Just because no carrier will provide a cellular signal to a smartphone doesn't mean it's useless on the black market. Is it really that hard for a thief to fence an iPhone as if it were an iPod touch?

You're doing it wrong. LEGO kits are intended to be assembled into a model, then disassembled and reassembled into a different model. That's why the enclosed instruction book shows how to build more than one model. For a dramatization of how wrong you're doing it, go see The LEGO Movie.

So that you can have x86 apps that work in touch-based mode while away from the desk and switch to mouse-based mode when the user pairs a keyboard and connects an HDMI monitor.

How so? Android apps are written in Java that compiles to Dalvik VM. Free apps that use NDK, such as those on F-Droid, can be recompiled by anyone. Proprietary apps that use NDK can be recompiled by their publisher if the publisher wants sales on the other platform. How big is the remaining set of apps that 1. use NDK, 2. are proprietary, 3. whose publisher is unwilling to take the money from Android/x86 users?

It really depends on the genre because the more locked-down platforms handle some genres better than PCs. Party games, fighting games, and cooperative platformers really need two to four players holding gamepads and looking at one screen. A PC can technically do those, but in practice, desktop or laptop PC's monitor isn't big enough for more than one person, and I'm told few people are aware that they can use virtually any HDTV as a PC monitor. The touch screen that ships with a mobile device makes certain genres hard to control as well, as I discovered when I repeatedly failed to make a certain jump in the demo of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure on my first-generation Nexus 7 tablet.

ObMicrosoft: Look at the drama surrounding updates to Fez .

Tell that to someone who nags me to "DO THE [expletive] WORK and quit whining" when I try to promote awareness of the consequences of entry barriers to getting a video game published.

Some people might think "firstpost.com" is a troll site like "hotgrits.org" or anything in the .cx top-level domain. So let me explain this input method in my own words. It works in much the same way that activating tiny hyperlinks in the Chrome browser for Android works. Tap once in the vicinity of the key you want to press, and it'll zoom in on an area of the keyboard centered on where you pressed. Tap again to actually enter a letter.

My Nintendo DS came with a typing needle. So did my Newton MessagePad 2000.

That's because the .NET Framework is rebuilding the "assembly cache" (recompiling the runtime library into the processor's assembly language) after an update. In a comment to a Slashdot story a few days ago, I suggested doing this rebuilding in the background, letting the user use native applications in the meantime, and marking managed applications that aren't yet ready to start with an hourglass icon. But another Slashdot user objected that letting the user run anything before the assembly cache finishes would break native applications that start a managed subprocess without user interaction.

The JavaScript runtime (Firefox or Chrome) needs updates as well. And on Ubuntu, I get plenty of updates to various libraries.

Tried it, didn't like it, got rid of it. Windows 8 has worked fine for me since.

I think the point is that criticizing behavior takes time that could better be spent to engineer a workaround to said behavior.

Microsoft would probably do it the way it does crash reporting, where the user is given the option to automatically send error reports to Microsoft. The developer can retrieve these crash reports by 1. forming a corporation or LLC, 2. buying a certificate from VeriSign or DigiCert in this company's name, and 3. registering with Windows Dev Center Hardware and Desktop Dashboard (formerly Winqual).

That would have goaded the popular tech media into making unflattering comparisons to Windows 3.11.

A telescoping antenna analogous to those on portable radios would have sufficed for that. For a keyboard, I would have probably used the 4x4 matrix of my Casio calculator watch.

One way to detect a backdoored compiler to a fairly high certainty is diverse double-compiling, a method described by David A. Wheeler that bootstraps a compiler's source code through several other compilers. For example, GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Visual Studio) should be bit for bit identical to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Clang) and to GCC compiled with (GCC compiled with Intel's compiler). But this works only if the compiler's source code is available. So to thwart allegations of a backdoor in Visual Studio, perhaps a better choice is to improve MinGW (GCC for Windows) or Clang for Windows to where it can compile a working copy of TrueCrypt.