Market economies in this case will tend towards higher efficiency. While it's true that short term we'll have rising unemployment, long term we'll end up with a better society as things improve. As technology improves, cost goes down driving demand up and more is produced. Ultimately those unemployed in the inefficient model find work either in the more efficient model or in related industries which see growth attributed to lower costs. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment

The Galaxy Nexus is currently running at an unsubsidized $350, and it's not that far behind the Galaxy SIII (almost twice the cost). I doubt you'll see the Nexus line competing against the free/crap phones because those are heavily subsidized by the carriers to lock you into contracts. A large part of the appeal of the Nexus devices is their relative independence from carriers (VZW GN notwithstanding).

It probably wouldn't take much work to create a custom image to do all of that. Modifying the package installer to require a certain key signature would take care of the first three. 4 might require a tiny bit more effort, but not by much. You'd never be able to convince your employees to cripple their own devices to meet these requirements, so you're looking at company owned devices no matter what, right? In which case you're buying a bunch of devices in bulk. You may as well spend a little extra and have your custom image flashed on them. That's the advantage of having a fully open-source OS. You can make whatever modifications you want to it. Just ask the U.S. Army, that's what they're doing.

For that matter, you're even limited as to how you can rearrange the ifs considering that you'd want an IllegalArgumentException to trump an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException. I could even see why you might want the exception below zero to trump the exception above the length.

Starting with 3.0 Android supports full device encryption. Considering the only phone that supports Google Wallet officially (I have it running on my Galaxy Nexus, but I had to hack it onto there) is Sprint's Nexus S, and that the Nexus S will be updated to 4.0 fairly soon, your objection should be met in a decent timeframe. That's not to say there hasn't been a window where this wasn't the case, but it should be fixed soon enough. Also, the standard method (and only way I'm aware of) to root the Nexus S involves a full wipe of the device. Some other devices don't allow rooting via this method so other methods are explored to utilize some security hole somewhere (meaning no full wipe), but the Nexus devices already have an easy way to obtain root so these security holes aren't normally sought out. All the more reason for OEMs to ship unlocked phones.

The title should have been "ESRB Rolls Out Game Rating System For Mobile, Is Completely Ignored By Mobile Industry". Seriously! Neither Apple nor Google intend to support this thing, so it's pretty much dead in the water. This is before even considering the damage it would do to mobile gaming. I guess it wouldn't be the first /. title to be off.

The fact is that Google+'s traffic is up 5 fold. Basically that 60% drop is comparing the initial surge from when it was first made public to where it is now. Of course traffic is lower. That's like saying that TV viewership dropped off after the Super Bowl. You had a bunch of people that weren't able to access a service that are suddenly able to ALL AT THE SAME TIME. Eventually traffic settled down, but at a much higher value than before. That didn't mean that 60% left, it meant that G+ went through a period with abnormally high usage. The users are still there, they're just using it at different times instead of all at once. See https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/AZh8wwb76vR

I disagree with your premise. Take Twitter, for example: I follow almost none of my IRL friends on it, yet it remains of significant value. Probably moreso than Facebook. I use G+ fairly regularly, but 90% of my stream is from people I don't know personally. The problem is that people see G+ as a Facebook replacement, and while in many ways it is, it's more of a Twitter replacement. Consider the huge draw that the Will.i.am hangouts have had, the hangout with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, and the upcoming one with Felicia Day. All of these have a very large pull, and yet none of them involve people I know personally. The same goes from the posts by Dane Cook, Tom Anderson (Tom from Myspace), Mike Elgan, the Googlers, the CyanogenMod team, the Android Central team... On top of that, that 60% now has a Google+ account. Even if they never actively look for their friends on it, some of their friends will circle them. Even if they never post anything on it ever again, people they know will. And every time one of these things happens, a little red box appears on Google's pages letting them know there is something waiting for them on Google+. Every time they check their Gmail, that red notification will be there. If they've installed the app, there's another notification... It doesn't matter that they're not active users right now. They will be. The best explanation I've seen for all this was by Tom Anderson at TNW: http://thenextweb.com/google/2011/08/24/how-google-will-succeed-and-why-youll-use-it-whether-you-want-to-or-not/ I've gotta say, he pretty much hit the nail on the head.

Before everyone starts WTFing over a floating reactor, it's worth noting that the US Navy currently has just under 30 floating reactors in service, and another 70 in service that not only float, but are designed to sink and come back up.

On a related note, PHK points out that Ben Franklin totally screwed the pooch by defining current flow from plus to minus.

I'd heard of a plant in France that would spend most of the night pumping water up a hill, then during peak hours they'd have that water run right back down the hill over some turbines. Relatively low tech solution to a technical problem eh?

Zoom in on Mario a bit... Enhance...

right, but scrolling down is easy, scrolling sideways can be a pain. Not everyone makes sure their lines don't exceed 80 characters.

In most cases it is much harder to actually prove something through experiment, whereas it may be comparatively easy to disprove its opposite. In this case "Paper will always be incombustible in air" is actually fairly hard to prove (I recognize this isn't your exact hypothesis, but your hypothesis as stated is not the sort that would lead to theories that could predict things and thus be useful). You would have to prove that in every possible set of conditions (and there are infinitely many) paper burns. This is not feasible. Instead you form an opposite hypothesis, e.g. "paper is not ever combustible in air," and then set out to disprove it. This alternate hypothesis is known as the "null hypothesis." Experimentation is a form of inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. As such it takes infinitely many examples to prove something, but only one counterexample to disprove something. By burning the paper, you have disproved your null hypothesis and provided evidence toward your theory. Thank you, XKCD, for forcing me to look up "null hypothesis" last week.

The myTouch 3G (i.e. the second Android phone in the U.S.) is currently running Android 2.2. That puts it on par with the iPhone 3GS. The G1 is the first "high end" (there really was no such term when it came out since there were no low end devices) Android phone by HTC to outright stop receiving updates. The Droid, similarly, is running Froyo, and receives important updates. Sure, the low end phones stop getting updates after 6-12 months, but if you consider that the same market is usually met by the previous year's iPhone, it's comparable. Just a point of clarification: while it's true that Gingerbread is the latest version of the OS, most of the improvements were hardware support (and a slight color scheme change). If a phone already functioned on Froyo, the user wouldn't really notice much difference if it was updated. For that matter, bug fixes for 2.2 continued to be released after 2.3 was out. In that respect, Gingerbread could be seen as more of a fork than a true update, and will be merged back in when Honeycomb and GoogleTV are merged in Ice Cream Sandwich. I ran both Froyo (CM 6.1) and Gingerbread (CM 7) on my myTouch 4G and could hardly tell the difference.