The Android OS *is* more than Google. Look at the various support bits that Google includes from Broadcom and Qualcomm, as well as other members of the OHA. The copyrights on the AOSP stuff belong to Google as well as other companies. The difference between Android and other products based on BSD (like Juniper's JUNOS or NetApp's devices) is that only the former claims to be open.
Oh, sure, you could go to CAF and dig up some half-baked Qualcomm stuff that's BSD licensed (and for some reason not included in the mainstream AOSP tree??) and still far lower quality than the code Qualcomm provides their customers. That's still not open, it's still hastily slapped together, and none of it (not even the Google stuff) is (well) documented. It's free as in beer. Period.
Now if you'd like to move beyond the incomplete hardware support that Google offers and on to the closed development model we could do that. Or how about the Google apps? For something that's been touted as being free as speech... there's that pesky core functionality provided by things like the Google Market app that are not only closed source but not free at all — last I heard Google sent a C&D to the CyanogenMod guys for redistributing the Market app. And you certainly can't download the Google market app from Google anywhere.
Unless there's some other marketplace that will integrate with Android OS in the same way I'd say that's a pretty big not-free piece right there. Unless apps are just another minor detail? Sure, you can sideload things via Amazon's market (or manually)... but that's really taking the second class citizen thing a bit far.
Android is entertaining because it's free as in beer. It's not free as in speech and it's not open.
But Android is more than just Google, right? Indeed Wiki claims that Android is the OHA's flagship product. The Open Handset Alliance includes Broadcom, Qualcomm, Motorola, and HTC. Their bits to this "open" project are far less than open. Hell, Motorola and HTC are notorious for locking their Android phones down. Thus, these "third parties" are really not. They're first party to Android.
Tell me though, how much would you like using your smartphone without hardware accelerated graphics, accurate GPS, working bluetooth, etc?
As far as being Google's responsibility, the piece broke bluetooth on the LG Optimus One line was a GPL'd program (the binary blob loader... sigh) authored by Broadcom (a member of the OHA) and distributed by Google (the leader of the OHA). As far as I can tell, all parties to the OHA, Google included, do the bare minimum.
Except the nVidia drivers are available to the general public. The proprietary binary blobs generally have to be extracted from the phone (hell even nVidia doesn't make you do that), and at worst you've got to decompile the libraries and pull out the relevant changes. No, the more apt comparison would be to say that Windows is an open platform because you've got Cygwin. Android itself is free as in beer, not open.
Nah, I gave you an example of broken tools that Google ships (anything that uses the Dalvik VM directly) and that you can't compile from source on certain platforms. Plus I've given an example of a third party (BSDroid) that's ported the dev environment, and Google's refused to acknowledge its existence. That's free as in beer, not open by any stretch.
As for the manufacturer stuff, what's the point of an "open" platform if you are still entirely dependent upon proprietary blobs. Go ahead, show me an Android phone where you can compile a usable OS entirely from source. P.S. Google ships plenty of the manufacturer specific stuff in the AOSP repositories that's still not nearly what the vendors themselves get access to. Qualcomm has their own pseudo open site as well (Code Aurora Forum). That's not open. That's free as in beer.
Go through the CyanogenMod git repositories. Tell me how many binary blobs are being used to build the ROM for your phone. Then go through the CyanogenMod source itself and tell me how closely it mirrors the AOSP source. Not even in terms of superficial changes to add the CM goodness but in terms of actually getting it to work with various hardware. Android is free as in beer.
Hell, where's the source code (or even documentation) for my bootloader, for my graphics driver, for my GPS userland libraries, my (carrier modified... sigh) SMS/MMS libraries, for my camera userland interface? The core OS is sorta free, and the kernel is GPL'd (hopefully you'll get a buildable one from the phone mfr), but you ain't gonna get much use of that without a lot of binary blobs from the phone manufacturer and carrier.
