You are over reading. That's not my or anyone's expectation.

Currently with Android it's not true that if you buy any current Android phone you cannot be sure it will run certain high profile applications, much less a more obscure one you might really care about. For a consumer device this is a serious problem.

You are correct in that they are all ARM. In this case it seems to me more variability in what parts of Android are used and what a given vendor adds to it.
The early Android tablets are notably a mess as to what runs where (velocity micro I'm looking at you). In this case it's not so clear what defines "Android"

On one side there are a bunch of devices that won't talk to the android marketplace, they are not official, a tablet shipped before the tablet version is out.
On the other side key vendors release apps for specific devices not platform wide (Netflix being a notable example.)

I don't expect write once run anywhere will ever really be true but It's a fair expectation that something written for a specific os will run on that os.

Tight control is clearly the advantage of the apple approach, that's what they do well. Love or hate it it works for them.

I just think there's plenty of precedent for interoperability without so much lockdown being required to maintain compatibility. (though more in the hardware world than software) I personally would like something somewhere in the middle (my current hopes are staked on Meego but that's just hope at this point.)

Win CE was great example of how not to make things work and I'm surprised to see Google fail to learn from that. (just spec out the platform, include certain code required to be the base and then offer those platforms as "certified" android. Or be less confusing only standards compliant be called android and the full OSS bleeding edge wild west roll your own code be called Robot or whatever.

There's other greats stupidity they're replaying from CE like the need to run a task manager on a phone..

Remember Windows CE hand held devices! You would run around the net looking for applications and they would not run (oh sorry was compiled for MIPS and you have and ARM device, or some other screen size or assumed a physical keyboard or was complied for V 2.11 and you running some minor incrementally different version).

It's weird to see the same thing happening all over again. It's great to have an open platform but like an electrical outlet all the plugs fit, or USB or PCI (yes there are occasional incompatibilities) having standards that the developers can rely on is what makes things useful. Android is not even close to Windows (or any good modern desktop Linux Distro that will run on just about any hardware that meets spec and the applications for said OS for the most part will run)

I think many of us would like that kind of reliable application experience sans Apple's vendor lock in on hardware and OS.

As an aside I don't know why we're so willing to welcome Google as our mobile overlords. I personally don't see how the community can catch every bit of data gathering they've built into the code and then make a stable usable version you can compile for whatever hardware you've got. eg I'm unaware of tinfoil hat Android.

While expensive a bit better set up for the little ones (though definitely the over 3 crowd) a set of a ton of little rare earth magnets.:
http://www.getbuckyballs.com/
I have yet to have any adult or child come to the house who could resist playing with them. You make coils rings, try to get them back into a cube. The kids learn about magnetism and polarity but it doesn't scream I'm a science toy and they have fun.

On the same theme as set of large ball bearings 10mm or more in diameter are lots of fun but hard to keep track of.

for electronics
http://www.elenco.com/snapcircuits.html are a bit simplified from the old standby radioshack 150 in 1 kits but are easier for younger children.

seamonkeys are still fun though sad when they die.

Gyroscopes are still fun, though good quality ones are hard to find.

A set of rope and pulleys secured to the ceiling are surprisingly fun. It's a crane, it's an elevator for the toy bear, it's whatever the kid comes up with. I was really surprised with how much fun they have with a pulley.

Games they may not have : dominos, go

Ah we'll see something like Interface (ISBN: 0553372300) is just a few short year. Kinda like fusion as a practical source of electricity...

In alot of scientific disciplines Master's degree's are consolation prizes for people who get part way through the PhD and realize they're in the wrong field. (eg a master's in biology basically qualifies you for a pay raise as a lab tech but not much else) You want to pick a discipline where master's degree in itself is a useful credential. Most fields of engineering, Master of Public Health, Medical informatics are examples. If you're willing to get a PhD there are a million fields where your skills will be rare and valuable (most chemist's neuroscientist;s etc are not coders but would build themselves better tools if they were, fish biology, oceonography you name it just about. )

Look really hard at biostatistics. Pretty much all clinical medical research needs a biostatistician to be published but the Ph.D's don't get promoted checking the work of the clinical researchers and consulting for them. As a master's level statistician you could likely find work in a statistics "core" and get to help lots of different groups analyze their data at a given institution. It stay's pretty interesting because you don't get bogged down working for one group on the same project forever.

