Quite the contrary, communism is all about proletarian revolutions, power to the people and elections -- yes, elections. Dictators are getting elected. They are not really democratic elections, everything being directed with fake votes from a privileged minority, mechanical smiles and applauses and all that, but they are elections nonetheless.

However, you should go and learn some systems theory -- just because a trait of a system is not advocated, it doesn't mean that it isn't going to happen, regardless of any precautions you might take. Communism itself is really natural for dictatorships. And it is not only about its predilection for dictatorships; but it contains many flaws as an economic system too, like for example the notion that profits are only generated through surplus labor; not to mention that the working class is becoming more and more obsolete.

Its most important flaw however is that it fails to take into account human nature. People do not want to be equal, they do not want to share property and in general have a strong sense of ownership, not to mention selfishness. What happened instead is that in communist countries the higher you ended up in the political party, the more privileges you had, with corruption going rampant. Hence the phrase: in communism, some people are more equal than others.

Karl Marx used to say that capitalism leads to economic crisis, making them inevitable due to internal flaws. However, communism does not solve that. I lived in an European communist country - when the country had to pay its huge external debts, the austerity measures taken in the 80-ties (that lasted for 10 years) would make today's Greece look heaven-like.

And make no mistake about it, China is communism with a twist, but their biggest source of income are external investors that come to them because of driving forces of capitalism. It also remains to be seen how China will evolve, but evolve they must, trust me ;-)

Android isn't using JVM, it's using Dalvik which is a VM written from scratch that's entirely different from the JVM (it doesn't even use the same bytecode).
The link between Java, the JVM and Dalvik is a bytecode converter, capable of converting already compiled Jars to Dalvik.

And not to burst your bubble further, but Android isn't even using an X Server, the gui manager / toolkit being also written from scratch ... so you can't really rant about how they've used a "free OS" ... it was only the Linux kernel ;)

On the whole, Android isn't even licensed under the GPL, but APL.

So the next time you rag about the virtues of GPL stuff you get for free, take a deep breath and get your facts straight because you're just waisting bandwidth otherwise.

Also, what Miguel does is Miguel's business. He saw some value and wanted that on top of Linux. Maybe he was wrong, but before you criticizes him you first have earn that right ... you see, I don't really think you or any of the freetards in this thread have any meaningful contribution to open-source software.

Yes, but it doesn't cut into my monthly paycheck ... too many of such monthly expenses would mean I won't be able to pay my bills and support my family ... and these, IMHO, are the real problems.

If Google's search engine and Gmail ... came with a paid subscription, then I wouldn't use them ... that's one reason I switched from Yahoo's Mail to Gmail ... since the free version of YMail had serious restrictions, like a really small storage, and no POP3 access.

Sorry, but I consider this to be a good deal ... Google can mine my data all day long, I don't care.

Windows ... the operating system for the dumb and poor.

> Apple basically invented the home computer

That's rich :)

They revolutionized the home computer with a GUI interface model stolen from Xerox, they lowered the price of the hardware (Woz was a wizard after all), but they haven't invented it.

The first home computer intended for consumers was from Altair - aprox. one year before Apple I was released. And the credits for the "home computer" as it is today cannot be attributed to a single individual or company. Far from it.

But then I guess it's fashionable to credit ol' mighty Steve for everything that's shiny.

Because the manufacturer of the related hardware isn't the one that's a threat to Nokia. Apple is.
They are designing the iPhone, they are the ones getting most of the profit.

People are calling Nokia a patent-troll, but Apple deserves this. They have patents on multi-touch gestures and because of that competitors (like Android) can't implement features requiring multi-touch.

Want a free pass? Learn to play nice then.

Dude, I'm really sorry about those poor bastards who died in the second congo war, but come on, is it the same as millions of people dying everywhere on this planet, with forests and cities burnt all over the place, all the world living in constant fear, asking yourself if you're house is going to be hit by a house tonight ... with no place on earth to retreat with your family?

That's the coldest argument I've seen in a while. You want to be part of a war, to fight? Go for it, nothing stops you.

And seriously ... the second world war has over 60 million casualties, of all nations, genders, ages and races. You can't compare that to 4 million, not by a long shot. And that's in a time when the military wasn't so advanced (compared to today's gear, it's not far from bows and arrows). Nuclear weapons aside, the casualties could be in the order of billions ... because even without nuclear weapons, you still have intercontinental missiles, satellites, jet-fighters, bio-chemical weapons and big-ass bombs that can obliterate a small to medium city (with extreme accuracy).

No you can't :) It's in the nature of our profession to be redundant (as it is with other fields of endeavor as well).

If a platform doesn't have redundant libraries, then it's either not popular, or it is tightly controlled.

AOT compiling has nothing to do with having a runtime or a garbage-collector. AOT refers to code being translated directly in machine code, instead of an intermediate byte-code language. When you're using an intermediate language you can do neat tricks like generating and manipulating the code at runtime, and that's why JIT-ing is disallowed.

For a garbage collector to run, you have to keep some state at runtime, like a global count of the number of references an object has or local counts of references (on each object) to construct a graph of objects that are still in use, but that's not code evaluation at runtime.

There will be disadvantages of Mono on top of the iPhone though. Because JIT-ing and eval-ing are forbidden, you can't use libraries that rely on runtime bytecode manipulation.

I doubt they'd have a problem of approval. There are already games developed with Unity3D (http://unity3d.com/), which is a toolkit for iPhone games running on top of Mono.

Using C# may not be much better, but learning yet another programming language, that's just another variant of C, with its own libraries and ways of handling events and with its own tools ... gets really tiresome sometimes. And learning is only half the battle, you'd also have to rewrite all those code-snippets and utilities you've grown quite fond of.