Ah, but Android is free as in beer, and a poorly cobbled together one at that. Not free as in speech. Go ahead, buy a phone from a carrier and vendor combo that doesn't bundle a bunch of crapware. Then take what you can find from the Android source repository, build it, and see how it stacks up to what your phone came with. If you've got a Samsung phone good luck getting that kernel built. If you're using a phone with a Qualcomm MSM7xxx chipset, good luck getting the GPS working (well). If you're using that same Qualcomm chipset, the (GPL) bluetooth enabler that Google ships with simply doesn't work. Want to use that fancy Adreno GPU? Well, the FOSS driver that Qualcomm publishes is crap. If you're saying Android is free as in speech, you'd probably be pretty surprised at the number of proprietary binary blobs needed to get everything working the anywhere near as well as they did out of the box. Want to get "off-mode" charging working? More binary blobs. Thankfully HTC separates them out from the init daemon (LG does not).
Let's say you want to build on OSX, a supposedly supported platform. Want to run dexopt? You're SOL. Maybe you'd like to build on FreeBSD. You're SOL there too. Sure there's BSDroid, but Google won't officially acknowledge its presence because they don't want people thinking it's officially supported (despite being more feature complete than Google's NDK for OSX).
Sure, you could blame Qualcomm, LG, HTC, Broadcom, etc for being jerks. But at the end of the day a lot of their GPL'd bits end up in Google's distribution. And Google is already fiercely closed about letting third parties submit fixes. The only part of Android that's free as in speech is the kernel, and, really, if you've learned nothing from GNU/Linux, the kernel alone will only get you so far. You need the full ecosystem. Okay, there are some other GPL'd odds and ends, but it's generally done without any sort of documentation or support. On one hand, to some extent you CAN tinker with Android far more than iOS. On the other hand, you NEED to tinker with it to get anywhere near the same level of functionality. Free speech in name, not spirit.
Let's not talk about the marketplace and the bullshit half-baked copy protection, mm'kay?
If you don't actually roam off of Sprint, take a look at Boost or Virgin. Both use the Sprint CDMA network, but offer lower rates than Sprint. Virgin is $40/mo for 1200 anytime minutes, unlimited SMS/MMS, and unlimited data. Boost's unlimited plan is $50/mo, but the selection of phones isn't so hot. Will Sprint collapse? Maybe. I sure hope not. But, at least in metro areas, there are other options like Cricket, MetroPCS, and US Cellular.
There are any number of discount carriers in the US. AT&T is not one of them. Generally the discount carriers will have restrictions you wouldn't see otherwise. For instance, Boost Mobile primarily uses Sprint's iDEN network (there goes your roaming ability). Virgin US uses Sprint's CDMA network with no roaming agreements in place. But $25 for a few minutes, unlimited EVDO Rev A, and unlimited SMS/MMS... who's complaining? MetroPCS has nationwide coverage... if you stick to the fifteen metropolitan areas that MetroPCS provides service to and don't want a high end phone. And so on.
For the record, SBC bought AT&T, not the other way around. Out on the west coast, I certainly miss (sic) the good old days of PacBell. Things definitely took a turn for the worse when SBC gobbled up PacBell.
Last I checked you can send a message from facebook to an e-mail address. Last I heard (but didn't bother to check) you can reply to an outside e-mail sent from facebook as well.
Cool. What happens when the judge's explanation goes right over your head? What are you as a juror going to do then? Typically judges do not allow their jurors to take written notes during the trial (but this certainly varies from courtroom to courtroom). And in the vast majority (if not all courtrooms) in the United States, jurors cannot ask questions during the trial itself.
What exactly are you supposed to ask the judge when a defendant's whole defense hinges on terms you don't understand, and that you cannot seek clarification on until the whole trial is over?
Lawyers (and by extension judges) spend YEARS of their life honing their knowledge of the law and the reasoning that goes into various procedures and terms. My experience was that lawyers and judges go out of their way to weed out folks who have any understanding of the law that they really are looking for twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty.
While it's nice to hypothesize that the system is set up on some glorious principle, you've highlighted the difference between abstract theories and applied examples. In theory the system may be set up to be failsafe (as I did not design it, I cannot say what the intent was). In practice, in capital cases – typically the only kinds of criminal cases where juries determine the sentence in the United States, it's more like fail death. There is a body of research out there to suggest that jurors chose death over life in prison when are too confused by the legally pure instructions they receive.
