I am not a lawyer either. Note that according to Wikipedia there was a lot of specificity in the copying in Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures: "the court cited the angle, layout, and details of the four city blocks depicted; the use of color on the horizon and sky; the distinctive lettering used in both for place names as well as the title at the top; and the overall stylistic impression of the two works". I am uncomfortable with that decision myself, though, and I'm even more uncomfortable with the alas well-settled law that fictional characters can be copyrighted.
What is most relevant to the Zynga case, though, seems to be the fact that US Copyright Office refuses to issue copyrights on game rules.
When the Tetris folks try to squash all the Tetris clones, people here think that's bad, and we're right that it's bad to squash Tetris clones. There is no copyright on concepts. But the same applies here. It shouldn't matter too much if it's a big company copying the ideas of a small developer did or a small developer cloning the ideas of a big company. It would, of course, be polite for the big company to offer some sort of thanks, though.
I looked at the side-by-side screenshots, and while the basic (uncopyrightable) gameplay ideas are very parallel and presumably copied, the graphics (which are copyrightable) are significantly different in style. And looking at coin amounts in the two screenshots, it looks like the rules weren't copied either (not that there would be anything wrong with copying rules, since there is no copyright on game rules, only on their written expression).
Early in January, I released on Amazon's Appstore a popular app aimed at the Kindle Fire to dim the too-bright screen. About two weeks later, two others appeared. I don't know if there was copying of ideas going on. But even if there was, what's the big deal? The competing apps have somewhat different interfaces, and differ a little bit in feature set, and now consumers have more choice. And inspiration in respect of additional features can go both ways, and as a result all the apps can get better.
If you don't take any notes, you'll be in trouble if there something detail-oriented that's not in the book, unless you're really smart.
I wonder if the recommendations depend on how detail-oriented and textbook-centered a course is. I teach philosophy. It certainly happen when I teach more advanced classes that I come up with new arguments and proofs right on the spot. They aren't in the assigned books, they aren't in the assigned articles, and because I came up with them on the spot (e.g., in response to a student question), there is no handout with it. But few students will correctly remember an eight step metaphysics argument or a hard logic proof without notes, or at least without taking a photo of the board.
Actually, cheap data plans in some cases can be a reason to stay on a relatively dumb phone, as long as it has a decent browser (and I think there is at least one HTC feature phone that has a good Opera browser). I'm on a no-longer available $30/month 500 minute, unlimited data/text SERO plan with Sprint. I am currently using a Treo 700. According to Sprint, if I were to switch to a more modern "smart phone" (by Sprint's definition), I'd have to switch to a new, much more expensive plan. So if my Treo dies in such a way that it doesn't make economic sense to repair it (I've made minor repairs on its keyboard so far), it could potentially make economic sense to switch to a feature phone with a decent browser so I could stay on the plan, rather than paying the smart phone surcharge.
IANAL, but I would think that the actual damages for infringing on a license by unauthorized redistribution (say, redistribution of GPL software without source code) would be a reasonable estimate of how much an alternate commercial redistribution license for the project would cost. If the project has negotiated such licenses with other companies in the past, that could provide data for an estimate. Failing that, I suppose one could look at relevantly similar projects and how much an alternate license costs for them.
Just make a trial version that expires after x days and points the user to the paid version. (Don't worry about the small number of users who will uninstall and just re-install the trial. That's a lot of work to do every x days, if x is small.)
There is still the question of getting the swipes in the right order.
When I wrote a PictureLogin beta app for Palms (back in 2007; no, it's not prior art for the MS patent, as it was tap-only rather than swipe), I made PictureLogin act as a quick login screen, with an immediate fallback to the default passkey login if it failed. It would be very unlikely an attacker would get in on the first try, but it would allow users to have a very fast login with as few as two taps, or maybe even with only one if one was willing to take a risk. That would also help with the fingerprint problem. I think I was also thinking about some security-by-obscurity options, such as a user using some fake form as their PictureLogin image, so that someone who stole or found the device would not know that it's actually a PictureLogin login screen. You turn it on, and you see some normal Palm screen. You tap once or twice in the right place(s) and you're in, and you tap even once in the wrong place and fall back. I never got around to a full release of PictureLogin, though the code is open source.
