Needing to hand-translate a program into a separate language for each platform violates don't repeat yourself.

We start with the assumption that the vast majority of the market isn't willing to pay a company substantially more to ship a formal proof of a software product's security along with the product. I'm interested in your bright ideas for making such a formal proof economical.

It sort of reminds me of Bill Meyer's negative space cipher.

If I were making a Windows 8.1 video, it'd go like this:

1. On the Start Screen, click Desktop.
2. Open Internet Explorer.
3. Go to ClassicShell.net.
4. Download and install the Classic Shell application.
5. Congratulations! You have upgraded to Windows 7.1. Now watch our Windows 7 video.

Yes, that's how important I think Classic Shell is: it goes on even before Firefox.

There are areas where land's contribution to the cost of food and shelter can far exceed the contribution of labor. How much does farmland cost again? And where can one lawfully pitch a tent to sleep for the night?

My understanding is that capital gains tax is lower because the business you're investing in has already paid its half in corporate income tax. It's like the FICA (Social Security and Medicare) tax in the United States: part of it gets deducted from gross income, and part of it the employer has to pay separately.

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.