Can be increased if you provide photo ID. For comparison, you have to provide photo ID to get a bank account or even to verify a Facebook account without having your own cell phone number that isn't shared with another Facebook user.

I thought transaction fees were the entire reason to mine as the minted coins per block decrease asymptotically.

Do transactions without a "tip" already take longer than an hour to get included in a block?

What's the accepted neutral term that means "iPod touch, iPhone, or iPad"?

Player 1's controller is $0 with the purchase of a console. Additional controllers are needed only for same-screen multiplayer, and Slashdot regulars such as CronoCloud have long maintained that same-screen is most useful to children, who have already become a minority in the market, and is dying out in favor of online. Besides, I've found it a lot easier to find used controllers for consoles than for phones. I bought the Xbox 360 wired controller that I use for PC gaming at this pawn shop.

I was under the impression that casual gamers expected handheld games to be in point-and-click genres, like Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Bejeweled, and the like. On consoles, conventional wisdom is that games requiring a specialized accessory (like Guitar Hero, DDR, and Wii Fit) have tended to sell well only when bundled with that accessory.

Let me rephrase it a different way: If you were to find an Android game on Google Play that could not be played to completion with just the on-screen gamepad, how many people do you think would ignore the "Controller strongly recommended" in the description, buy it, and give a one-star rating that it's too hard?

I wasn't singling out iPhone vs. Android as much as iPhone vs. 3DS/Vita. The Ouya console includes one controller. And even if you limit it to phones and tablets, if you happen to own an Xbox 360 controller or any HID controllers for the PC, those work with an Android 4 device through a $2 USB OTG cable.

Thank you. Between this, NVIDIA's Shield, and the various clip-on controllers that already worked on Android, it'll eventually boil down to who wants to buy a $60 controller to play a $3 game.

So how exactly do these successful iOS games emulate buttons without the player ending up pressing the wrong button or whiffing (pressing outside any button) all the time?

"Nobody" is a strong word. Consider these three scenarios:

One could develop an Android-exclusive application and use the revenue to buy a Mac, an iTrinket, and a developer certificate on which to port the application to iOS.

One could develop an Android-exclusive application in one of the categories that Apple is known to ban.

One could develop an Android-exclusive application that requires a gamepad. The forthcoming Ouya game console runs Android, and for game genres that aren't point-and-click, an on-screen gamepad isn't really a substitute for physical buttons. Let me know when Apple even ships a standard game controller for its current iBaubles.

I think the object of publishing an anecdote like this is to encourage someone else to make such an analysis as a response.

Like Windows XP, Android 2 never got the update to Transport Layer Security to allow connecting to web servers that host more than one SSL site on one IP address.

Server Name Indication (SNI) allows name-based virtual hosting to work on SSL sites. The only remaining major web browsers that aren't compatible with SNI are Internet Explorer on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.2 or 2.3. Try visiting SNI Test or Pin Eight on Chrome, Firefox on desktop, Safari on recent Mac OS X, or IE on recent Windows. Then try visiting it on your Android 2.x device.

Not all phone buyers buy a lot of applications. In the early days of Android, Android phones were sold in a lot of countries that didn't yet have Google Checkout. So developers had to make their applications free and ad-supported to serve users in those countries, and users have since come to expect the $0.00 price. So let's assume hypothetically that the average member of the 17% spends four times as much money on priced applications as the average member of the 56%. In such a case, the developer of an iOS app would likely come out ahead.

The upgrade from Android 4.1 to Android 4.2 broke a lot of apps that act as drivers for Bluetooth input devices. It broke "Sixaxis Controller", a driver for Sony's Dual Shock 3 controller. That eventually got fixed. It also broke "Wiimote Controller", a driver for Nintendo's Wii Remote controller. That still isn't fixed.

And now that you point that out, I can't look at that without thinking of Nickelodeon's game show Double Dare .

Host: "What's the capital of Kentucky?"
Team 1: "Dare"
Host: "Now worth 20, or you can double dare them back. What's the capital of Kentucky?"
Team 2: "Double dare"
Host: "Now worth 40. What's the capital of Kentucky? You can answer or take a physical challenge."
Team 1: "Physical challenge"
Host: "The answer is Frankfort." (goes on to describe something sloppy that Team 1 must do in 30 seconds)

"Xbox 360 Turbo Fire 2 Wireless Controller with Rumble by Datel" doesn't look licensed. Datel has a history of cracking cryptographic lockouts to produce its products. I wonder how long it'll take for Microsoft to file the ITC complaint. I get the impression from TBONE1207's one-star review that Microsoft might have already updated the Xbox 360 firmware to refuse to recognize this controller.