No.

Taxes from Tobacco sales doesn't even cover the medical costs of long term treatment of smokers in Australia, where tobacco taxes are high.

This is just medical costs, it doesn't include fires started by cigarette butts or costs that the government doesn't have to pay (such as cleaning a car or house after it's been occupied by a smoker) that have a net drain on the economy.

For the same reason people prefer to watch 42 meat heads wrestle each other for a ball rather than watch 42 of the brightest minds debate.

I dont mean the suppressed homoerotic desires either.

Given my experience with Civ V, they'll build about 2 cities each and never actually go to war, let alone attack. It will be a paint drying simulator. The incredibly stupid AI was what ultimately forced me back to Civ IV.

I believe the Lt Cmdr has wrestled with that question for years.

Because this is pretty much the only thing the anti-android crowd can complain about.

Its becoming harder and harder for them to hide how butthurt they are behind legitimate excuses because the legitimate excuses are disappearing rapidly. Whenever you see an article on the horrors of Android Fragmentation/Piracy/Profitability and so on you know it's going to be bullshit by someone who's upset that Android has become the dominant platform.

These renewed attacks are conveniently timed with Google's release of Google Work.

However, what people forget is that 95% of small app developers on IOS dont break even, it's still high 90's on Android but more break even due to lower start up costs. The idea that you make millions from an app is something Apple likes to perpetuate but in reality only 0.001% of devs make a significant amount of money. The way to make money as an application developer on Android or IOS (or Win Phone, can we call it WinPo?) is the same way as you do it on PC. You make applications for other people.

Everyone from banks to supermarkets to coffee shops want an application that they give to customers for free as it brings in business. Someone has to write these applications and dollars to doughnuts I'll bet that Tesco didn't write the Tesco app, they hired someone to do it for them. If you want to make money from Android or IOS, forget selling direct to consumers because chances are you wont make it.

This.

The only people afraid of Android "fragmentation" (those are sarcastic quotes) are the people who dont have an Android device and are desperately hoping for Android to fail for some reason, any reason.

On Android, most Android users don't pay for apps. Either because they can't (Google Wallet isn't universal)

Next time, just write "I know nothing about Android" because it'll waste less of our time.

You dont need Google Wallet to purchase apps on Google Play. You can do it with a normal credit card or the Google Play preload cards that are sitting next to the Itunes cards.

Google wallet is a completely different product, whilst it can be used on Google Play, it is not required.

So the Android business model is to sell ads and give the app away

And this ends up being more profitable. Especially over the long term.

And now that its happened, I'm going to blow my own trumpet.

For all the people who bashed Flash and said HTML5 is our lord Geezus and Saviour, I hope you enjoy it because now that you've more or less killed flash all the things flash was being used for (I.E. annoying the living shit out of you with ads) is now in HTML5. The problem is, Flash was a plugin, you cold block it completely at that level and easily select the bits you wanted to play. Now with HTML5 the ads and annoying videos are part of the code so in order to block them you need to parse the code. This means advertisers can get even trickier in hiding ads as part of the content and ad blockers are going to have to wrestle with a higher number of false positives.

If you thought adwords was annoying, wait until you have adword videos in HTML5 (and if I've thought of it, you can bet that someone with less scruples has too). So you've killed flash and all the evil that was in flash is not moving to HTML 5 where it'll be easier to hide and harder to block. There's your victory, drink it in.

They're the silly party everywhere.

However I believe even the Official Monster Raving Loony Party would refuse to accept homoeopaths.

So what you're saying is if we dilute the belief in homoeopathy, it'll start working?

I dont expect you to understand but, it's nice to have a leader you dont have to be disappointed in. Even if they're only a symbolic leader and haven't wielded any real power in 400 years.

The same way someone is granted a patent on using rounded corners or scrolling on a mobile device.

The patent system is horribly broken and now only works for money (you pay, you get patent).

A robot bartender in a commercial environment would either need to be able to follow all the same rules or be operated by someone that does.

A robot bartender will be programmed with a set of rules that will look very similar to the rules set out for human staff.

It will be the same with a robot carer. They will be programmed to the same parameters as a human carer would receive. So someone with chronic liver issues will be denied alcohol, someone who has mobility issues will be able to order the odd sherry.

People forget we already have a system of rules for decision making in place. The main reason they're flawed is because humans sometimes dont follow them (I.E. the man with chronic liver issues might persuade his carer to give him a sherry because it's his birthday).

The difference between a human and robot bartender is that when you've had a few too many the robot bartender can not be bargained with, reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop until you've been served a diet soda.

No that's a head that looks like a freak formation of mashed potato.

Thats because 99% of AAA games are twitch games. No strategy involved, just reflexes. Games like COD, Halo, et al. really limit what the player can do and it really is the fastest mouse wins. So they have to limit the reaction time of the AI to what a human is capable of.

Now if you look at strategy games like Civ IV, you had to give the AI unfair advantages to put it on equal footing with human players. But turn based strategy games have a lot of fuzzy logic. So really an AI mastering COD is not news, we can have been able to build bots with superhuman reaction time since the 90's. Wake me when they can master a city building sim as well as a good human player.