...they are already going to have to include over 4,000 people in the game's credits. Anyone who donates $100 or more gets "special thanks in the game's credits".

(Yes, my name will be one of those.)

Just FYI: you can use off-the-shelf USB barcode scanners with the iPad. I have done it. If the barcode scanner presents itself as a USB keyboard, you just plug it into the iPad's camera connection kit, and the iPad then thinks it's got an external hardware keyboard connected. Scans work.

This isn't theory -- I tested it with my own USB barcode scanner. It does work.

You're explaining why the version of the Linux kernel commonly used for desktops today cannot provide all the features Android apps use today.

What's to stop someone from basing a desktop (or tablet) distribution on the Android kernel? Sure, it's not what the "Linux mainstream" is doing, but can't it be done?

(Maybe it can't, in which case I look forward to being educated. But I've seen fairly complete userspace tool collections available to add on to Android distributions, to the point where people talk about "Ubuntu for Android"...)

This is false:

1) We have DirecTV (in the United States), and some of our content is 1080p (It's mostly "on-demand" movies that download to the DVR's hard drive before playing, and take way longer for us to download than actually play back, but so what? I can let it download all day while I'm at work and then watch it in full quality when I get home in the evening. Fuck streaming, it's not the only option.).

2) We have multiple devices that send a signal to the TV that's locally generated, not a movie or TV show or something, and they're visibly better when connected at 1080p.

One example is our XBox 360. The user interface elements are sharper, for example.

Another example is an actual computer. They're coming with HDMI ports these days. No need for VGA or DVI or DisplayPort or whatever, just plug in the HDMI cable and get video and audio and everything. For this, 1080p is definitely better. Just try both and see.

(Heck, we're even thinking of getting an HDMI/USB KVM, since we've got multiple devices that use HDMI for both video and audio and use USB for peripherals. Then I'd be able to share a keyboard, mouse, and wired XBox game controllers across multiple systems.)

On the XBox 360, I can play four (well, five and a half, but four that count) different kinds of game: on-disc games, XBLA download games, "on-demand" download games, and "indie" games.

All four can be patched. Is the claim that even on the cheapest of these, a patch costs $40,000? That's a bit hard for me to swallow, because I've seen "indy" games get patched, and those are often from very small shops.

(There's also "original XBox" games, now obsolete, but also capable of being patched. There's also interactive content on video DVDs, but almost nobody distributes games that way, and these cannot be patched.)

I'm confused ... isn't Google Docs already this?

I'm already using it this way, using it as an arbitrary file store, from my desktop via the browser and on my iOS devices via multiple applications like "GoodReader".

The article didn't give me an idea of what they're adding. Transparent background sync with local filesystem? Standards-compliant WebDAV access?

Eh?

Loss-leaders are certainly of benefit to those that decide to engage in them. I think that's obvious. You seemed to think I didn't see that. What about my commend gave you that conclusion?

That does not mean that they're of net benefit to consumers, or to society as a whole.

The arguments you make are similar in character to the arguments against regulating pollution. Pollution regulations would not be put in place for the benefit of polluters, but for everyone else.

My preference is for the market to be made up of fair competition among a huge number of small players. I tend to have a negative view of practices that give incumbents a leg up. Is that enough on its own to explain my stance to you, or do you need for more of the dots to be connected?

Are they going to make all loss leaders illegal?

That certainly would be nice, wouldn't it?

Why do you think there's a high risk of hurting their market share? Do you think most of the masses buying Android phones are buying them because they run Android? Do you think they care about the Android brand, or about Google services (like marketplace) specifically?

If so: you may be correct, but it's certainly not self-evidently obvious. Amazon's selling Kindle Fire systems like mad. Why couldn't Samsung do the same with a fork for smartphones?

Most hate towards PHP comes from elitist snobs who don't know how to use the language.

Maybe. But not all of it.

I have been using PHP, for both business and personal stuff, since it was called "PHP/FI" ("personal home page / forms interface"). My old startup company would never have been successful without stuff we did in PHP. I've written and contributed C-based PHP extension code which was distributed with the core for years (until the underlying libraries fell so far out of use that there was no point including it anymore).

I still use PHP sometimes. But I prefer not to use it for important stuff that needs to stick around for a long time if it has any complexity.

Here's why: in my own personal experience (YMMV, of course), PHP has not been terrific about separating security fixes and bug fixes from feature evolution. It was far too easy to write code that would break with a version upgrade (eg. because an API or behavior changed), and to be forced into that version upgrade because security hole fixes were only available for the newest versions.

It's certainly the case that if you were very careful, you could avoid the problems. But, you had to be careful, and I saw a lot of novice programmers who weren't. (Our startup company provided PHP APIs for our product -- as well as Perl, Python, Java, and even TCL, this being the mid-to-late 1990s -- so I got to interact with a lot of novice PHP programmers.)

It's also certainly the case that for home/hobbyist use, you can mitigate some of the trouble by getting your PHP as part of a Debian distribution instead of getting it directly from upstream sources. The Debian folks are kinda insane about backporting security fixes to regarded-as-obsolete versions of software, and I love 'em for it. This is what I do on my household servers. (Yes, I still run my servers myself, not via a hosting provider -- have since about 1988, when they were Sun and VAX systems instead of the Linux I use today.)

It's certainly possible that PHP has gotten significantly better about this than it used to be. I haven't had reason to go check.

But anyhow, that's where my own ... hatred is too strong a word, let's say maybe "concern"? ... for PHP came from.