Anyone who has ever had these little bastards in their house could have told you how good they are at evading predators.

Not strictly true. They added an option to turn off all-caps. It's a simple registry setting and the first hit on Google.

My first program was:

10 PRINT "FUCK YOU ";
20 GOTO 10

I lovingly entered it into every department store demo that I ever walked past.

Are they virtualizing this?

I so wish I had mod points right now. This should be at +9.

Amazon should give the retailer who sold the kindle a little taste on each purchase that is made on the device.

Userbase? Sure. Money? Um, go spec up a 3D graphics workstation and see what those things cost. You don't need a billion customers to turn a profit selling that kind of gear.

1) All patents expire after 2 years. If you can't make money from having a 2-year monopoly on an invention, it obviously wasn't very good anyway. 2) Getting a patent costs a €LARGE_AMOUNT of money, which goes into a fund that the government uses to invest into research. 3) No sales bans. The only penatly for "violating" a patent is compensation for actual damages, the burden of proof for which lie on the patent holder. 4) If out of a random sample of five university students in the appropriate field, at least three find your idea obvious and/or trivial to come up with, your patent is rejected. 5) (Very) generous exemptions from the all of the above for non-profits, educational users and independent (non-corporate) inventors.

I would go and see this chimp if they would let me throw the stones back at him. Hell, I'd even pay good money.

I'd imagine that varies from state to state.

In georgia, SACS accredits high schools.

When we (the US) get rid of the penny there will be a HUGE supply of zinc out there.

E-mail uses push notifications, you make it sound like it's on a 30 minute polling interval but that's simply not the case - it's nearly instant, certainly every bit as fast as on Android. Twitter does the same thing. Just read the documentation if you don't want to take my word for it. Using polling for any kind of instant messaging is not something you want to do since it's massively inefficient, much better to let the server tell you when there's something new to fetch.

As for porting, what you are describing is the same on every platform. You have an iOS app and want to port it to Android? Better brush up on those Java skills because your ObjC is worthless there. You can theoretically use C/C++ as a lowest common denominator between the two but almost nobody does that except possibly for some very core functionality and then you have to write a ton of platform-specific wrappers for the device-dependent stuff anyway. Oh and the UI, which is probably the most time-consuming single part of your app if you want to get it right.

I will give you this - being the minority platform, WP7 certainly stands more to lose from not sharing a common language with Android/iOS than the other way around. I don't really want WP7 apps that are just least-effort ports of Android apps though, and if you're as concerned about battery life as you say then you should find the thought of porting over a big fat VM just to run a few more apps abhorrent. It's not like porting is that hard, and unlike Android, WP7 is actually fun to code for. I've put one app on the market already and am working on a second. Never could muster up the energy to do that for Android, well not on my spare time anyway, there's just too much pomp and ceremony required to get anything done. I do code for Android at work though, since they're paying me well to put up with it. :)

Strange, I seem to have no trouble receiving mail while I'm doing other things on my WP7. Perhaps because the "extremely limited means" are actually quite sufficient. I believe limiting multitasking a bit is a tradeoff for better battery life, and that's certainly fine by me. Apps like navigation and music players (Spotify, Nokia Music) seem to have no trouble whatsoever with me switching to a different app and back. The web browser dutifully remembers which tabs I had open. So no, not a big deal at all. The Skype limitation I believe is a beta issue.

C/C++ support is probably coming eventually but - are you kidding me? Lack of a Java runtime an impediment? C# is by far a nicer language to program in, and is instantly accessible to any Java developer (being basically Java++ by design). Lack of Java support doesn't seem to have particularly hurt Apple in their quest for global mobile domination. The only possible use I can see for Java on WP7 would be to make porting of Android apps easier but they would feel right out of place on WP7 anyway since it has a very different UI.