Dig through Google Scholar, take a look at the Wiki article on jury instructions. If you want something specific, I *think* Craig Haney at UCSC might have some published research (but it's been a while since I've thought about this in depth).
Seriously, you've not given any reasons why allowing a juror to utilize a dictionary is a BAD idea. All of these lofty goals and hypotheticals don't mean squat if they fail miserably in practice. In the case at hand, even if the juror was supposed to ask the judge clearly there was a problem. Maybe the judge was too intimidating. Maybe the judge wasn't clear enough about the appropriate options. Maybe the judge was overtly biased. Who knows.
Because laypeople are totally in a position to understand arcane legal theories and reasoning. Let me guess, you knew exactly what 'rape trauma syndrome' was before you read the article, right? Nine of the ten or so people you asked off the street knew too, right? Those that didn't got a perfectly lucid explanation from a lawyer, right? Ehhh
Probably because Yahoo! ran them into the ground. That's what Yahoo! does. They buy things (they don't innovate) and ruin them. They're like a smaller, hipper Microsoft.
I use Flickr, Delicious, and probably a few other things that are Yahoo brands. They've actively meddled with Flickr making the UI worse with each revision. Instead of focusing on reliability and core features, they've added a bunch of asinine bling. With Delicious they've merely left it alone to rot for the most part. Actually I'm fairly surprised that they're shutting Delicious down because they just pushed a UI update in the past month or so. I rather liked Delicious because it let me synchronize my bookmarks across different browsers and because it let me categorize my bookmarks easily.
As far as I'm concerned, this is further proof that Carol Bartz is a first class asshole who knows shit for all about running a business. Sure, the stockholders were pissed when Jerry Yang refused to sell out to Microsoft but at least Yang had decent reasons (preserving the brand identity and corporate culture) for doing what he did. Bartz is just another short-term profits first type CEO. Like Fiorina, Hurd, and Nardelli, Bartz thinks her slash and burn style is a one-size fits all type thing when in fact it's a one-size fits none.
And also really, really bloated memory usage, widgets that don't act like native widgets, and the ability to make use of my laptop's nifty fan like no other. Seriously. Two hundred tabs in Firefox, and the laptop would remain quiet. Open up an AIR app and... it gets hot and the fan goes nuts. Take a look at most of the desktop Twitter clients as an example. TweetDeck is a good one because it highlights most of my issues. It runs on OS X, but not well. I was able to put up with using ~1gb RAM for a small data set, but couldn't handle with the constant stealing of keyboard focus. TweetDeck does these nifty little notifications (similar to Growl for native Cocoa applications) to tell you of significant events that happen while it is in the background. Sure, they look pretty, but they'd managed to grab the input focus roughly every other time they popped up. Sure you could type into the input boxes, but they standard OSX keyboard navigation shortcuts didn't work. IIRC the widgets didn't handle scroll wheel (or touchpad) inputs properly either. In short, the application felt like it was written by a two year old. With the exception of the notifications (which no other AIR app I've tried has dared to do), the complaints are eerily similar.
Maybe AIR attracts incompetent developers en masse. Or maybe AIR just puts the lowest in lowest common denominator. It may be a breeze to develop with, but you're putting your end users through the ringer if you go with the Adobe route.
Let's make one thing very clear: these are not pat downs. What I went through when I traveled last year was a (sloppy) pat down. When the TSA needs to inspect your vagina because you're wearing a non-standard menstruation undergarmet, you've gone well past a pat down. Depending on your interpretation of whatrapeis, it may be appropriate to call the TSA's actions rape or sexual assault.
| Please tell me you're kidding. Anyone suggesting MySql for real work should just be laughed at.
I'm not sure how you got modded to +5 with this statement, but your statement is uninformed and completely false. While MySQL isn't in the class of Oracle for HA, MySQL with InnoDB is damn well is a competent database and I don't just mean for LAMP.
Eh. It's *okay* for lightweight work where you don't care about data integrity or don't add or modify a lot of data. Beyond that it falls apart quickly.
