It's not harmful, it's just that mod points are limited. Which would you rather do, promote 5 good posts, or bury one bad one?

Washington Post broke the story late last year:
 
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/georgetown-students-shed-light-on-chinas-tunnel-system-for-nuclear-weapons/2011/11/16/gIQA6AmKAO_story.html
 
Though they can only predict the size/length, not the actual mapped location(s).

Alternately, different people with different viewpoints (pro linux, pro microsoft, pro apple, pro richard stallman, etc) will mod the most well written posts that support their viewpoints. Given enough moderators, both methods should end up with roughly the same result.
 
This only works if moderators only up moderate though. Somewhere a couple years ago CmdrTaco pointed out that something like less than 5% of all moderation points are spent down moderating posts, so I think this works overall. Moderation on Slashdot has been pretty consistently high quality for the last decade, so whatever moderators are doing, it seems to work ok!

To be fair, the Chinese are doing what he suggested -- albeit in secret underground train tunnels that span the length of the country.

It seems like it would be cheaper to simply lie about how many you have.

part of the developer program. Why is that so hard for you to understand?

A couple of replies back you said, "The advantage with iOS is", which made it seem like as if you were promoting iOS over Android. My (obtuse, perhaps) response has been that there are less hoops to jump through to develop on Android since anyone can just install the dev tools and go, no registration needed. The same goes for people testing the program. Apple on the other hand, is introducing hurdles for both parties to overcome to test the software.

If you are not part of a beta program then you just basically stole a copy of the prerelease version and you are then not beta testing anything.

There is no official beta program for the software I am testing because it's free software being written for the users' benefit. No theft is happening. The developer quite literally says "here, try this version and see if it works: http://example.com/program_beta9.apk"

Don't you need a dev account to generate/issue "provisioning codes"? That just seems like a needless step. This is generally what happens:
 
me: "hey dev, there is a bug that does X, reproduce it by Y"
dev: "oh shit i forgot about that, here let me compile this and throw up a URL on the forum and people can test it"
me: navigates to forum, clicks on link, installs app, gives feedback, repeat
 
This is a 5-10 minute process and lots of people can participate, it works great :) Rapid prototyping is fun and lots of great features have been added as a result of this process. It also avoids the headache of waiting for a final build to get approved and go live on the * app store.

A lot of mods use their points early in the discussion to shape it to their own agenda. Five mod points in the first 20 posts can either promote an idea, or derail a discussion entirely. Not that this is a bad thing.

I've got some sort of strong password chrome plugin already, I use it for everything. I just don't bother to write down the passwords.
 
The chances that I'll lose the randomly generated password in the time between when the cookie expires, and when I actually need to use the site* again is about 90%. If I think I'll come back to the site, I'll email myself the password, and if it's just a throwaway account (is there a better single word term for this yet?) I'll just use the password recovery if by some chance I need to login a second time. Hell, I've started using the password generator to pick usernames.
 
  *Does not include sites that have financial info like the Bank, Ebay, Amazon, etc.

Actually of all the apps I use on my phone, I think only gtalk (rapidly becoming replaced with facebook chat), google maps, and the web browser are the only two official google apps I really use. Google goggles will bust in and tell me interesting stuff about my photos, but generally 3rd party apps tend to be better in my experience.