They wouldn't be able to live so far away from work if gas taxes or road taxes reflected their true costs on the user. Right now, gas taxes alone do not cover the maintenance of roads.

I'm all for the gas tax but eventually this will become useless as new EV vehicles come up. Then you have the same problem. I also would like to see a more fair way of distributing the taxes. A lot of cyclists would argue that the big rigs and cars damage the roads far more than their 20 pound bicycle.

As for the metering device, I don't think it is necessary either. The same thing can be accomplished by checking the odometer on a regular basis. This can be done through annual vehicle registration.

This is a Japanese article mostly about Japanese culture. The camera is obviously targeted at the Japanese population since they mention Bic Camera which is a popular camera store in Japan.

Over there women/girls love to take pictures. Picture booths called "purikura" (japanese translation/shortening of "Print Club") are in almost every arcade and sometimes even have their own stores. These are your basic photobooths but also add some effects. For example, skin tone always appears clear/white even if you're on the darker side of the skin tone spectrum or if you have skin blemishes. These effects are obviously tuned to what Japanese girls consider beautiful.

If you were to offer a camera that offered purikura-like capabilities, it would sell like krispy kreme donuts in Japan. They're very into the way things appear on the outside.

Despite that I don't know why they don't place more emphasis on straight/white teeth and plastic surgery modifications. Korea is more into permanent modifications like plastic surgery but Japan seems to only be interested in looks or appearances.

That's a lie and that's not how it works. You can run any OS of your choice on a PC, even Apple's Mac OSX. The difference is Apple will not allow you to run their OS on any hardware. There's nothing stopping me from taking a random Windows box and loading up Linux, FreeBSD, or anything else for that matter. In fact there's nothing stopping me from running OSX on my PC either, except Apple's OSX license terms.

I'm not sure this is a valid complaint. I didn't find Xcode "smoothe and elegant". Maybe I didn't find enough time to get used to it but it was hardly a wonderful experience.

Eclipse isn't bad at all. It does occasionally crash or chew up memory, other than that it is fine on modern hardware. Some of the features are actually worlds better than other IDEs like the autocomplete and automatic library detection. It actually does get rid of a lot of the Java tedium.

ADT (Android Dev Toolkit) isn't bad either. My only gripe here is that DDMS should be a little more usable and stuff like the emulator SD card should be easier to access/manage.

Most of the complaints from real android devs will likely stem from one of two things: the SDK design or the Android Market. I consider a good chunk of the android SDK either "brain dead" in design or inconsistent.

By "brain dead" I mean many parts of the android SDK seem slapped together and designed to be easy for the android OS devs to implement. Take for example Activity menus. In order to set those things up you have to override at least one method onCreateMenu or something something. In there you'll likely have to define a switch statement to handle a menu id. The menu ids are enumerated by you rather than someone else. All of this just adds drudgery code that shouldn't be your responsibility.

By inconsistent it seems like each dev totally didn't communicate with anyone else on what they were designing. From notifications to menus, to dialogs, to activity design, all of it uses different paradigms. In some instances you feel like you're writing C code, in others you feel like maybe you're writing something that's Java OOP but not quite.

The final complaints stem from the market itself for which Google is doing a very lousy job. It wasn't till recently that more than 2 screen shots were allowed and the description field was increased from some ridiculous character count (maybe 500 characters or so).

The market still sucks for a number of reasons. For example, the only interface available is still the default one on the android device. Where's the advertised "web" browser enabled market?

The android market interface (on devices) itself sucks because it lacks a useful browsing feature. The recommended way to find an app is through "searching" but people don't "search" a store when they want to buy something that they don't know exists. They browse and see what's available through a process called "shopping". There is no good way to "browse" the android market because the categories are too general and there's no way to limit items by parameter/rating/cost/feature. At times I wish Google would let go of its hard-on for search because search isn't the right interface for every use case.

I could go on with the faults, but that's enough for now.