At a previous job we used ActiveRecord hooked up to MySQL to handle an influx of temporal data that was meant to be quickly processed and usable for reading back in real time. ActiveRecord uses sequences (so, auto increment fields in MySQL -- since proper sequences are lacking in MySQL) for the primary key. With Postgres this is not a problem at all. InnoDB, OTOH, locks *the entire table* to update an auto increment field. The sysadmin/dba was averse to using Postres, so the result was a series of complex and tedious to debug performance problems and queues. We spent countless hours dancing around the performance problems inherent to table level locking.
Of course we could have gone with MyISAM... but data integrity was important. There were other seemingly basic features that were lacking in MySQL (timezone support and a useful explain command come to mind). As far as I can tell there aren't a lot of good reasons to actively choose MySQL. The lightweight cases are well handled by SQLite, and the heavier stuff will almost certainly benefit from what Postgres has to bring to the table.
The API rate limit is per hour per user (if authenticated) and per IP if not authenticated. Unfortunately the Twitter API does not allow you to aggregate requests even if their web site does (e.x. status updates for all of the people I'm following and all of the things people I'm following have retweeted). If you go through the API docu, you'll find all sorts of horrid seeming inefficiencies and awkwardness with the API.
For instance when you request a status (or a list of statuses or whatever) you'll get back: the contents of the tweet, the user name, user id, URL for the user avatar, URL for the user's profile page background image, whether that user is following you, their real name, the number of tweets that user has made, and so-on and so forth. A lot of this information could easily be cached by the client, but is instead sent for every tweet you get back.
Slashdot Mirror
Short attention span much?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement#Use_of_term_.22teabagger.22
The Android OS *is* more than Google. Look at the various support bits that Google includes from Broadcom and Qualcomm, as well as other members of the OHA. The copyrights on the AOSP stuff belong to Google as well as other companies. The difference between Android and other products based on BSD (like Juniper's JUNOS or NetApp's devices) is that only the former claims to be open.
Oh, sure, you could go to CAF and dig up some half-baked Qualcomm stuff that's BSD licensed (and for some reason not included in the mainstream AOSP tree??) and still far lower quality than the code Qualcomm provides their customers. That's still not open, it's still hastily slapped together, and none of it (not even the Google stuff) is (well) documented. It's free as in beer. Period.
Now if you'd like to move beyond the incomplete hardware support that Google offers and on to the closed development model we could do that. Or how about the Google apps? For something that's been touted as being free as speech... there's that pesky core functionality provided by things like the Google Market app that are not only closed source but not free at all — last I heard Google sent a C&D to the CyanogenMod guys for redistributing the Market app. And you certainly can't download the Google market app from Google anywhere.
Unless there's some other marketplace that will integrate with Android OS in the same way I'd say that's a pretty big not-free piece right there. Unless apps are just another minor detail? Sure, you can sideload things via Amazon's market (or manually)... but that's really taking the second class citizen thing a bit far.
Android is entertaining because it's free as in beer. It's not free as in speech and it's not open.
But Android is more than just Google, right? Indeed Wiki claims that Android is the OHA's flagship product. The Open Handset Alliance includes Broadcom, Qualcomm, Motorola, and HTC. Their bits to this "open" project are far less than open. Hell, Motorola and HTC are notorious for locking their Android phones down. Thus, these "third parties" are really not. They're first party to Android.
Tell me though, how much would you like using your smartphone without hardware accelerated graphics, accurate GPS, working bluetooth, etc?
As far as being Google's responsibility, the piece broke bluetooth on the LG Optimus One line was a GPL'd program (the binary blob loader... sigh) authored by Broadcom (a member of the OHA) and distributed by Google (the leader of the OHA). As far as I can tell, all parties to the OHA, Google included, do the bare minimum.
Except the nVidia drivers are available to the general public. The proprietary binary blobs generally have to be extracted from the phone (hell even nVidia doesn't make you do that), and at worst you've got to decompile the libraries and pull out the relevant changes. No, the more apt comparison would be to say that Windows is an open platform because you've got Cygwin. Android itself is free as in beer, not open.
P.S. If I didn't make it clear I was responding to the assertion:
Is that anything like https://github.com/inferiorhumanorgans/android_device_lge_thunderc ?
