I agree with most of your examples, but I can think of a situation where an SSD might help with faster 3D rendering. The soft-real-time 3D renderer in a video game is often bottlenecked by the speed of loading textures into RAM. If you've ever seen the blurfest that is the start of an Unreal Engine 3 level before the textures pop into focus, you know what I'm talking about. There's a reason that PC games load faster when installed to SSD.

Good luck doing that in the United States if you happen to live where T-Mobile has poor coverage. CDMA2000 carriers in the United States don't use CSIM.

Perhaps my question is how people are supposed to learn of the benefits of owning open hardware in the first place. If all the existing computing devices in your household are closed, you never get a chance to see what open hardware can do.

It's a followup to a previous article featured on Slashdot, showing how the Streisand effect is strong enough to shut down a health care practice.

Because you quoted a character name, I could Google that it came from Blade Runner. But a lot of these allusions change a line's nouns, pronouns, and verb tense to fit the context, making it harder to search by exact phrase to figure out what people are talking about when they speak this Tamarian language of movie quotes. So yes, I'm for real. I'm trying to figure out what specific films, video games, webcomics, etc. I'd need to catch up on to keep a geek card current.

You can build a representative sample from a used Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus, and Nexus 4 for fairly cheap. Or you can take advantage of the device diversity of your team of beta testers who brought their own devices.

Some existing "apps for that" require root to backup or restore because they try to back up private data that belongs to another application.

If you have more than a couple GB of data to back up, cloud backup becomes an expensive recurring fee compared to backing up to local physical media.

Like when people say "turn in your geek card" when someone fails to get an inside joke related to an uncited quotation from some science fiction movie like Blade Runner or WarGames.

If given the mutually exclusive options of A. full control of their own hardware or B. access to major studio movies, what will most home users choose?

Just because the comic titled "Time" may have reached its final panel doesn't mean that xkcd itself is ending any time soon. We'll see on Monday whether there's a #1244.

You could always test on a few hardware versions representative of the range of devices you're targeting, including one stuck on 2.x, along with the official emulator.

So Google is blocking one sort of APK, namely use of the hosts file as a crude DNS blacklist. Does this means we're soon going to lose another sort of APK, namely loading applications from unknown sources? Or am I clanging again?

How would that work on a CDMA2000 network, which doesn't use a SIM in the first place?

According to how I understand the summary, Google or an Android distributor would be responsible for "providing additional APIs and extensions to the user", such as adding Dual Shock 3 support to Android's existing joystick API.

Wi-Fi carriers such as cable and DSL ISPs typically don't provide a subsidized tablet. Nor do cellular carriers outside North America and maybe Japan. So what do "carriers" necessarily have to do with rooting, especially with rooting a Wi-Fi-only device?