2) You cannot build once run everywhere. Its a myth.

You're confusing the language with the API. Of course an Android app won't run on a J2ME device, because they COMPLETELY DIFFERENT APIs. That'd be like expecting Windows ME apps to run directly on Windows 7. But if you're writing to pure vanilla J2SE, you *CAN* write once run anywhere, given equivalent API versions.

3) Java *IS* an order of magnitude slower than C/ASM for many things that are important for games, such as matrix math. Google knows this and is trying to work around it with JNI/NDK, but really why the complication?

What's good about Java, and in particular Android, is the separation of high and low-level operations. Sure, it'd be great if we all could code our apps in C or ASM, we wouldn't need Moore's Law to pull some of the beefier OSes and apps out of the swamp, now would we? But we don't all have your programming skill level.

For games on Android, there's OpenGL ES, which provides support for both GPU and emulated GPU operations, allowing for very speedy games.

1. What are you complaining about? Of course it's a legal grey area, those are some of Google's primary products - why would they make it easy for you to slap Google Maps into a thin wrapper, insert adverts, and call it "Chris's Maps"? Go write your own, silly boy.

2. You are required to declare *exactly one* activity and intent. After that, it's up to you how you stitch together your app's UI elements. The point of multiple Activitys is that they're a) modular, b) stackable, c) can be swapped during low memory events, and d) can have their state preserved by the platform upon exit. Personally, I prefer a low number of activities, then use other UI elements to add navigational depth.

3. New to software development, eh? Over the next 5-10 years, be prepared to learn new and discard old, that's the profession you've entered (recently, it seems.)

4. "Never quitting" is merely the default. It's up to you to detect navigational or logical termination of your app, and invoke the necessary methods to bring it to an end. The reason for this is that, hey! it's a phone, call might come in! and it's a multitasking O/S! Another app's Activity may suddenly be running on top of yours, and you may not want to exit just yet, hmm?

5. Finally, a real problem. Yes, there are apps that leave background processes running continuosly, disregarding the device's sleep state. These are from bad developers -- learn well from their mistakes. Also, you don't have to use those apps, just uninstall them, and also install Power Manager which will extend your battery life.

6. Watch the video "Writing Real-time Games for Android," wherein you will be introduced to some key concepts around embedded and real-time software development. First and foremost, STOP DOING THINGS THAT INVOKE THE GC! Cool it with excessive + string + concatenation and start using StringBuffer. And preallocate objects to that end as well. Et cetera.

7. Intense, dude. Having developed for Blackberry, all I can do is throw my head back and laugh, laugh hard. Android is a V12 Ferrari next to Blackberry's three-cylindar commuter tin can.

8. If you'd read Google's Android documentation, you'd realize this point was moot, thanks to the carefully spelled-out guidelines that will keep your app looking and behaving the same across various screen sizes. True that you'll have to *think* about how to handle an 8x10 format screen in your app, but that's no different than any windowed platform.

9. You start out whining about "platform fragmentation," then return to your point #1. Whatever. Platform fragmentation may, indeed, become a problem one day, but you haven't defined how that will happen, in your point.

10. If I'm not mistaken, Nexus One equals (or eclipses) the iPhone's raw computing power. 1 GHz, GPU, though low on RAM and flash comparatively. I'd rather have a platform with greater RAM, but the architecture of Android is such that it is *meant* to run on low-capability devices.

Apart from the author being a newbie, did we all misread it as not being a spoof??

How much can comfortably be carried in a vagina or anus?

One need look no further than the drug-running trade: condoms. Drug mules currently carry smack in multi-bagger condoms: in the anus, vagina, or stomach.

Consider a condom full of plastique, filled to the volume of a John C. Holmes-sized schlong, and there's enough to bring down a plane. Build the detonator into a crappy several generations-old MP3 player or camera body. Visit the lavatory post-takeoff, extract condom, attach explosive cap, and boom, you're in paradise with a dozen virgin concubines.

And what about mass spectrometry? I have wondered why this technology hasn't been deployed more extensively. I've seen two kinds of spectrometer machines in airports - huge hulking things outside the TSA zone, where I've occasionally been directed for a swipe, and smaller ones the size of a photocopier inside the zone.

Several years ago I toured a Saavis data center, where we were to deploy a government website we'd built. They were keen to point out the tiny, flush-mounted spectrometers in the ceiling, spaced two meters apart in a grid pattern. They very specifically mentioned that these devices were capable of detecting substances, at very low PPMs, in the air. They claimed the devices could tell the difference between a power supply that was about to fail and a hard drive that was about to fail.

I was rather dubious of this claim, at the time, and my gut was possibly proved right, as one of the drives in the database RAID array failed without notice (within a year, so possibly not a valid point.) They also had a Star Trek-looking entryway that use a biometric hand-scanner (hand geometry, not prints) and voice print validation - and not functioning at the time of our visit.

IAALHD (I am a long-haired dude), with beard, and probably look like a terrorist (or political protester) to TSA drones. I've been patted, searched and swiped probably beyond several standard deviations relative to the flying populace's experience.

In the hypothetical future of scanners-at-all-airports, you've got millions of people passing through these things daily. There must be failure modes for these things, right?

Will there be conditions, clothing in particular, that influence efficacy? Consider someone wearing explosive undies whose outer layer is made of gold lamé? Would that prevent the x-rays from penetrating to flesh? Will operators be trained to spot when you can't see a subject's genetalia?

