First, apart from Slashdot, I don't even post on the other forums he posts on. Second, our style differs greatly: I make interleaved replies using Slashdot's quote tag, while APK prefers no quoting at all, short paragraphs, and entire sentences in bold text. Third, my name and address are on my web site.

But after a discussion that we had a few months ago about data structures for blocking list construction, his use of a hosts file in a layered security process intrigued me. (No, I can't dig it up on Google, as Slashdot generally doesn't include later comments to a given story in the view presented to web spiders.)

Better yet, call it the "Name That Tune" button and let people key in what song they hear.

YouTube used to have "copyright infringement" as one option under the flag button until someone pointed out that it encourages users to commit disparagement of title against videos they dislike.

Just because an application is in the Google Play Store doesn't necessarily mean it's not also in Amazon Appstore. Open source applications are less likely to be in Amazon Appstore because of Amazon's $99 per year recurring fee, but they're also more likely to be in F-Droid or to have a downloadable .apk file.

There is a concept of "rational laziness". Where's the return on investment for making and testing an Android/x86 version of an application? In addition, several applications already appear to be at or near Google Play's 50 MB limit with one architecture alone, such as LibreOffice.

You could always buy a Bluetooth thumb keyboard and carry that.

Part of the problem is that a lot of popular Android applications use NDK because they're ports of applications from other platforms that aren't written in Java. Most of these aren't compiled for anything but ARM, while desktop Linux is overwhelmingly x86 or x86-64. Applications that heavily use NDK would have to run in an emulator, and by that point, you could just download the Android SDK and emulate a Galaxy Nexus as if it were a Game Boy.

In other words, like Magibon. Unfortunately, such videos might be the only videos allowed on YouTube if Big Copyright gets its way.

Some large and influential copyright owners are unhappy with the OCILLA safe harbor as interpreted in Viacom v. YouTube and have pushed for requiring each uploaded video to be reviewed by a person before it goes live. How much would it cost to employ people to watch 100 hours of video every minute?

Rap music could just as easily have been named after "Rapture" by Blondie. The man from Mars is eating cars

So Jehovah's Witnesses were right about something for once?

How was it the "cover story" if that's almost exactly how it's worded in the constitution of Slashdot's home country? Let's compare:

"To promote the public good by protecting the interests of creative people for a limited time" --bdwoolman

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries" --Framers

Eventually authors will run out of distinct works to create. See "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson.

In the diatonic scale, there are seven distinct intervals between pitches, and rhythm can be approximated as either a short or long time from one note to the next. This leaves fourteen possibilities for each note but the last, as the last note has no next note to make an interval or duration meaningful, or 14^(n - 1) distinct melodies of length n. But a song was deemed an infringement for having matched eight notes (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, the "My Sweet Lord" case). This sets n = 8, or 14^7 - 105 million distinct melodies. There are already far more people than that on this planet.

My former employer used to get dinged for stating in item descriptions that other payment methods were available.

For a little over a dollar a day, users of Wi-Fi-only device can buy a cellular radio with a Wi-Fi router. You could think of it as a cell phone that doesn't make calls because it's only designed for tethering.