F R A G M E N T A T I O N

• There's no "I" in "TEAM".
• Fuck!
• I have diarrhea.
• Her eyes were like two brown circles with big black dots in the center.
• Voila!
• She's a 10.
• Mr Smith.

But why is that? Why does the correlation hold true? I've studied more than 2 languages and by anecdote, I would say learning the 3rd is easier than learning the 2nd. Partly because I had taken a linguistics course and the third language was taught in a different manner than the 2nd language.

When you learn a language, you shouldn't just throw up an expression and say "this is a direct translation of this". Instead the phrase should be decomposed into it's grammar particles and the structure of the phrase should be understood. From this you can now hand that blueprint to any student and tell them they can do something like "NOUN1 particle NOUN2 *copula*" is a translation of the English "NOUN1 *copula* article NOUN2". Now the student will correctly translate between phrases or ideas instead of words. The problem of learning a new language then simplifies into understanding correct grammar rules and exceptions, the limitations on those rules, and the required vocabulary to correctly express enough ideas.

Beyond that, the artistic, cultural, and idiomatic portions of any language will get you every time in translation. These things cannot always be translated because the target language may be missing the appropriate expressions. Worse, certain cultures prevent the use of some grammatically legal expressions. For example I could go outside and ask an attractive woman that I have never met before, "How old are you?" I would then probably receive a slap on my face. But take that same expression, translated, to many east Asian cultures like Japan or Korea, and you'll find that it is culturally acceptable for that question to be asked and sometimes necessary.

iPod touch has no camera. iPhone2 has 1 camera. iPhone3/3GS has 1 camera. iPhone4 has two cameras. So why are you tagging this on Android?

The projectors have a built-in end-of-life device. It's the bulb. The projector companies will likely stop producing the bulbs or make replacement bulbs more expensive than buying a new projector.

The grandparent post may have talked about anger and frustration but I've gone through enough by now (I'm still in my 20's) to realize life isn't all happiness and glory. There's an awful lot of sorrow and pain in life. Even though that exists, most people can overcome it the first few times. But it is the repetitive nature of the up and downs in life that beats a person into submission. Some may tolerate more than others but everyone has their limit eventually.

I have no doubt there are elderly people in their 80s or older that still enjoy life. But there are a good number of people past 40 and even 30 that are already tired of the burden partially because of the cards they were dealt at birth. Some of these people are still fighting with all their heart and the slightest hope for improvement in quality of life, but I've met enough to know there are some people that die trying or get their years cut short. It isn't a fair game for everyone, so blanket statements like "you die when you stop enjoying life" are certainly naive. If that were true, some people were born dead I guess.

I am sitting here perfectly happy with my unlocked from the factory NexusOne. I've been running froyo for months now. I don't have any of the "I need root" nonsense the other phones have.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't since there's lots of rumors of a Nexus Two.

They certainly didn't market or sell the phone correctly. Even Steve Jobs doesn't throw up a web page and expect people to buy his products. What does he do? He throws the press a bone or two before his official announcement to get everyone all excited and curious. He has a grand planned out event where he tells the world "behold, the next best thing EVAR!" And on the same day or near future, many different brick and mortar stores have the product ready for sale, for touching and looking. And if you missed all that, there's giant ads on walls, billboards, TV, and other mediums.

Google, a company that primarily makes money off of a marketing/advertising product certainly dropped the ball when it came to product awareness marketing. For a product, the NexusOne is a great product. But in terms of awareness, nobody knows about it. Pretty much everyone I talk to I have to give the run-down on the history and what it can do. It is just as capable as any of the Samsung Galaxy phones.

I also know that marketing speak is disliked around here but Google really should have advertised a primary feature being "Android Care" or something similar. All "Android Care" would mean is free and timely updates such as Froyo, etc. The updates really are a step up from the competition including Apple. The releases of Android are much more often than other devices.

