This is surprising in exactly what way? Computers in Syria have to come from somewhere. And they haven't invented Muslim-computers yet, so yes they do have to come from the West somewhere.

And javascript wasn't designed to be the screwed up obfuscation platform we see it used as today In a decent world, someone will time travel into the past to warn young Brendan Eich that his future self will be an evil Hitler version of himself with false ideals that will misuse the inventions of the younger self to promote bizarre uses in conflict with the original intent. Yes this is a real-life time paradox where ones future-self is subverting positive ideas of their younger self.

I see this market as very ripe for "sea change". The Nintendo DS and the Sony handhelds have been largely displaced by tablets. Gaming consoles need replaced with something more open. Sony in particular uses an iron fist that inhibits indie developers from any meaning participation on the platform with onerous requirements. Consoles need to get displaced. Apple won't do it (I don't know that they could), so Google and Android must.

And no --- a Steam gaming console wouldn't get the job done although that would be better than the status quo by far.

They killed the "English system" of measurement in favor of metric system. The field of the study of radiation got rid of all the weird measurements like roentgen and curies that were named after pioneers in the field but cluttered the field up with oddball units of measurement. Mathematics has numerous legacy inconsistent symbols. It would help to spread the knowledge better if it were cleaned up and modernized.

In what way was this a deliberate troll? A child goes to a wikipedia page on circles, finds it filled with oddball symbols --- which you cannot even Google for because you can't type them in to search for them. I think this is a major issue. Math is important, it gets cluttered up with Greek symbols because that Greek symbols were popular amongst the educated in the 1700 and 1800s. This impairs math education.

Each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer's right, who gets seven. .. Two jacks are a "half-fizzbin". If you have a half-fizzbin: a third jack is a "shralk" and results in disqualification. One wants a king and a deuce, except at night ...when one wants a queen and a four. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays.

Mathematics is one of those fields that could use some ISO standards.

There are critics of C++ that say the language is just pieces and parts hacked together. Even if that is true, mathematics takes the undisputed crown of bizarre hacked together symbols.

The symbols used in mathematics are unintelligible, inconsistent, don't even use a standard language character set and cannot be represented in a programming language.

These mathematical symbols either need to be modernized to come to a standardization or die.

The real answer is that they will die. And they should.

Be nice to Barnes and Noble. They stood up to Microsoft's patent racket attempt and they are/were trying to prevent Amazon from being an Ebook monopoly.

So Finland can beat the Russians in WWII twice, but their captial of Oslo runs out of garbage today. Those Finns aren't so smart as they claim.

Your forgot the one part though: the hilarity that they are paying you to do what they tell you. Even though their "orders" are insane and you would spend a week writing up a list of why it won't work out. But you shut up and do it anyways. This does not mean you are not entitled to laugh. What else can you do?

Here is a short list of how you have done it better next time: DON'T TELL THEM.

A. It's funnier

B. It's comedy gold.

C. It's more fun than pulling legs off a spider (I can't say I encourage that behavior, btw).

Sounds like you are embellishing corporate wisdom. Most corporations thrive solely on having a fixed-location on the ants to report the ant-hill in the morning, and little else.

So if your phone gets stolen, then wat? Can they charge the TSA with corporate espionage?

Ha ha ha ... I post a intellectually based critique of the open source business model (based on both economics and natural selection) and got modded into oblivion so much I couldn't even reply to those that demanded I reply to explain my reasoning in detail.

That was tough endure, even for Trollston!

I thought in the past, Blackberry's primary market was government and corporate contracts. They don't need the smaller market, they just need to persuade gray-haired government officials to sign some papers in a meeting or grease some politicians.