Good luck!

It's not posted in Idle it's posted under science. That's the context. Don't post under "science" and label it as written by a neuroscientist studying toxo! (leaving out that he's apparently a graduate student there) There's plenty of room to raise the quality of discussion of ideas outside of large journals like Nature and Science.

How is this science? A slate article siting the economist?

This is a classic example of potentially the ecologic fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy) In brief you have aggregate exposure data and aggregate data about the population and correlate them. From this data you don't have any idea if the exposed people are affected by the condition understudy.
(Anyone here have toxo serologies on the world cup teams?) Clearly there are no other differences between these countries besides their rate of toxo infection.:) See confounding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding).

All this stuff about toxo changing the development of society is entertaining speculation but no data is presented here to make it more than that. There are lot's more plausible pathogens for this (eg tuberculosis, malaria, HIV )

Population level correlations are best used for hypothesis generation, they are not reliable tests of same in most circumstances.

The old three button mouse twm solution for copy paste directory worked ok for me. I'm just not much of a keyboarder. I know I'm the minority here but I'm much faster with a gui. Heck why would I even run X on a PIII otherwise :).
 

ubuntu server and all command line stuff would definitely perform faster. (or some tiny linux would be even better)
My version was purely for ease of setup and use.
Unlike the usual slashdotter CLI is a pain to me, I don't know how you all type long paths without typos. It's okay for light work but the GUI works better for me.

I took an old PIII 933 mhz tablet that stank up the place runing xp tablet edition.. Xubuntu runs surprisingly well if you don't mind. I use bittorrent (transmission) client for download. VNC to admin without going to basement. (VINO to serve) Runs samba fine. I used to use enclosures and make my own but WD etc external drives have better drive spin down etc.
Currently about 2 TB of USB 2.0 external storage. Plug in more drives as needed. Use separate drives. Just mount and use Samba to make a share.

To playback video over network the cheap 5400 rpm vanillia externals deliver plenty of speed I have no trouble with playback on my lan. mostly MPEG 2 and H.264 stuff I've downloaded with VLC on the client machines. (Might be different if more than one person is accessing.)

I'm reasonably savy but no linux command line god (hence VNC ). And I wanted something I could set up and just work without tweaking for months like the last time I tried Mythtv. I got samba running and a share available on my network with about 2 hours worth of work. There's always room to tweak. Powermanagemnt on old laptop is not perfect, I can't get it to turn off the backlight on the screen. But for the cost of the drives I got a working file server and a separate machine to download torrents in a total of about 4 hours worth of work without haveing to mess with the command line too much. The main issue is that vnc is not xubuntu's strength. and I had to install samba via apt-get.

MAC is a pretty ubiquitous organism and clearly and emerging infection not only in the immunocompromised.
For people who live in older large buildings, legionnaire's is more likely to be a serious infection.
So much so that in many areas hospitals have to check their water regularly for it's presence to prevent outbreaks.

Legionnaire's it's not just from air conditioners anymore...

In no particular order.

E E "Doc" Smith - Lensman series ( have been reissued no so long ago so you should be able to find them). They're fun and it's a lengthy series.

C.M. Kornbluth and Fredrick Pohl The Space Merchants,& The Merchants war. Wrote a nice series about if advertising agencies ruled the world. In many ways more timely now than when they were written. Kornbluth has fun short stories along this line about inbreeding and consumerist societies...

A lot of Harry Harrison Novels would likely fit the bill too (I'm mostly thinking of the Stainless Steele rat. )
The Earthsea Trilogy (and the fourth book written much later) recomendation by others here is right on.

A lot of folks mention Enders Game which doesn't sound like what the OP is looking for despite being quite good.....Card's Alvin Maker series probably is and is great fun. The Call of Earth books would be appropriate too, but they are not very good.

While foundation trilogy may not be what the OP is looking for at that age I thought Caves of Steel, Robots of Dawn, and I Robot were awesome!

I'll second the Frank Herbert recommendations but you can go farther afield than Dune to stuff like the Dosadi experiment too.

Tom Swift series - basically Sci Fi Hardy boys. Neither dark nor political but honestly kinda dull.

At the risk of going off topic non Sci-fi thats great at this age is The Hornblower Series.