One step closer to sentient spacecraft? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ship_Who_Sang

Amen to that. WindowMaker rocks(ed).

Don't forget copying your floppy disks after getting a powerful item, then importing the character repeatedly from your different backups and giving the item to rest of the people in your party. :)

1) You don't matter.
2) It doesn't appear to support tablets with camera's for that matter anyway.

I wonder why the comparison was made against the nook color, and not the nook tablet? The tablet is more of a direct competitor. $50 more for the nook tablet gets you the same cpu as the fire, 2x the ram (1GB), 2x the internal storage (16GB), support for up to an additional 32GB via external storage, a less reflective display, and a microphone.

You can even run the amazon app store, kindle app, and amazon instant video player app on the nook tablet. Both the Nook Tablet and the Fire have been rooted, and both have been reported to be able to access the Android Market.

Yeah, they're mixing metaphors. Superman and Dr. Who, do NOT go together. I think it should be the Dark Knight core. No super powers. :)

Heh. Until somebody gets the idea to use the Interstate Commerce Clause. Then creating and sharing yourself without going through a big publisher will be banned because it's a non-commercial activity that "would have a substantial effect on interstate commerce, even if the individual effects are trivial.". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn )

I'm actually rather pleasantly surprised that the big software companies haven't tried to use this against open source (at least as far as I know), although I suppose they might if we ever manage to get rid of the big stick they have now (patents).

Heh. Look how high his user number is. He probably wasn't alive 20 years ago. lol.

HIPPA is privacy. I think you mean ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act).

I've been an Android user for over a year now. I kind of agree. Most of this isn't gaming specific though. Here's the problems as I see it.

The search functionality in the android market stinks. This is Google "king of search", but if you don't have the exact app name, good luck finding anything.

There's only 1 level deep categorization. Big hierarchies are a pain to manage, and some apps fit multiple categories. And it's hard to display a tree on a small screen. But only having 1 level deep makes it very hard to browse. If you don't know the name of the app, have a QR code, the app isn't a top 20, or if it's not updated almost constantly, it's almost impossible to find.

A desktop client for browsing, searching, purchasing, and installing apps, and perhaps other content (movies, music) would be helpful. Basically iTunes for android. DoubleTwist addresses some of this, but the market integration is in it's infancy (and I don't know that purchasing will ever work, unless google buys doubleTwist - hey, there's an idea!)

Not having any kind of review process in the market, there's a lot of shovelware, and a lot of ip infringing crapware. There's even been some malware. It's kind of like the wild wild west. Or the internet. Sometimes, being an "open" system isn't such a good thing from a user perspective.

Outside of the market, I think that divergent hardware is an achilles heel, not a strength. There's what, 3 or 4 iphone versions to deal with? Android runs on what, dozens of models (or will). With so many phones with varying capabilities, and os versions - not to mention bugs and quirks like the nexus one multi-touch swapping, some applications, especially games that like to get as close to the hardware as possible are going to be difficult to make portable.

yeah, who spilled the beans on that one?

Time flies way too fast when you're having fun.

Chrome is coming to the mac soon. I'm running a nightly snapshot of Chromium (http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/), from a couple of days ago. They've got a bit of work to do on it, but it's good enough I'm using it as my every-day browser now. Only major problem I've run into is that the java plugin on snow leopard doesn't seem to work yet.

Haven't you read the news lately? Bank bailouts/stimulus? If the government now owns a portion of the bank, then it could be argued that it is a government facility.

OpenFire, as many others have noted, is an open source jabber server, that's highly extensible, and already has support for the logging you require (via the monitoring plugin).

The same group also has a web based client, SparkWeb, that you can lock down to your OpenFire installation. You can also lock down OpenFire, so that it only supports your official client. One of the nice things about a web client is you don't have to deploy to 100 desktops. You just send out a link. :)

The paid apps setup in the market is a serious mistake.

I think andappstore.com has gotten the security model right. It requires some work on the developer's part, but it provides for strong copy protection, and works on the dev phone.