I doubt that subsidies really hurt the carries bottom line. About 3 years ago when I was last switching carriers, T-Mobile used to have two plans that provided the same minutes/text/data; one plan provided a discount on the phone but were required a two year contract while the other had no subsidy and no contract. In addition the plan with the subsidy cost $20 more a month for smartphones with dataplans. The typical discount on the smart phone was $250-$350. But the extra fees you paid over the life of the contract was $480. So over the life of the contract, you paid an extra $130-$230 to the carrier in exchange for a low start up cost.

(And T-Mobile had a similar thing with regular phones; charged an extra $10 a month / $240 over the life of the contract for a discount of $100-$150).

I highly doubt that any of the other carriers don't also make back the subsidy by higher per-month fees. Of course, I also wonder now that those carriers have gotten people used to a certain monthly fee, will they really lower them after taking away the subsidy.

One of the reasons I liked T-Mobile was that they gave me the option.

I really don't see why this is such a big deal. According to the article, there's .365 accidents per 100,000 miles or just a tad under 1.1 accidents for 300,000 miles. So while the self-driving cars are not having significantly more accidents per mile driven, they haven't logged nearly enough miles yet to clearly demonstrate they that have less accidents per mile driven.

You should check out Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A).

Can they teach the controversy that George Bush stole in 2000 election?

Being able to create a single large product with a single programming language is a great skill, but so is being able to do Unix shell scripting.

The system/product I have been working on for the last 10 years is two major pieces that is about 90% of the total code base and lots of small pieces. The two major pieces are both essentially a single program that can be developed in unified environment. But we also have lots of small pieces that are shell scripts that are done in the classical Unix spirit.

Being able to work in both ways is a great strength for the engineers who can do that. Those who can only do one or the other are essentially marginalized as that limits what they are able to do.

This is not entirely accurate. I just heard from DDJ that an article of mine they accepted earlier this year is being published in February. I asked for one final change and told me that they could not do that because the issue had already gone to press.