Nah, I gave you an example of broken tools that Google ships (anything that uses the Dalvik VM directly) and that you can't compile from source on certain platforms. Plus I've given an example of a third party (BSDroid) that's ported the dev environment, and Google's refused to acknowledge its existence. That's free as in beer, not open by any stretch.
As for the manufacturer stuff, what's the point of an "open" platform if you are still entirely dependent upon proprietary blobs. Go ahead, show me an Android phone where you can compile a usable OS entirely from source. P.S. Google ships plenty of the manufacturer specific stuff in the AOSP repositories that's still not nearly what the vendors themselves get access to. Qualcomm has their own pseudo open site as well (Code Aurora Forum). That's not open. That's free as in beer.
Go through the CyanogenMod git repositories. Tell me how many binary blobs are being used to build the ROM for your phone. Then go through the CyanogenMod source itself and tell me how closely it mirrors the AOSP source. Not even in terms of superficial changes to add the CM goodness but in terms of actually getting it to work with various hardware. Android is free as in beer.
Hell, where's the source code (or even documentation) for my bootloader, for my graphics driver, for my GPS userland libraries, my (carrier modified... sigh) SMS/MMS libraries, for my camera userland interface? The core OS is sorta free, and the kernel is GPL'd (hopefully you'll get a buildable one from the phone mfr), but you ain't gonna get much use of that without a lot of binary blobs from the phone manufacturer and carrier.
Ah, but Android is free as in beer, and a poorly cobbled together one at that. Not free as in speech. Go ahead, buy a phone from a carrier and vendor combo that doesn't bundle a bunch of crapware. Then take what you can find from the Android source repository, build it, and see how it stacks up to what your phone came with. If you've got a Samsung phone good luck getting that kernel built. If you're using a phone with a Qualcomm MSM7xxx chipset, good luck getting the GPS working (well). If you're using that same Qualcomm chipset, the (GPL) bluetooth enabler that Google ships with simply doesn't work. Want to use that fancy Adreno GPU? Well, the FOSS driver that Qualcomm publishes is crap. If you're saying Android is free as in speech, you'd probably be pretty surprised at the number of proprietary binary blobs needed to get everything working the anywhere near as well as they did out of the box. Want to get "off-mode" charging working? More binary blobs. Thankfully HTC separates them out from the init daemon (LG does not).
Let's say you want to build on OSX, a supposedly supported platform. Want to run dexopt? You're SOL. Maybe you'd like to build on FreeBSD. You're SOL there too. Sure there's BSDroid, but Google won't officially acknowledge its presence because they don't want people thinking it's officially supported (despite being more feature complete than Google's NDK for OSX).
Sure, you could blame Qualcomm, LG, HTC, Broadcom, etc for being jerks. But at the end of the day a lot of their GPL'd bits end up in Google's distribution. And Google is already fiercely closed about letting third parties submit fixes. The only part of Android that's free as in speech is the kernel, and, really, if you've learned nothing from GNU/Linux, the kernel alone will only get you so far. You need the full ecosystem. Okay, there are some other GPL'd odds and ends, but it's generally done without any sort of documentation or support. On one hand, to some extent you CAN tinker with Android far more than iOS. On the other hand, you NEED to tinker with it to get anywhere near the same level of functionality. Free speech in name, not spirit.
Let's not talk about the marketplace and the bullshit half-baked copy protection, mm'kay?
Yes, but, for instance, Verizon sells Android phones with Bing preinstalled.
I thought pie are square?
Derp. In the 90s most carriers offered the first incoming minute free. IIRC, that started disappearing around the time Verizon was created.
Or you can do what plenty of other countries do and charge separate rates for calls to landlines and wireless lines if there's such a disparity.
If you don't actually roam off of Sprint, take a look at Boost or Virgin. Both use the Sprint CDMA network, but offer lower rates than Sprint. Virgin is $40/mo for 1200 anytime minutes, unlimited SMS/MMS, and unlimited data. Boost's unlimited plan is $50/mo, but the selection of phones isn't so hot. Will Sprint collapse? Maybe. I sure hope not. But, at least in metro areas, there are other options like Cricket, MetroPCS, and US Cellular.
