I'm still waiting for the money to eat a car as well :-/.

...sorry

I agree with your rhetoric, but really the only difference you're citing between the iPhone and Android is the lack of flash, which Android doesn't even have to have installed. Android phones aren't subsidized by advertisements, advertisements are simply the reason Google broke into the market. Android phones are more pervasive simply because they want more people doing searches that feature phones can't/couldn't do. In the end they just want to present you the same text based advertisements that your iPhone will show you, and Android just opens more channels for it.

This.

Money helps develop good software of course, but it doesn't change the fact that bad software engineering practices lead to bad software. No matter how much money is thrown at it, it won't make your teams do things in a manner close to "the right way."*

* Definitions may vary

This reminds me of why I got addicted to Diablo 2 multiplayer. "PlayerX has joined, Diablo's minions grow stronger." Easy scaling and a lot of fun to play with friends.

Anyone else think Julian Love is a really cool name? If only he were had a Ph.D. in the study of calendars.

TFA mentions that these were not spores, spores have been known to live for years in space, but rather that these were cyanobacteria (photosynthesizing bacteria) that survived, and this is the longest that bacteria of this type have been known to survive.

Incidentally this is exactly the reason that Android was able to take off. Cell phone manufacturers and wireless companies wanted to be able to put their own applications on your smartphone (similar to the way they behave with their feature phones), and they wanted something cheaper than paying for windows mobile licenses. Android filled both those requirements by being free, and they can install their own crapware to try and get you to continue to add to your monthly bill by paying for their services. Remember, cell phone companies are constantly trying to stay important by being content providers, rather than just being dumb data carriers like what happened to the phone companies.

This is actually pretty handy. I live in Colorado and as soon as I hit the mountain roads I lose my 3G signal, but I still have all the data cached to get to where I'm going which may be out of cell range, or at least to the cell tower where my maps can re-download if my destination has changed.

Not really, http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-03-09-americans-buying-majority-of-soccer-world-cup-tickets

While I agree with most of your points, I disagree that small local governments are somehow inherently more well run. Even in smaller suburban towns like the one I grew up in, where most of the people think alike, the smallest issue can be extremely polarizing, and you end up with nonsense compromises (like the cutoff points for mandatory inclusion into sewer systems ending at places that don't make sense). Bad city councils suffer from the same problems that federal and state governments suffer from, "He may be an idiot, but he's our idiot," and the people who are there stay forever. Or, even worse, they voters don't know anything about their local government, so they stay forever.

I've tried a few flavors of linux on my netbook, and so far the best performer has been mandriva running xfce4. Great power consumption, firefox runs pretty well (some slowdowns with video frames), but most flash sites run just fine. With NoScript and adblock I can do just about anything I need to. Although to be honest, I find my smartphone encroaching on the featureset I used my netbook fore these days.