That's not entirely true.
According to Wikipedia:

In fairness, they can't produce enough of the things to match demand.
That has to say something to their product.

The question is: if they were able to match demand, would they make a profit?
If so, then the fact that they're already cash-positive (if artificially), means they have a viable long-term future.

Not if your profile isn't public

Two different things. Once you're using social networking services, you've already gone through the "why" and the tradeoffs involved in questions of privacy, self-hosting, using other platforms, etc.
You're already using social networking for whatever reason, so why not try to mitigate your exposure at essentially zero cost (as I said, nobody's going to see your old posts anyway, and most of them are just useless fluff like "great weather today").

Like you, I also keep my interactions on FB and G+ minimal, but my proposal stands regardless of level of usage.
It's actually easier for me to go back in history and delete everything exactly because I've so few posts there, but for someone more prolific, it'd be a hassle.

Possibly - we all assume that, but we don't really know. Perhaps it gets deleted in time. Perhaps in certain jurisdictions they are forced to really delete it.

The point remains that even if the data is still available to the service itself, at least it becomes unavailable for everybody else
Something is better than nothing.

I've often wondered about deleting all of my social networking messages older than [$time_frame], say 6 months.
Social networking like Twitter and Facebook is usually very time-critical: you post something relevant for the moment, but that doesn't really make sense to store for very long (unlike, say, a blog post).
After a few days your post will be so far down your contacts' streams that it will probably never be seen again by a human anyway.

So why leave it up for machines to harvest your data? Why keep posts you did when you were younger and which could possibly be embarrassing later? Why leave open the possibility that through some security failure or site policy change your data suddenly becomes public?

The problem is doing the deleting itself. Going over each post and deleting them manually is a bore.
Facebook, G+ and Twitter are obviously not going to help you automate it -- they'd rather keep your data.
What we need is plugin or site like http://www.deleteallmytweets.com/ but which has a cutoff point instead of simply deleting everything. I wonder how long such a site would survive, particularly if it became popular.

Then there's the question if you'd trust a third party with that amount of access to your profile.

I also bought a second one after the first one RROD'd.

It's not about being "extremely loyal" as you put it, it's about being pragmatic:
- I still want to play games on a console, so I'd have to either fix it or buy a new one
- Fixing the old Xbox would cost about as much as a new one, and the new one is simply better (quieter, extra controller, lower energy, wifi, larger HD, etc)
- I have a game library which I'd like to be able to replay
- I can use my old controller

Honestly I've always preferred the Playstation, but I won the Xbox in a contest a few years ago, and it made no sense to go out and spend extra money on a console which is essentially the same.
For the next generation it'll be a PS for me. Either that or a box running Linux+Steam connected to the TV.

As for your friend breaking 12 Xboxes, that's really too much. I wouldn't lend him anything if I were you.

For some people, statistics is part of the fun.
Also, as others pointed out, some people participate in activities for reasons other than (or in addition to) having fun.

Who modded this up? This reads like a collection of every snake-oil "fix" plaguing xda.

Swapping, besides the problem of wearing out flash that you pointed out (but strangely dismissed as not being a problem to ruin user's flash memory even if it's replaceable - even desktop OS's tend to disable swapping on SSDs), is also slower and more energy consuming.
Actually, the effect of swapping would be that you'd get lag in your current application as your device realizes it needs to free up memory and initiates swapping instead of instantly dropping the other app.

Swapping only really helps re-opening an app faster, but the official recommendation here is that 1) apps start quickly (the dev environment will warn you if your app is doing too much work at launch) and 2) save its state when unloaded from memory and recover.
Unfortunately, many app devs suck, which will be a theme for the following points.

True that GPU acceleration came way too late in the game. There is no disdain however, there's only the fact that having a diverse universe of possible architectures forces the APIs to remain more abstract. This is also true of desktop OS' though, so not really a problem (and the newer Android devices certainly render as smooth as any other device).

I'm not even sure what you mean by architectural bias to rendering content on the fly.
True that this happens in the Google Maps app and in the browser (and webview), and I wish they'd fix it, but for lists and every other view container, the architectural design is to reuse the views as much as possible.
In fact, the API even gives you a cached view and handles the cache for you automatically, so you only have to add a few lines of code to take advantage of it.
Problem is, again, that many app developers are crap.

Allocations are expensive on any platform. Allocating more than you need wastes power and memory, both of which are limited on a device. Your solution seems to be to throw more memory at devices, but while I'd love if manufacturers started doing that, the sad reality is that they won't. So the OS has two choices: work within the current conditions, or optimize for pie-in-the-sky designs. You seem to prefer the latter.
And even if your device has a shitload of memory, your app will still need to live in a multi-tasking environment with other apps. Because of point 1, you want every app taking as little of that precious memory as possible in order to conserve the entire system responsiveness.
Stop being lazy and allocate only what you need.

Wasn't this done for Android 4.2?
Anyway, my experience with Android hackers is that they'd too gladly trade a lot of battery life for a little performance. I'm not saying the standard Android ratio is perfect, but this will come down to a matter of taste and use-cases.

To finish off, there's a line in the article which while stated poorly, does have some truth to it: (paraphrasing) when you reinstall your system it's always snappier, simply because you're getting rid of the cruft.
This (and as someone in another post above said, paranoia), I believe is the real reason behind why a lot of the above ideas have taken so much hold. Someone makes a claim like this, posts a new ROM which "fixes" it, and people will invariably find their system snappier. Then, with time they start installing back their old apps, services, widgets and live wallpapers, and slowly turn the temperature on that frog.
Then they are ready for the next conspiracy-induced "fix".

I don't know if a QR code would be much better.

Recently I was at a music festival where they had some type of QR code hunt going on.
The codes were all behind the fences where drunk people couldn't reach and destroy them, and just that bit of distance made it quite difficult to read the codes, even outside on a cloudy day (the abundant difuse light should be perfect for this).

Granted the codes they were using were a lot denser than needed (they were embedding the clue to the next code in English and German in the code itself -- stupid since you were using the festival's app to read the code anyway, they could've embedded the text in the app itself), which made them harder to read than normal, but the code was also quite big.

I also tried to read a small (unrelated) QR code which was glued to a pole, and the distortion caused by the pole's circumference made the code impossible to read.

So reading a code from a billboard, even in perfect conditions... It'd have to be pretty fucking huge!

No it doesn't.

Upfront, sure, but I've yet to find a contract where after it runs out, you haven't paid more for the phone that if you'd bought it and the contract separately.

Just make it an US-only "update" and don't bring this bullshit to the rest or the world, where the patent system isn't (completely) torn to hell.

You have to pre-register.
After a while you'll get an email with an order code you can use on the website.
I did it when the Rpi was announced and got the email a few weeks later.

I was really busy at the time, so I ignored the email and forgot about it.
Until two weeks ago, when I decided to follow through with the order. They're expecting to send it "within 10 weeks", which frankly is a lot, but not unexpected.

I'm going to attach an external USB drive to it and set it up in a remote location to serve as a remote backup and a private proxy server (different country, could be useful).

Microsoft is also releasing a tablet.

It's unlikely that it's GSM related, since the Nexus 7 doesn't have cell data connectivity.
The complaint is pretty odd to me too.
Even if ASUS's existing licenses are not appliccable since they are selling the tablet under Google's brand, Google still owns the mobile branch of Motorola, and is hard to imagine that they don't have those patents.

Furthermore, all of the nexus devices up to now have had WiFi. Why complain only about the tablet?