There are any number of discount carriers in the US. AT&T is not one of them. Generally the discount carriers will have restrictions you wouldn't see otherwise. For instance, Boost Mobile primarily uses Sprint's iDEN network (there goes your roaming ability). Virgin US uses Sprint's CDMA network with no roaming agreements in place. But $25 for a few minutes, unlimited EVDO Rev A, and unlimited SMS/MMS... who's complaining? MetroPCS has nationwide coverage... if you stick to the fifteen metropolitan areas that MetroPCS provides service to and don't want a high end phone. And so on.
For the record, SBC bought AT&T, not the other way around. Out on the west coast, I certainly miss (sic) the good old days of PacBell. Things definitely took a turn for the worse when SBC gobbled up PacBell.
You tell me how you think the roaming charges stack up.
T-Mobile UK roaming in Germany or Spain
Outgoing calls $0.62/min (38.8p)
Incoming calls $0.30/min (14.3p)
Outgoing SMS $0.16 (10.2p)
Outgoing MMS $0.33 (20.4p)
Incoming SMS free
Incoming MMS free
GPRS/3G $2.46/Mb (£1.532)
AT&T roaming in Germany or Spain
Incoming calls $1.39/min (86.5p)
Outgoing calls $1.39/min (86.5p)
Outgoing SMS $0.50 (31.1p)
Incoming SMS
Outgoing MMS $1.30 (80.9p)
Incoming MMS
GPRS (no mention of 3G roaming at all) $19.97/Mb (£12.43)
Last I checked you can send a message from facebook to an e-mail address. Last I heard (but didn't bother to check) you can reply to an outside e-mail sent from facebook as well.
Cool. What happens when the judge's explanation goes right over your head? What are you as a juror going to do then? Typically judges do not allow their jurors to take written notes during the trial (but this certainly varies from courtroom to courtroom). And in the vast majority (if not all courtrooms) in the United States, jurors cannot ask questions during the trial itself.
What exactly are you supposed to ask the judge when a defendant's whole defense hinges on terms you don't understand, and that you cannot seek clarification on until the whole trial is over?
Lawyers (and by extension judges) spend YEARS of their life honing their knowledge of the law and the reasoning that goes into various procedures and terms. My experience was that lawyers and judges go out of their way to weed out folks who have any understanding of the law that they really are looking for twelve people too stupid to get out of jury duty.
While it's nice to hypothesize that the system is set up on some glorious principle, you've highlighted the difference between abstract theories and applied examples. In theory the system may be set up to be failsafe (as I did not design it, I cannot say what the intent was). In practice, in capital cases – typically the only kinds of criminal cases where juries determine the sentence in the United States, it's more like fail death. There is a body of research out there to suggest that jurors chose death over life in prison when are too confused by the legally pure instructions they receive.
Dig through Google Scholar, take a look at the Wiki article on jury instructions. If you want something specific, I *think* Craig Haney at UCSC might have some published research (but it's been a while since I've thought about this in depth).
Seriously, you've not given any reasons why allowing a juror to utilize a dictionary is a BAD idea. All of these lofty goals and hypotheticals don't mean squat if they fail miserably in practice. In the case at hand, even if the juror was supposed to ask the judge clearly there was a problem. Maybe the judge was too intimidating. Maybe the judge wasn't clear enough about the appropriate options. Maybe the judge was overtly biased. Who knows.
Because laypeople are totally in a position to understand arcane legal theories and reasoning. Let me guess, you knew exactly what 'rape trauma syndrome' was before you read the article, right? Nine of the ten or so people you asked off the street knew too, right? Those that didn't got a perfectly lucid explanation from a lawyer, right? Ehhh
Probably because Yahoo! ran them into the ground. That's what Yahoo! does. They buy things (they don't innovate) and ruin them. They're like a smaller, hipper Microsoft.
I use Flickr, Delicious, and probably a few other things that are Yahoo brands. They've actively meddled with Flickr making the UI worse with each revision. Instead of focusing on reliability and core features, they've added a bunch of asinine bling. With Delicious they've merely left it alone to rot for the most part. Actually I'm fairly surprised that they're shutting Delicious down because they just pushed a UI update in the past month or so. I rather liked Delicious because it let me synchronize my bookmarks across different browsers and because it let me categorize my bookmarks easily.
