You aren't forced to write in Java, you're forced to write for the JVM. There are other languages that target the JVM, including versions of Ruby, Python, LISP, and my personal favorite, Scala. Using the JVM means that Android isn't locked in to using any one particular CPU instruction set (which was what destroyed the original PalmOS), and that all Android programs and libraries are API-compatible with each other without the need for setting up special bindings.

XeY means X*10^Y, not X^Y.

If a company wants to pay you money for software you wrote, then for the love of god, take it, and give them whatever license they want. They don't actually need a different license, but that doesn't matter because what they're really after is support, not licensing. So write up an N-year support contract where you promise to take their calls and promptly fix any bugs they report, and charge appropriately for it.

Ford built a Fiesta with a two-stroke engine that achieved 1.4l/100km (that’s 168 mpg!) in 1996! Not a drawing. Not a experimental model. No, a real driving prototype car. Looked just like a normal Fiesta.

I don't believe you. If anyone could make a 168 mpg car without some show-stopping problem with it, they'd be making it now. I think someone pulled that claim out of their ass, and it got copied without citation between editorials and blog comments for awhile.

This is not nearly as big a problem as it sounds like, because it has a simple engineering solution. A transmission of a certain speed always uses up the same amount of bandwidth, but it uses that bandwidth over a different area depending how far it is from the cell tower or access point. The farther away the access point is, the more power the tower and phone use, and the more area the transmission covers. Placing more access points closer together allows lower-power transmissions, so that the same frequency can be reused more times in different places. So if there isn't enough capacity for all the people using the cell phone network, you just put up more towers. It's expensive, but not so expensive that normal subscriber fees can't cover it.

Identity theft is a misleading term for bank fraud, and fighting it is the banks' responsibility, not the government's or the user's. We know how to do it, it just isn't getting done because of cost. Monetary transactions should be done with dedicated devices so that compromised computers can't be used to steal money. Reducing the number of compromised computers won't help because there are many of them and it only takes a few.

You are proposing the death penalty for ordinary fraud. This is totally unreasonable, and the US Constitution prohibits disproportionate punishment, so it can't ever happen.

I think the reason is because for most of DotA's history, there was no way to balance the teams after players left. A large portion of games were spoiled by players leaving early and imbalancing the teams, which is very frustrating, and since you can't yell at someone who's already gone, people take out their frustrations on players they expect to leave, ie noobs. The situation was greatly improved by adding the option to switch teams, so that if two players left from the same team someone could volunteer to switch teams and make them even again; but a community of assholes remains a community of assholes forever, because non-assholes are driven away.

I played around with this a bit in the beta. It's significantly slower than native and has a fair share of graphics glitches, but it was good enough to take my dual-monitor computer, plug in a second keyboard and mouse, and play two games of Warcraft III against eachother simultaneously using only one box.

Not if you have an "ASCII" file you are trying to read on Windows that has Unix newline conventions. Try opening a newlined file with notepad, for example.

As far as I can tell, the problem is entirely unique to notepad. Every other text editor I've ever tried handles files with Unix-style newlines correctly. Since it would be trivial to fix Notepad, I can only assume that Microsoft either doesn't care at all about Notepad, or is deliberately leaving the incompatibility in place to discourage use of Unix.

At this point, social security numbers are so widely distributed that the only sensible thing to do is to publish them all in the phone book, so no one will be able to pretend they mean anything. If a scammer wants to use someone else's identity to defraud a bank, then the black market will sell them cheap and in bulk. The real problem is that creditors are allowed to issue debts without attempting to contact the person whose name they're using, and then try to collect those debts when the scammer runs off with the money.

Capacity for delusion is only a problem because of scoundrels looking to make a dishonest dollar by exploiting said capacity.

That statement is entirely false. Self-deception, both on an individual and societal level, frequently leads to bad consequences, even without anyone trying to exploit it; and believing that all the blame for such consequences falls on scammers is absolving your responsibility to try to dispel delusions and see the truth.

Sorry, but the US Constitution expressly prohibits extending punishment for crimes onto family members. The most you could get is forfeiture of assets which a prosecutor could prove constituted stolen goods, and that wouldn't be nearly everything.