. But, I figure since most of it is game consoles such that only one would be on at a time (and most of them are from before the days of "standby mode"), the total power draw at any given time is probably reasonably safe. Hell, been here 7 years, nothing's exploded yet. But I do burn out a lot of lightbulbs...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OY4SU0c1eUk

Couple problems here. First, we're talking about mobile devices here. Yes, you can get a 32GB microSD for your phone, but it's expensive, and most people aren't going to have one yet. Fat binaries would take much more space on the memory card, and more bandwidth to download (watch those caps!), which makes it infeasible. As to having the app store give you a binary for a specific hardware setup, that would be asking thousands of tiny, independent app developers to try to maintain and compile their code for that same array of architectures, which would likely be sufficiently problematic that many of them would simply stop developing, or would only target their preferred architectures, further fragmenting the app market.

You do need a government to enforce notions like private property and civil rights and I know of no libertarian who would argue otherwise.

If government is necessary to enforce private property rights, and those rights are essentially contractual arrangements to transfer property from one owner to another, then why is it not necessary to establish a meta-government to enforce the "social contract" which establishes the government? And, of course, the meta-meta-government to enforce the meta-government's social contract. And so on...

In what sense is an institution which systematically violates civil and property rights (civil and property rights, incidentally, are the same thing. Civil rights, also called natural rights, are derived from self-ownership of the individual, the same source as property rights) necessary for the protection of those rights?

And incidentally, there are plenty of libertarians who hold precisely the view that the government is not only not necessary, but actually detrimental to the defense of natural rights. Read a little Murray Rothbard for a prominent and particularly well-reasoned example. The minarchist view is readily summed up as follows: we cannot trust the government with aspects of life such as the production of a stable currency, but we can most certainly trust them with our lives and freedoms. How does that make sense?