I think that MIDI support in and of itself is fine, but Android has so many other things that would be useful to so many more people. How about mounting network drives so that you can access them in every application. How about integrating Google Drive so that applications can access files without the application developer having to write code specifically to handle it?

Not as far as I'm concerned. The last space race meant we just build very large things that already existed. We basically built really big rockets. Rockets have been around for centuries. We also used computers for navigating the rockets. But computers advanced on their own without the need for the space race to really push them. We developed some pretty interesting materials and technologies to make the rockets lighter, and to make sure they didn't burn up on re-entry. But we didn't actually come up with any solutions that made it significantly easier to lift mass out of earth's gravity well. It still requires huge amounts of energy (and therefore money) to lift things into space.

You're still looking at a very long time to turn around and come back. Apollo 13 was only a 5 day mission, and their oxygen system problems happened 56 hours into the mission. They were only 15 hours from the moon when they encountered problems. Turning around was a relatively simple thing to do in this case. When your turn around point is 5 months away and something goes wrong, you have to have the materials on board to fix it. You don't have the option of just aborting the mission early and coming back home.

What it really means is that it makes many have access to servers that never had them before. Before all these cloud servers showed up, if I wanted to have a place to backup my files to, I would buy another hard drive or backup to DVD. Which means I bought 0 servers. Now with cloud storage services, I just back my stuff up to the cloud. I'm using a certain percentage of a server.

A lot of things that require servers just didn't used to get done, because it wasn't feasible to buy your own personal server for yourself if you aren't going to utilize a significant portion of its resources. But with cloud services, even if you only need 1% of a server, you can still do that task because it's now possible to buy very small pieces of processing and network time.

This is what people don't seem to get. Even getting people to Mars is a much bigger task than just launching a single rocket. The round trip time for a Mars mission is around 2 years. You have to send everything you need along for the ride. All the food that the astronauts need to eat on the ride will need to be brought along with them. I've seen some numbers (can't find the link now), that even a single Mars mission would require 30 launches of supplies from the earth. There's also no ability to bail out like they did with Apollo 13. Once they are on their way there, there is no possibility of turning around. Even when you get there, you have to wait about 6 months for the planets to get into the right alignment for the trip home.

I like SOKP, the Sonic Open Kang Project.

I am shocked that in the hours since you wrote this comment, no Microsofties have showed up to tell us how wonderful their Windows Phone is. I literally only ever see those comments on Slashdot, but normally they are as reliable as the sunrise.

Oh? So you have the source code? Snicker snort.

A jailbroken Android device, on the other hand, really is a small Linux box. You can trivially install a more complete userland on most interesting phones. You can install an X server. You can get the sources to everything but the Google Play stuff, and you can use the phone without that stuff. In theory you should even be able to throw away the GUI and all the apps from Android and switch to Wayland someday, at least on relatively modern phones whose graphics drivers will be usable by Wayland.

Now, tell us again how much your iOS phone is like a computer, please. We're fascinated.

What? No. They are all motivated by profit.

That doesn't actually preclude our doing it, although we won't be able to do it with a robot arm any time soon. (Would love to be wrong.) It might be possible to do it with biotech, though.

If you're using somewhere near the inverter's peak output, then you can get as much as 90% efficiency. Inverters are getting smaller all the time, which makes it more feasible to gang modules instead of using monolithic units which will provide very low conversion efficiency for low outputs.

It's still unfortunate to leave 10% on the table. But a lot of DC-DC power supplies are also not very efficient. Best-case, they are only around 95% efficient, and you can easily lose another 10-15% if you execute them poorly. So yes, optimally they have half the peak loss, and even bad ones are likely to be better, but we can make better inverters and we will as the demand increases.

Well, we could argue about that all day, but I argue that it doesn't really matter: no matter what it means, they're more likely to use Android. If it just means they are going to want to use a broad variety of apps from disparate sources, that's Android. If it means they want to customize their phone as much as possible, even just bling-bling style, that's Android. If it means they want to tinker with the internals, obviously that is Android. If they care about security and controlling what apps can do on their phone, that's also Android, albeit one of the cooked-down versions and without Google services — but you can do that if you want to.

You could argue that any of these desires makes you a "power user", but clearly any of them will also lead you to Android. If you took some of them to extremes you might end up someplace else, but it wouldn't be iOS or Windows Phone.

I don't even remember there being a pay-for version of CDE for Linux. I'm not saying it didn't happen. I just remember you could buy a Motif tarball from Metrolink that would get you Motif and mwm, not like you would ever use mwm when you had fvwm. And then later you could buy Caldera Network Desktop, which came with Metrolink Motif. You could also buy AccelX, which got you a substantially faster X server back in those days, with meaningful support for your video card's 2d acceleration features... something that XFree eventually achieved, of course. Apparently you can build CDE for Linux these days, but I haven't tried. (why...)

Yes, actually. Why should they bother, in this case?

Not really. TL;DR: Linus doesn't say so, and he holds the trademark, so he gets to decide what makes "Linux(tm)".