Yes, please provide examples.

The defining moment for airport body scanners will arrive with a news flash that scanner operators had been secretly trading "nude" images of celebrity women. Expect it.

The 16MB heap limit does not apply to OpenGL ES resources, which can be the lion's share of a 3D game's memory use (texturemaps etc.)

Android actually is quite an excellent gaming platform, on hardware with a GPU of some sort (i.e. nearly all the currently supported handhelds.)

I'm writing an Android 3D game currently, and with hundreds of texture-mapped objects in view, the framerate is at or above the display's refresh rate. The CPU(s) are untaxed, the load is low.

Any serious game developer for Android will follow the usual real-time programming paradigms, like object-preallocation, avoiding boxed primitives, etc.

My impression as to why Android does not currently *seem* to have many quality games has to do with Google choosing to avoid touting one app over another. Also, OpenGL is not easy, nope, it's in fact hard. After reviewing many books on the topic, I've found just one that fits the bill: "Mobile 3D Graphics with OpenGL ES and M3G" (Pulli, Aarnio et al.)

If anyone's read this far, and you're considering buying the book, you'll want decent example apps to understand wtf the book is talking about. Go grab the NeHe OpenGL ES Android ports, then bunkerize for a week to learn how it all works.

The GP is probably referring to the OS, not apps. Pretty much anything you can build and run on the Android emulator should install on an Android phone. There are a few forked Android OS projects out there, offering root access and more. Question is whether they can be flashed onto Nexus and other recent phones...

"Smartphones," he said. Nokia's worldwide marketshare for stupidphones is still many times that of all smartphone sales combined.

In a phone, Wifi is a fallback, at best. The only advantage a phone has over other internet devices is portability. And "must be near a hotspot" is not portability.

Android's primary target market is *currently* sessile early-adopter geeks who are near hotspots 90% of the day. That, plus the fact that wifi is wayfuckingfaster than North American mobile networks, means your point is nearly moot. Except for those using their phone on the road.

As Android spreads out to more mobile networks, things will even out.

Could anyone explain the reason why simply extending vim is being ruled out? Why is it considered a "mortal sin"?

Extending vim is normal practice -- where'd you get the idea that it's a sin?

Check out some of the plugins for vim.

That said, I've found vim plugins to be not unlike emacs extensions, in that when one fails, it's probably gonna be up to you to suss out why and patch it.

It has long been, and still remains, illegal to have a scanner capable of listening into police frequencies in a moving vehicle

All points agreed, except for this one. It is *not* illegal to own and monitor a scanner in a moving vehicle, except in a handful of states. In another handful, it's only illegal when used "in furtherance of a crime" (e.g. used to elude the police after your bank caper ends.)

I have no doubt that, upon being pulled over by a cop, a $500 car jammed wall-to-wall with comms gear *would* get cited and impounded. Some cops just like to harass and intimidate, whether they think you're a terrorist, or they just don't know the law.

But, over two year and at least one or two defrags (I'd hope), the data would have been overwritten and unrecoverable.

You would hope, but what really stands out in this case is that the family agreed to an unwarranted search!

About a year later, FBI agents showed up at his family's home. The family agreed to let agents examine the computer, and at first, they couldn't find anything.

No court order or search warrant mentioned in the article, or any of the others searched up. The family let the feds into their home - then they LET 'em search their computer! Game over.

Know your rights. When police, federal agents or any other badge-and-gun-wielding officer shows up without warrant, DO NOT INVITE THEM IN. Hard to believe that Joe Citizen has completely forgotten one of the main reasons the U.S. fought a revolutionary war for independence - overbroad searches via writs of assistance.

“Allow neither policemen nor vampires to enter your home.” -anon.

Specifically "radio frequency," as in only those wavelengths/frequencies used to transmit sound, image and data? Probably not.

X-rays, gamma rays, alpha/beta particles, neutrons, high frequency UV, etc - these are ionizing.

Microwaves affect the kinetic energy of dielectric materials, such as water. A different effect than ionization. I also question the penetration depth of cellphone microwaves - do they get much beyond the dermis and adipose layers?

I wonder if there are other effects besides cancer that aren't going noticed, such as effects on the cochlea. When I first started using cellphones, I'd get this whitenoise tinnitus type sound in my ear, as I brought the cellphone up to the side of my head - before and after the callee answer.

At least with physical health, much of what might be wrong with a patient is measurable. Blood pressure, pulse, respiration, blood chemistry, urine and stool specimens. You have nothing like that with psychiatry.

It is difficult to measure brain serotonin levels in a person, not without biopsying brain tissue. I did read about a blood serum test for serotonin - apparently, the levels in your bloodstream are not indicative of what's present in your synapses. It's used for detecting certain types of cancer.

...limit the insurance company's ability to rip us off, and another part is to limit the ability of "customers" to rip off the insurance...

I agree, however it looks like the Dems are finally caving in to insurance co. demands; whereas the Republicans were already long in insurance co. pockets.

Such a big "system" is wide open for abuse, from all parties involved. It belongs at the same order of complexity as voting systems, given all the people, computer systems, etc. involved.

My hat's off to the Dems for at least trying to fix such an obviously fucked-up system. But bad on them for trying to fix it in such a short time, and with limited transparency.

Our system of government is so antiquated, makes it easy to buy off politicians. While I'm not an anarchist, the fact that we're still running the country under a super-narrow hierarchy makes it really easy to corrupt.