The CLR like the JVM can host other languages, there is even a lisp for it ( http://clojure.org/clojureclr ). I am not that familiar with the CLR but I think that only "system languages" can't really be implemented in it.

Good managers don`t torture their developers, you should be constantly asking what is preventing them from getting their work done and do something about it.

The GPL is essentially cancer for software licenses and that is by design.

It is not just a "wrapper for the UI code" there is a shitton of stuff, just for starters there are all the sensors (gyroscope, gps, camera), permission handling, packaging the app, interaction between apps, background services and a lot more stuff that differs from one platform to the next.

Yes you can share much of your application logic between each platform using C/C++, but:
1) You need to write it in C/C++
2) If your app mostly just talks to a server there is not much application logic in the mobile device, so most of your code will not be portable at all.

There is a reason mostly only games share significant codebases between each platform. Their application logic is already usually written in C++ and they don't often have to deal with the stuff I mentioned before.

Jeez, they don't show many tech ads in my country but I remember seeing the old ipod ads and all they did was shown white silhouettes of people wearing a headphones and dancing with some kind of brick in their hands...

Those ads kickstarted apple rise to the top.

"This is another power grab by the religious right"

I think this is just a bunch of politicians spending money and time on something stupid. Politicians either trying to grab votes from the more radical religious voters or just radical religious politicians trying to force their world view on other people. I don't think these people can be considered one coherent group like your statement suggests.

Good code has comments for edge cases, I mean "why the fuck are you checking if foo is less than bar?" with "//checking if foo will not overflow because ..."

Edge cases are by definition very unlikely, usually the code that handles them are bugfixes. Too many times I come across code that is full of bugfixes for those edge cases but no comments whatsoever, to me those kind of comments are more important than method comments (aka javadoc).

As opposed to what? Subversion would be completely unusable in this situation, at least git users can push and pull from each other peer to peer, which you would only do if you REALLY need it, because it is kinda of a pain in the ass compared to push/pulling to origin. Plus you CAN carry on your own work keeping a normal commit history as long as you don't want to share it with anyone until the servers come back online.

Really, it is "the greatest thing ever (for source control)".

Not being great does not mean you are not above average. The average is just very, very low.

Looks like someone forgot to use StringBuilder

You got a good point, but is the amount of money and effort wikimedia is putting on this venture be that big? To me it seems most of the work is being done by Facebook and the Indian Carriers themselves.

A band-aid is better than nothing. Global, free, uncensored internet will arrive (eventually).

For several versions Android required that too, until they came up with fragments in (if I am not mistaken) Android 4.0 which works well enough for touch (and touch only) devices.

I don't think stuff actually loads that much faster with ghostery because those analytics scripts and facebook buttons are really small and the browser makes up to X connections (8 usually) per domain at the same time. BUT sometimes the page hangs waiting for a third party domain to respond, this rare cases don't happen anymore.

The thing I don't get is the analytics scripts, do you really need that many? One or two I can understand, but with that many you won't even have the time to look at all the graphs they can throw at you. It is not like they are generating revenue for your website...