I ignored the guide (well I didn't know about it at the time) and got a Kindle Fire. Guess what, you can't even install the free apps without a credit card. And is not like it comes with a lot of apps, it is basically unusable without a credit card!

While MathML can be used to describe stuff related directly to computation (like for example 1+2+3+...+n written with the big sigma symbol) more often is used for things that aren't computations and don't have a program equivalent (or at least not a useful one).

Try to use a program to communicate some abstract theorem you just discovered.

the stupid (probably blue) LEDs on the chargers.

Thank you Sir,

this is now on my top "to read" list once I manage to push away a little bit the usual clutter.

... for who's paying attention: I meant IMEIs of course.

I was saying the same about IMSIs earlier ... we can't agree on what's the decimal separator, if today is 12/10 or 10/12, user1@gmail.com can't chat to user2@yahoo.com but somehow we'll get a reasonable percentage of the owners AND buyers to register in some specific database. Good luck with that.

Not only that but it also assumes you can't tamper with the serial and doesn't address what happens if somebody starts to spam the DB.

when a friend was playing some adventure game and at some point he got stuck because he was looking for a "mouse" and for a "stick of joy". That is because one of the F-keys allowed him to select mouse for example and then it said "mouse not found".

Some of my friends knew quite well some particular Spectrum Z80 clone that had an (albeit recessed) reset button on the keyboard (well, the computer was inside the keyboard so to speak).

Somewhere around windows 95 and all ping of death variations (valid for NT3-4 as well) we used to regret the lack of such key on PC keyboards. We were actually discussing how to include such key somewhere on the keyboard as cleanly as possible.

I bet you wouldn't be so happy if you were looking for a job and the first 666 things that appear when somebody searches your not-so-common name are reviews of Angry birds spin-offs. Written on a phone in "SMS-English".

And by the way Amazon does accept reviews under pseudonym.

I don't understand how it solved the problem with fake reviews. I think you need a google account to even have google play working at all so if I'm going to write bogus reviews I can still make it a Google+ account and use whatever name, it isn't like they're checking.
Google knows who you are if you're using an android phone (they DO know a lot about you, think, they have your location, your IPs both from inside and outside the network, your IMEI, IMSI, possibly your phone number, your address book, your email, even before you start giving them credit card no, pictures, documents, etc). It's not hard to weed out the non-users.

The only problem they had was that nobody was using Google+. This is why they're pushing it to play store, youtube and who knows where else too.

Google killed a good part of "pseudonimity" with this crazy move to link your Google+ profile to your play/market reviews (even for just giving X stars without any comment).
WTF? Ok, google knows a lot of stuff about me, where I am, it reads my email, some documents, knows a good chunk of what I browse, etc. WHATEVER. However, I just don't want to have a list of apps and apps rating associated with my name. It just feels wrong.

You got it the wrong way, the MINIMUM wages are the ones that matter. If thousands would be the regular wage why would the state bother to say by law that you need to give at least hundreds?

Minimum wage of less than 200 EUR monthly (and even that is hard to get for young people), before tax , pension, etc (and that is recent, around Y2K 30-100$ wages were common, even for engineers), VAT at 24% and prices just a bit lower than the rest of the EU. That is wages 2-3 times lower than freakin' Turkey. For a EU country, with almost EU prices.

And you can get thousands of Euros in the "normal" EU, plus all the other benefits that come from non-retarded country like medical care (I mean the actual services that really don't exist, even the head of state went to Austria for some minor intervention).

Even the freaking gypsies are leaving the country. Science? Forget it.

We are talking about millions of customers. Because of the numbers involved I'm sure that includes beside people who are well ... dead by now also people that pee on themselves, people who have both AIDS and cancer and (gasp) people who leave in a fantasy world that involves running around killing as many people as possible.

Sure, bad mouthing on a forum, sucks. Death threats, sucks much more. But in the end that's it, do your best to prepare for the worst, hope for the best and life goes on (until it doesn't).

This would be a nice idea, if I manage to do it cleanly. (I still want to pay with the card at the stores, in fact I'll be using the card that way mostly).
I wouldn't be able to do it cleanly probably but I'm sure it is possible.