Not particularly insightful; the vast majority of all government-backed money in existence is "digital" anyway - i.e. it doesn't exist in any analog form (such as coins and notes).

Talking about VNC, it is worth mentioning that WM5/6 has a working, usable VNC SERVER, at least since 2007. I am still waiting for one for Android (I've tried the free ones on my rooted Nexus 4 - they're sluggish to the point of unusable).

The HTC Desire HD has those old-school virtues (SD card and removable battery), and I don't think it's pricey now. Of course it has to be bought second-hand or refurbished. If you can settle for even lower resolution, you can get an even cheaper HTC Tattoo or even older stuff.

You might want to have a look at VS 2008 and the .NET compact framework - I seem to remember the Express (free) version of VS 2008 supports it. It's pretty easy to develop. Expect far from fast performance and no easy way to scale across screen resolutions, but it should be good enough for things like "daily organizer / shopping list / memory games".

I wouldn't bother, though - I have a couple of those devices (a Dell Axim x51v and an HP). They probably work like new, but I haven't used them for half a decade. Where to start? If the OS's horrible usability isn't enough to put you off, it isn't fun to deal with the short battery life and the proprietary, clunky connectors which made them a pain a recharge (though in all fairness, the HTC smartphones were slightly less awful). Any el-cheapo Android device runs circles around those.

I guess this is supposed to be newsworthy because of this part of TFA, missing from the summary:

Financial markets and slot machines.

Furthermore, patents are public by definition anyway. GP might have a point if he meant "trade secrets" rather than patents.

Subject should have been "... for anybody" of course.

Signed 32-bit oughta be.

No, this is about Earth, not Mars.

- Calling Flip a "programming language" is quite a stretch. It is not. That's the whole point in it, in fact.

- The metric to determine how good a game is is not how "complex" it is, but how much fun it is.

Out of boredom I googled "Microsoft Linux", and found this ancient joke site. A joke news from 2000: "MS Linux to have Start Button". Well, with fairly minor differences and a different name such as "Menu" button, damned if it isn't right there at the bottom left corner, on quite a few Desktop Linux themes nowadays, e.g. the standard on Mint Mate.

But I'm not sure they're really talking about trolling. The mainstream media and politicians have a habit of confusing trolling with online bullying, harassment, particularly vicious racist attacks (for instance on memorial pages), etc.

More recent version of the WHO report (which confirms no new cases in Nigeria since 8 September).

No. We know it because US health authorities and the WHO reported it.