As far as I'm concerned, this is further proof that Carol Bartz is a first class asshole who knows shit for all about running a business. Sure, the stockholders were pissed when Jerry Yang refused to sell out to Microsoft but at least Yang had decent reasons (preserving the brand identity and corporate culture) for doing what he did. Bartz is just another short-term profits first type CEO. Like Fiorina, Hurd, and Nardelli, Bartz thinks her slash and burn style is a one-size fits all type thing when in fact it's a one-size fits none.
And also really, really bloated memory usage, widgets that don't act like native widgets, and the ability to make use of my laptop's nifty fan like no other. Seriously. Two hundred tabs in Firefox, and the laptop would remain quiet. Open up an AIR app and... it gets hot and the fan goes nuts. Take a look at most of the desktop Twitter clients as an example. TweetDeck is a good one because it highlights most of my issues. It runs on OS X, but not well. I was able to put up with using ~1gb RAM for a small data set, but couldn't handle with the constant stealing of keyboard focus. TweetDeck does these nifty little notifications (similar to Growl for native Cocoa applications) to tell you of significant events that happen while it is in the background. Sure, they look pretty, but they'd managed to grab the input focus roughly every other time they popped up. Sure you could type into the input boxes, but they standard OSX keyboard navigation shortcuts didn't work. IIRC the widgets didn't handle scroll wheel (or touchpad) inputs properly either. In short, the application felt like it was written by a two year old. With the exception of the notifications (which no other AIR app I've tried has dared to do), the complaints are eerily similar.
Maybe AIR attracts incompetent developers en masse. Or maybe AIR just puts the lowest in lowest common denominator. It may be a breeze to develop with, but you're putting your end users through the ringer if you go with the Adobe route.
Let's make one thing very clear: these are not pat downs. What I went through when I traveled last year was a (sloppy) pat down. When the TSA needs to inspect your vagina because you're wearing a non-standard menstruation undergarmet, you've gone well past a pat down. Depending on your interpretation of what rape is, it may be appropriate to call the TSA's actions rape or sexual assault.
| Please tell me you're kidding. Anyone suggesting MySql for real work should just be laughed at.
I'm not sure how you got modded to +5 with this statement, but your statement is uninformed and completely false. While MySQL isn't in the class of Oracle for HA, MySQL with InnoDB is damn well is a competent database and I don't just mean for LAMP.
Eh. It's *okay* for lightweight work where you don't care about data integrity or don't add or modify a lot of data. Beyond that it falls apart quickly.
At a previous job we used ActiveRecord hooked up to MySQL to handle an influx of temporal data that was meant to be quickly processed and usable for reading back in real time. ActiveRecord uses sequences (so, auto increment fields in MySQL -- since proper sequences are lacking in MySQL) for the primary key. With Postgres this is not a problem at all. InnoDB, OTOH, locks *the entire table* to update an auto increment field. The sysadmin/dba was averse to using Postres, so the result was a series of complex and tedious to debug performance problems and queues. We spent countless hours dancing around the performance problems inherent to table level locking.
Of course we could have gone with MyISAM... but data integrity was important. There were other seemingly basic features that were lacking in MySQL (timezone support and a useful explain command come to mind). As far as I can tell there aren't a lot of good reasons to actively choose MySQL. The lightweight cases are well handled by SQLite, and the heavier stuff will almost certainly benefit from what Postgres has to bring to the table.
The API rate limit is per hour per user (if authenticated) and per IP if not authenticated. Unfortunately the Twitter API does not allow you to aggregate requests even if their web site does (e.x. status updates for all of the people I'm following and all of the things people I'm following have retweeted). If you go through the API docu, you'll find all sorts of horrid seeming inefficiencies and awkwardness with the API.
For instance when you request a status (or a list of statuses or whatever) you'll get back: the contents of the tweet, the user name, user id, URL for the user avatar, URL for the user's profile page background image, whether that user is following you, their real name, the number of tweets that user has made, and so-on and so forth. A lot of this information could easily be cached by the client, but is instead sent for every tweet you get back.