Putting aside your main point, which I agree with.

Blackberry doesn't need to be modified to run android applications. It will run most of them if you just repackage and sign again the application for blackberry.

One caveat thought, if your app is using specific Google android sdks like the Google Maps sdk for instance, you may need to rewrite your app to use the web api of Google Maps instead of its android sdk api.

Scammers also sell anti-scam services. Personally, I would be even more suspicious of someone who wanted to help me and sell me something to get back at those scammers.

I assume you meant a chart like this one. The other link you provided sends me to a gas cost calculator.

I love how the chart purposefully EXCLUDES countries with large land masses and lower population density like Australia, Canada, Norway, Russia, etc. Unfortunately, it's a complete no-brainer that countries with higher population density need to prevent people from driving their own car. One way is to increase the gas tax. The other way is to make the drivers license for new drivers insanely expensive and almost impossible to get.

Build your own drone and fly it around to take some nice aerial shots. Just don't do it like this guy. His drone looked way too nice. He was lucky to recover it from Nepal customs after two weeks. See if you could build yourself a cheap weather balloon, or a foldable motorized flying wing large enough to take the altitude.

Yes, but if we don't like the type of moderation on Slashdot, we're free to go to another site. With the government, we're not free to do that (at least, not if they have their way).

This system, if implemented, will just drive radicalized speech underground and out of the public eye. It's not going to solve anything, except increase the number of people who want to rebel against the government, and make them better at hiding their trails.

This payment api they're retiring was far from their usual free offering. It was a payment api. It was getting a cut of every transaction.

That being said, the article is click-baiting us, it's discontinuing a service that nobody uses. Google Wallet isn't being discontinued for other goods, just digital goods. And it isn't being discontinued for in-app payments on Android, or on Google Play, only third party web sites selling digital goods with Google Wallet are going to be affected, which means practically no one.

If you had a third party global web site selling digital goods, it never made any sense to use Google Wallet in the first place. So it's not so much Google abandoning a product feature. It's actually a digital market that never saw the need for Google Wallet over competing options, and finally Google waking up to that fact.

It isn't even competition in this case. Cabs and "ride sharing" augment the capabilities of public transportation. They do not subtract from it. Most people do not live right next to a convenient hub of public transportation. You often need to drive there, or have someone drive you to it. Also for the very few customers that "ride sharing" might actually take away from public transportation, it's a drop in the ocean. "Ride Sharing" simply can't scale like Public Transportation can.

Uber's insurance is explained here, and its legalese can be found here. I haven't looked for Lyft's policy, but I assume that Lyft's policy can be just as easily found.

And yet despite all those penalties, racial discrimination still happens systematically during peak hours. During peak hours, taxi drivers can easily pretend not to have seen someone hailing them down if they know they can easily pick up someone else just as easily.

And in a way, Uber and Lyft's processes nicely solve that problem, since for them, they're not allowed to pick up people who are hailing them visually. They can only pick up the people that have hailed them electronically through a mobile app. So choosing your customer based on skin color is much less of a possibility for Uber and Lyft drivers, because now there is an electronic paper trail if a driver suddenly decides not to pick up a potential customer he has agreed to pick up electronically.

The electronic process of ordering rides through a mobile app also solves the problem of displaying a license. By ordering a ride through Uber, you see the picture, you see the id, and you see the rating of who's going pick you up before they do pick you up. Just try to get that level of information the next time you call for a Yellow cab, you won't get it.

Not only that but in a few big cities, where the number of medaillons stays stagnant despite the desperate need of additional taxis on the road during peak hours, Uber and Lyft are serving the needs of an underserved market. Because I can tell you, in my personal experience, it's not just black people that can't find a cab sometimes. As a white person who sometimes really needs a cab in San Francisco during peak hours, I've simply given up trying to find one. I can only assume that only customers from five star hotels and hot supermodels can catch cabs during those hours, because I see many cabs during those times, and I've used my phone to call cab companies as well, but those cabs are certainly not stopping for me, or they have the light on signaling that they're on their way to pick up someone else.

If I really need a car after work for some reason, I'll drive my car in, clogging up the system even more, and I'll risk paying insane parking fees for the entire day (despite the fact that I might only need the car for a fraction of that time, to go somewhere after 5 PM, that's not easily reached with public transportation).

I agree with your comment about data privacy, but what do you mean by flexible mail aliases? I have about a dozen email aliases linked to each email address on Google Apps Premier/Business, they all seem to work just fine. The filtering and dot notation also seem to work well.

So it could also mean that stupid people are more likely to drink pond/lake water than non-stupid people. Or that people living in rural areas are more likely to drink pond/lake water than city folks. Etc.

Alibaba is mostly for business to business sourcing. Personally, I don't know any other reputable place where I can source custom electronics equipment from China.

Amazon doesn't do that. Ebay doesn't that. And I guess I could go on a Chinese manufacturer's web site to get something done, but without Alibaba, I have no idea where I could get started and how reliable a supplier is going to be. Alibaba has just grown to be the default place where people go for that kind of thing. It's definitely not for everybody.

David Allen Van Vleet died in 2006, a good 8 years before he made his FOIA request.

Zombies don't usually worry about retaliation. They keep coming after their target, slowly but surely, filing out FOIA requests after FOIA requests, submitting court documents after court documents. They're relentless. Outside of updating their facebook page, playing the occasional farmville game, and voting in elections, they really have nothing else to do but pursue full-bosomed women.

Computer hygiene should be taught like personal hygiene, at the school level for the kids and through other public programs to try to reach the adults and the elderly.

In case you're the one who usually buys her a computer, she's the perfect use case for a cheap Chromebook. That's what I did for my mom. I didn't really force it on her. I just bought it for her to keep next to her Windows XP laptop. Eventually, as her machine became much slower and slower, she just switched to using the Chromebook on her own.

They're not trying something new. They're just trying to keep up with the free competing alternatives.

This strategy isn't going to win them any new marketshare. At best, it may prevent them from losing more marketshare.

In either case, people will still think of Microsoft Office 365 as a paid-only service. Similar things happened with Hotmail and Bing. Eventually, Hotmail and Bing matched Gmail and Google in terms of quality of their features, but this change took so long to happen, it didn't improve their marketshare despite all the money they spent in marketing and advertising.

That's essentially how their web site works, except they're asking every roommate to divide up and assign a value to each space, before asking them which space they might prefer. In a way, I like their site better, because it seems to work more like a blind auction. By keeping the bids of other roommates initially secret, then they're essentially preventing them from changing their mind halfway before the process is finished. It makes the process much cleaner that way and much more haggle-free.