Google needs to learn to commit to things and sell them rather than leaving things out there and hoping people will bite. Yes, that means hiring those pesky "marketing" guys, hiring an ad agency, and coming up with a valid Marketing Strategy, not just build a product and throw up a webpage.

The division isn't because older android versions aren't compatible in newer versions, the division is because developers want to use features of newer SDKs that are not available in the older ones. There are many big and important changes from 1.5 to 1.6 and 1.6 to 2.0. But many devs started around 1.5 or 1.6 and so they already have a user base or they started with 2.0, had success, and wanted to capture more market by making compatible 1.5 or 1.6 versions.

So while you can use the 1.5 version, it probably lacks features and has other restrictions that are not present in the 2.X version. All newer devs are switching to 2.X since the 1.5 and 1.6 market share is stagnating/shrinking and many features in the SDK aren't there. Nearly all new devices are 2.X android so it doesn't make much business sense to deal with the limitations in the 1.5 or 1.6 SDKs.

At 1" I still think of it as a giant brick. It fits in the bag, but the bag has to be large enough and it feels bulky in the bag just like a text book. At around half an inch, it begins to feel more like a thin pad of paper and since there's a lot less material, the overall weight is lighter.

Portability isn't just about fitting into pockets. It has more to do with weight. A netbook still doesn't fit in your coat pocket yet it still sold like pancakes. People on the go don't mind the bag, they do mind how bulky the bag has to be and how heavy the bag is. Go to most dense metropolitan areas where foot traffic is the primary method of traveling and you will notice that everyone has a bag. Go to any university campus and you'll notice the same thing.

Thinness plays a bigger role in the bag than you think. Suppose I have a backpack full of stuff and all of those things are really thick. That means the center of gravity for the bag is further away from my back. With the bag on, my center of gravity gets shifted further out and I must compensate more for it. The net result is either I lean forward or use more muscle activity to deal with the awkward center of gravity. As things in the bag get thinner, the center of gravity shifts closer to my back and there is less effort required to compensate.

The whole idea behind portability is not to get rid of the bag, it is to make the bag more manageable. When you think portability, think of the college student with a backpack, the business man with a briefcase, or a metropolitan women with a bag. Even if you eliminate the laptop/netbook, all three of these types people are still going to carry around a bag.

The fastest available Intel Atom is the D525 which is dual core. It gets 709 on PassMark.

An Intel Core 2 Duo U9400 1.4Ghz, on the same benchmark, gets 963.

For reference, an Intel Core i3 330UM @ 1.20GHz scores 1196 and an Intel Core2 Duo U9600 @ 1.60GHz scores 1129.

That's like asking for a big rig with a trailer to pull 1G on a skidpad or a Tesla Roadster to tow a big rig trailer.

Is the Air underpowered? Of course. But you find me an 11" form factor laptop that doesn't look like a giant brick and has a 2ghz+ i7. Not even the Dell Alienware M11x offers more than a 1.06ghz i7 or 1.3ghz Core 2.

I don't normally defend Apple but you're really comparing two different product lines. They still have a replacement for your 12" powerbook, it is called a MacBook Pro (13"). Ok, it is one inch more, but it is still small and has all the bells and whistles you're droning on about.

The Air series seems to target portability users where weight and size requirements trump all others. A MacBook Pro 13" comes in at 4.5lbs, while the MacBook Air 13" comes in at 2.9lbs, and the 11" version at 2.3lbs.

You simply can't argue much when the thing has nearly half the volume and weight of the fully loaded version. If the weight simply doesn't matter get the Pro. But for some people like myself, every pound counts when you're on the go. So I'll gladly shed things like dvd drives, ethernet ports, firewire, and even a GHz of CPU if it means 2 pounds less in weight. Obviously I have limitations: the atom cpu is much too slow for my needs and most integrated graphics solutions still don't cut it these days. The Air still comes with a good GPU and a good CPU. So there isn't much to complain about.