You're right, even highly educated people can lack a sense of humor ;)

I more or less agree with most of what you say, but I do have a few issues. The user experience is subjective: for you and me, it's straight forward and functional. The interface as a whole is a little rough around the edges, and the iPhone has a pretty distinct advantage in this area for most people.

Also, the android market place is pretty horrible compared to the apple app store. Discovery sucks, sales are low, etc. Even some of the popular iPhone apps ported to Android aren't selling but a handful of copies. Hell, some of the best apps on the Android can't even be found without specifically searching for it.

That being said, the hardware itself is much, much better. The screen is absolutely stunning, the web browser is much faster and thus more usable. Multitasking: 'nuff said. Best of all, I can decide what software to put on the hardware I paid for (including those I wrote myself without having to sacrifice my first born at the altar of Steve Jobs).

I think the fragmentation is inconsequential to the success of the market place. In reality, supporting a handful of screen configurations and featuresets is a minor inconvenience that most developers would happily work around if the money was there. But, that seems to be the problem: it just isn't as profitable to develop android apps!

I don't doubt that Android may become the most common phone operating system at some point, but I strongly doubt it will drive Java's popularity for several reasons. For one, the mobile computing market is relatively small relative to all the rest of the java code out there. The android market place has also been an abysmal failure and might not ever be as profitable as the iPhone app store unless Google gets their act together.

I have trouble with the notion that we must somehow feel obligated to "respect" someone's beliefs. I have no respect for a belief system that can not be adequately justified. That's not to say I don't respect someone's right to believe what they want. I imagine that the distinction, however, is lost upon most people (and this confusion is probably the cause of the perception that any nonsense should be respected as long as it's a belief).

IANAP, but here's my simple analysis: the schartzchild radius of two collided protons would be about 5e-54 meters, which is about 1/3 the radius of a single electron. The gravitational pull of this tiny blackhole would be the same as two protons (ie, almost nonexistent for our purposes). I'm not sure, however, whether the singularity would carry any charge.