Apple re-architecting their home launcher to support widgets would be a pretty huge change, but certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Also, I've had no OS-level instability with my Xoom. Browser, market, and launcher crashes, yes, but I've yet to have an issue requiring a reboot. And finally, the question is not one of difficulty anyway. I'm merely pointing out that these products aim to do different things.

Ok, sorry, those absolutes should be expanded a bit. The Xoom is almost certain to have its issues fixed. There's no reason to expect Google will be abandoning it any time soon and they have a pretty good track record in general and with Android specifically. As for the widgets, well, never is a long time and anything can happen, but it seems highly unlikely. And anyway, widgets are just one example I used to make my overall point: different products, different features.

As an aside, despite my Android love, I hate flash. I'm happy to have the option on my devices, but I'm also happy that a large, influential company is doing everything they can to kill it. Flash can go die in a fire for all I care.

I don't know about this. He's not wrong, per se, but he's missing a key point: these devices do things an iPad can not and will not ever do. And (probably) vice versa. So yeah, my Xoom market crashes on occasion and I have to reopen it, but I also have a bunch of widgets all over my home screen. And while my instability will eventually be fixed, the iPad will never have widgets. Point being, if you assume the iPad and the Xoom (or Playbook) are the same except that one has some problems then his point is valid, but if you see them as different products with their own ups and downs then he doesn't make so much sense. For every downside to the non-iPad there's an upside to counter it. In that context, it doesn't make sense to "trash" these other tablets. They're just better in some ways and worse in others, and the value you place on each of these features/bugs will direct the scores you hand out.

Note: if you don't see the upsides of the non-iPads of the world as upsides then this can't apply, but then these products were never meant for you anyway. If you don't like widgets and customizability, you probably weren't in the market for a Xoom to begin with, and the same goes for the Playbook and its Blackberry Bridge.

https://market.android.com/details?id=net.sourceforge.gemrb&feature=search_result

I've been playing the GOG version of PS:T on this for a few days and it's working surprisingly well. Only thing to note is that, with the GOG version at least, you have to set all the CD paths in the cfg file to './data'.

Yes, but it's not about quality. Everyone knows that 90% of any given app store is crap whether it's paid or free, games or other. The point is that there exist a good number of games for less than $5 that will entertain for several hours. They might not be deep or graphically impressive or anything else, but that doesn't matter to most people so long as they're fun. If I can get 10 hours of fun out of a $2 game, how do you justify $60 for 6-8 hours of fun? Even with deeper gameplay and super high production values the bottom line is the amount of entertainment you get out of it, and $60 games don't often justify their price in that department.

I think you missed the key phrase: "as a condition of use, modification and/or distribution of the software subject to the license". The GPL requires those things as a condition of distribution. The BSD license allows those things, but does not require them, and so would be allowed. I mean, seems to me that it has to be interpreted that way cause otherwise (iii) pretty much bans any free (as in beer) software.

The difference between text and speech is not a big deal. I imagine that speech processing is outside the scope of what they're trying to accomplish. This computer is working on the problem of understanding and interpreting relatively natural language. Speech-to-text is an entirely different and wholly unrelated problem. You could strap any speech-to-text engine onto the front-end of this thing and feed the text output into it. Speech is not what this project is concerned with, language is.

I don't understand why no one seems to be able to understand this. And I don't just mean the non-techie's among us. It's very simple: if you put info on facebook, facebook has access to that info. I don't even consider this an "invasion of privacy." I mean, you gave it to them. It's not like they're following you around filling in your info or anything. They just ask, and you give them as much or as little as you want. The people who don't follow this stuff seem to assume that they can put up their info and still have it be private, then get upset when it's not. Yeah, good luck with that. Meanwhile, people paying attention are often (over)reacting by trying to equate using facebook at all to wearing a sign with your social security number on it. The reality is just that facebook has access to what you give them. No more, no less. You don't want them to know your name? Fine, don't give it to them. Your phone number? Your interests? Your relationships? Your address? All the same. It's really very simple, and if everyone would calm the hell down it might even make perfect sense.

If this is an implied threat to Monday Night Football I'm gonna be PISSED!

I always used to wonder this myself, but then I met some people who communicate largely through texts. And really, it's pretty nice. You don't force the person to drop what they're doing to talk to you, they can respond when they get a chance. That's a huge advantage imo. I can send people texts without worrying about interrupting something, while still being sure they'll see my message. You and they also don't have to worry about people listening in or background noise affecting your communication. Or bothering anyone else, for that matter. No one likes the one dude yelling into his phone on a train (for example).

Really, calls are conversations and sometimes I just don't want to have a conversation, but would still like to communicate. Texts are excellent for that, if nothing else.

I can't figure out why anyone would think this isn't accidental, though. As the GP mentioned, code reuse accidents happen often enough that it's not even a stretch to believe that explanation. It's very easy to imagine an engineer using the code without fully auditing it first. Yeah, that shouldn't happen and Google should tighten up their reviews and such, but it's still just an accident. Further, what use would Google get out of random samplings of packets on random unsecured wireless networks? I can't imagine any of that would be particularly useful even if you assume that they're hellbent on world domination, and if you're going to accuse them of intentionally collecting this data, there should at least be a motive.

We demand equal representation!

This is exactly right IMO. Obesity is a real problem. Parents are ruining kids lives (or at least making them far more difficult) by feeding them fast food and other junk. We've known how obesity works for awhile, but it not only keeps happening, it keeps getting worse! I'm all for personal/parental responsibility and keeping the government out of it, but to this point a very large portion of our population has proven that they can't handle their responsibility and it's affecting society as a whole negatively. What do we do at this point? Do we legislate for the good of society, or do we just say "fuck it" and let people destroy their children's lives and a large portion of our society with them? For me at least, it's not so easy a call to make when viewed in that light.

To put it simply, never is a long time. Saying "never" in regards to technology is always a stupid thing to do.

Then don't go to sites that don't give you what you want. Adding support for hardware acceleration is not going to suddenly make every site have flashy graphics, it's only going to allow sites to add flashy graphics. If you don't like it when they do, don't visit those sites. If enough people agree with you and the sites lose traffic, then they'll stop adding graphics. If not enough people agree then, well, sorry, but majority opinion will win out.