Subscription services for books like Safari Books Online http://my.safaribooksonline.com/9781449309473 already "loans" books with a model like this. They pay out from a pool based on the number of times a book is selected from their library. Of course a single use isn't going to pay out as much as a purchase, but the alternative is for a Safari-like subscription library to buy a single copy, or as many copies as would be used simultaneously, and do license management. And that opens the whole DRM can of worms.

An open-ended revenue model can be advantageous to authors of frequently-read books.

Java is much complained about, on the one hand by people who think it is too hard, and on the other hand by people who think it is not sufficiently expressive. But the evidence is you can build a world-beating OS with a Java userland. And evidently it isn't urgent to augment or replace Java, either with more expressive JVM languages like Scala, or supposedly simpler languages available for the JVM like the BASIC-like Jabaco, even though this could be done for Android since the translation to Dalvik bytecode is downstream of compiling into Java bytecode.

Java has great static code analysis tooling and great refactoring. There are books like Thinking in Java and Effective Java that will make you fluent in the idioms that make Java understandable, debuggable, and maintainable. For a programming beginner I'd suggest Learning Android and Head First Java. Android's documentation, tutorials, and examples are enormously improved since Android first came out.

Every language has screws, but a good case can be made that Java has fewer of them than many other languages.

Think about the phrase "personal computer."

How many people do you know who really need a completely general-purpose computer that they own and control personally?

How many "PCs" are actually nodes in a centrally controlled system, and not "personal" at all?

Because of the economics of making "PCs," we have the illusion that hundreds of millions of people buy and use "personal computers" each year. In reality, a minority, possibly a small minority, of those people actually take advantage of anything those "PCs" do that would require personal control over a general-purpose computer.

This is the reason mobile devices that are not quite "personal computers" are rightly popular. They serve the actual need. Hopefully, it will be possible to use mobile devices as if they were personal computers, so that the potential of personal computers can be applied to a networked, mobile world.

This is a great proposal. I would no longer make mistakes about a meeting in another time zone changing to local time for an in-person versus a phone meeting. However, it can be improved. Decimal time would make calculating percentages of time spent on various activities much easier. Combine the two for Flawless Victory.

Nobody has ever moved an operating system from mouse to touch. There is a first time for everything, but the two winning tablet OSs were designed for touch. I believe there is a reason: Turning a non-touch OS into a touch OS is harder than anyone doing it thinks it is.

Secondarily, I think this is what is holding back Web operating systems on touch devices. The Web wasn't designed for touch and Web operating systems "leak" bad user experience in from the non-touch Web. On Android and iOS touch devices, the Web browser is an ancillary UI and application environment, not the central part of the user experience.

That is correct. And most specifications for LI ("lawful intercept") specify that it should be undetectable, or, at least, inconspicuous to the people operating the network. That is, it has to operate outside network management and network statistics gathering. LI implementations can do that successfully because they are usually specified to capture a small fraction of network data - 1% in some cases. LI is distinct from the kinds of technologies used as a data dragnet by spy agencies, and it also distinct from deep packet inspection.

As the post above points out, if you have access to law enforcement tools for monitoring telephone networks, and no effective checks on that access, the underlying technology enables one to do the kind of snooping alleged here without leaving a trace in the network's operations.

I was hoping for a visual timeline of distributed git repos, or something that would make using git easier. Git is likely a better way to do version control, but it is better because it is fundamentally different. Those differences have not worked their way into Eclipse's abstraction of version control far enough, yet.

You wouldn't steal a car.

But would you download one?