Are you implying that the developer tools for Blackberry are excellent? I've worked extensively with developer tools for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile 6.5 when that was a thing, J2ME, and, yes, Blackberry. Blackberry's tools aren't the *worst* of the mobile platforms available... but they're pretty close.

Or maybe, just maybe, you *won't* see random people's account info. You can still play with a randomly matched person without needing to know who they are. I wonder if Google is smart enough to respect privacy at least when it comes to other people looking at it.

They don't need access to your contacts and call logs, but that permission is the same that allows them to retrieve an ID unique to your device in the form of your IMEI/MEID. There are better ways to do this, even ones that don't even require any permissions. Most companies still do it this way either for backwards compatibility (from when the other better ways were either non-existent or were not completely unique) or because of third-party libraries that require it for similar reasons. Usually this means ad networks, but it can also mean third-party gaming services, like OpenFeint (when that was still around), that want to connect you to all your games without needing an explicit login. It looks like with this new Google Play Games thing, that obstacle will be overcome by using your Google+ account instead. But that doesn't mean the permission will go away. The ad networks still need to be able to figure out who you are.

I don't know about that "visible from space" thing. Sure, anything is visible from space if you have a powerful enough lens, but even the Great Wall of China isn't visible from space to the naked eye, and even zooming out a little bit on the map shows how small it really is...

http://www.google.com/reviews/t

Numa numa

Well, there are things that make phasers superior, such as different settings (stun, kill, vaporize) much more ammo (not sure if you'd call it limitless, but I've never seen them need to recharge one), and presumably lighter and more compact than carrying guns with real bullets around. Although I tend to agree that speed is a major component of most weapons, and they've certainly done something wrong by making them so much slower.

My physics (and Mass Effect) is a bit rusty, but I had assumed that the element zero in the weapon causes the "grain of sand" to have an increased mass, thus an increased momentum (p=mv) , thus making it harder to affect by wind and more damaging than it might otherwise be (at the normal mass of a grain of sand).

And if they decide to just go to a landfill, "catch" a bunch of plastic, then turn it in for profit?

How has nobody commented on the transparent-aluminum-like properties of this so-called "glass"?

I see a correlation between the 20% of friends and 80% success rate. So all they have to do is gather data from 0% of friends, and they're 100% likely to guess the user's info!

I'm rather fond of this bit of ignorance:

The certificate is the latest to target a weakness that causes browsers, email clients, and other SSL-enabled apps to ignore all text following the \ and 0 characters

I have to agree. I always used to apply logical operations on sematic operands (and don't tell me you've never done it: Do you want to wear pants or shorts? Yes!)

This only gets more annoying as other people listen to you over time! Natural Language Processing lets you still answer the question correctly while not pissing of your spouse.

I don't know what's going on with that website. It vaguely reminds me of Zombo.com. There's nothing there, but it's some damned fine nothing.

It's funny, cuz it really doesn't. Not in Russia anyway.