Comment: Flag button and disparagement of title (Score 1) 83
Comment: Amazon Appstore (Score 1) 135
for the vast majority of packages that you want you will not be able to get the file because it is released through the Googlr Play store
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
Comment: Rational laziness; 50 MB limit on .apk size (Score 1) 135
So there's no reason for this to be the case, other than laziness
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.
Comment: External Bluetooth keyboard (Score 1) 135
Comment: ARM vs. x86 for NDK apps (Score 1) 135
Presumably one ought to be able to [run the Android application environment] on desktop Linux as well, but I've never seen a method to do it.
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.
Comment: The Copyrobeast (Score 1) 83
myself eating at my desk in silence
In other words, like Magibon. Unfortunately, such videos might be the only videos allowed on YouTube if Big Copyright gets its way.
Comment: Manual review (Score 1) 83
Comment: The man from Mars is eating cars (Score 1) 85
Comment: Something Better Than Christmas (Score 1) 45
Christmas [has been] virally compromised with malware that is beginning to affect many other holidays.
So Jehovah's Witnesses were right about something for once?
Comment: Re:Noted that no event is yet scheduled for the US (Score 1) 45
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
Comment: Eventually run out of new works (Score 2) 45
couldn't an argument be made that artists are now forced to create entirely new non derivative works if they don't want to license the older ones?
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.
Comment: Re:Which stores allow this? (Score 1) 64
[On eBay,] Other payment methods are offered at the seller's discretion.
My former employer used to get dinged for stating in item descriptions that other payment methods were available.
Comment: For $420 per year (Score 1) 164
What about wifi only devices?
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.
Comment: Outside Boswash, there isn't much Amtrak (Score 1) 164
rest of the country has lots of freight
Amtrak is a commuter service, not freight.
I took Joe_Dragon's comment to mean that the vast majority of rail service outside Boswash is freight, not commuter service.