According to this post, using any of the anti-features will hide an application from most users. How should one fund the development of, say, a video game to be distributed to users who have switched to F-Droid without putting in ads (which requires the "Ads" anti-feature) or charging for mission packs after the first (which requires the "NonFreeAdd" anti-feature)?

Most of the permissions on the Cineplex app are perfectly justifiable. "Full network access" is needed to contact the payment processor and venue to buy your ticket. "Add or modify calendar events" is to remind you when the event for which you bought a ticket is about to occur. "Take pictures and videos" appears to be needed for scanning barcodes on tickets and related documents. And perhaps "precise location" is used for getting directions to the venue. My only suggestion is to make Google Play Store require the application publisher to add an explicit rationale for each permission it uses.

People who choose not to install can always contact the application's developer privately.

There are ways to establish trust for the first install even if it is not from Google Play Store. For example, if I download the APK of VLC from https://www.videolan.org/ then I'm piggybacking on the SSL CA infrastructure, which assures me of one of the following:

• A. The APK is authentic.
• B. Somebody compromised www.videolan.org and uploaded a trojan.
• C. A man in the middle compromised the private key of www.videolan.org and my Internet connection.

How likely are the scenarios other than A?

I agree that an Android smartphone is a personal computer. But when you plug your smartphone into an HDMI cable, how many windows can you keep open on the screen at once? Like you, I own an Android device and an Ubuntu netbook, in my case a Dell Inspiron mini 1012. When I'm programming on my netbook while riding the bus to and from work, I routinely split the screen down the middle to see the source code on the left and the output, another source code file, or documentation on the right. I imagine that even non-programmers find it useful to see both the document you're referring to and the document you're writing. But Google has strongly resisted any sort of split-screen feature in stock Android.

If everybody moves closer, then what will people eat? Some cities have abused zoning laws to send people to jail for growing what used to be called victory gardens.

The Settlers was released for the Amiga and PCs running MS-DOS. This was possible because it was possible to read a serial mouse with serial port commands (whether Microsoft protocol or Mouse Systems protocol) and a PS/2 mouse with PS/2 port commands. But the Amiga and MS-DOS are no longer commercially relevant; Windows is, and by default, Windows conflates PS/2 and USB mouse input into one stream of deltas.

I define "PC" to mean that the person who owns a device controls what computing is done on it. If a device's owner needs permission from some other organization to run a given piece of software, it's not a PC. Kindle Fire and anything with Galaxy or Nexus or both in the name are PCs. Apple devices whose name starts with iP are not. PlayStation 3 was until system software 3.21.

An individual PC will eventually fail physically. A cap might blow, a chip might blow, etc. Once 8-core monsters are all they make, it won't be any cheaper to buy a PC that runs existing PC software and is comparable to a Core 2 Duo.

I'm getting conflicting results while trying to figure out whether the 8-core CPU refers to eight independent cores or to eight half-cores like in AMD Bulldozer.

Good point. I'll try to ask the PC fans how important a one-step, controller-operated installer is in the next article, and I bet that by the end of the year, they'll probably have come up with some drawback of unified GDDR5.

To pick random examples from the sixth and seventh generations, my cousin plays StepMania and a lot of other people play Audiosurf.

A lot of the Sonic games are on both consoles and PC. Sonic Generations, for example, is on Steam.

I thought those had gone out of fashion on consoles after the sixth generation because light guns don't work on LCDs. Or are you including the Wii Remote (and Namco's clone thereof called the Guncon 3) in the category "light guns"? In any case, there are plenty of mouse-controlled shooting gallery games for the PC, many in the style of the classic Area 51/Time Crisis style arcade light gun games.

You mean like Split/Second, Blur, Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing, and its sequel? But in general, thanks for reminding me of what genres are still underrepresented on PC.

And if you buy a gaming PC, you want the exclusives. There are currently a lot more exclusives on PC than on any given console, though that includes a lot of non-AAA games, and it may change in this generation depending on whether one classifies OUYA as a PC or a console.

Some of these cases involve limitations of the API to access peripherals. Coding up the solution oneself would mean the user would have to root the device first.

Apple is also dropping support for the fourth-generation iPod touch, which was the current model nine months ago. Because gamepad support is new in iOS 7, and game developers who haven't been able to get into Nintendo's far more selective developer program will be itching to finally have access to physical controls, watch games get quickly updated to be incompatible with the iPT4.

It would have made more sense to say "dearth of devices available to in-house testers compared to those in the field".

The problem with games is that they're more difficult to develop on a (DFSG) free software model than applications that are not games. Creating assets other than code costs money, and you have to recoup expenses somehow. The problem with paid apps on Android is that Android got launched in a lot of countries that didn't have Google Checkout yet, meaning the only way to get an app in front of users in those countries was to offer it without charge. This set an expectation among users even in other countries that apps would be $0.00.

And there's a developer problem when the upgrade from Android 4.1 to Android 4.2 broke every game that can use the Wii Remote as a controller through Bluetooth. It's just one that's impossible to work around from user space.