Including 9366 bytes worth of images. It's been pretty steady since 1992 or so (initially hosted over ftp instead of http as my Dept didn't have an http server yet).
Somewhere around 1/4 or 1/3 of the apps on my Archos tablet use a native library. I know because I occasionally monitor how much stuff is in the/data/data/*/lib directory, and for the apps with particularly fat libraries, I offload/data/data/*/lib to an SD card, and symlink to it.
Here are two examples: The open source APV PDF viewer that I am on the dev team for is just a relatively small java wrapper around a native library that encapsulates muPDF code, with no changes in the core muPDF code, and uses other standard libraries like libfreetype and libjpeg. I expect a fair amount of open source Android ports work like this. I also have on my device one app which is a port of an iPhone app, and the developer has kept all of the OpenGL C code unchanged and wrapped it in a native library.
Sure, it wouldn't be hard for a developer to recompile the ARM code, but then (a) the developer will need to install another toolchain and will ask: is it worth it for a small segment of the market? and (b) will need to either swell up the binaries for everyone by including a MIPS library or will have to go to the trouble of uploading two versions with every release, which is a nuisance, especially if it's a free app.
I just set my Palm TX (ca. 2005) to unlock with a swipe plus a tap using only stock stuff.:-) How did I do it? I set the password to a space, and turned on full-screen graffiti input. Now, to unlock it, I just needed enter a space, and then tap on "OK". And with full-screen graffiti input, you enter a space by swiping right. (OK, you have to make sure you don't swipe too far--the swipe needs to stay in the relevant alphabetic subdivision.
With the TealLock PalmOS app, I could even set a quick password that wouldn't need to tap the "OK" button. I assume Graffiti will still work. So, you wouldn't even need to tap on "OK". You can then use any sequence of gestures that are a part of the Graffiti alphabet to unlock then. So you could unlock with a swipe-right (space), a swipe-down (i), a swipe-up (!), a right-side-up U (u), an upside-down U (a), a backwards alpha (x), etc. TealLock's Quick Lock feature came in before version 5.30, which was released in October, 2004.
I don't know if it counts as animation exactly, but Graffiti will draw a line following the touch contact.
Within reasonable limits, the greater the number of customizable control options there are in a device, the better for power users. It's useful to be able to press or hold a button and pop up a calculator while using some other app. It's handy to be able to do a gesture and pop up a notepad. It's efficient and pleasant to be able to pick up a turned off device, directly press a calendar or email button, optionally press an unlock button (or do an unlock gesture--I think it's best to have both options), and then have the device both turned on and showing the calendar or email.
It's often useful to have multiple ways of doing something. Say, I'm on a PC and typing something in a textbox, like this comment. I want to change the second-last word I typed. The fastest thing for me to do is probably to press ctrl-left, ctrl-backspace, retype (with space, alas), ctrl-right (or ctrl-end). I want to change a word further back. The fastest thing to do is to reach for a mouse, move the cursor there, double click, retype, and then press ctrl-end. I don't want to be limited to one of the two ways of doing things, because each one is optimal in its own context, and what works better in which context differs from user to user, making flexibility important (while it's a good idea to make commonly used functions more easily available, what functions are more often used differs from user to user). And as one uses a device a lot over the years, a power user will develop a lot of optimized patterns of usage that use different control/input modalities to accomplish the same task depending on the context.
We do that outside of technological contexts. Sometimes I nod, sometimes I say "Yes" or "Yeah" or "OK", sometimes I grunt "Uhu", and there is a time and place for each. Sometimes to pick up an object from the ground, I stoop down and sometimes I pick it up with my foot. Flexibility (in multiples senses of the word) is worth having.
For any portable computing device I own, if a magician were to offer me an additional fully customizable hardware button for it, without reducing the size of any of the existing buttons or the screen, and without making the device noticeably harder to hold or keep in my pocket, I'd go for it. Of course, this wouldn't go on to infinity, which is why in the first paragraph I said "within reasonable limits". My Treo 700P is closest to reasonable limits, though not quite there yet. (There is unexploited space for hardware number and punctuation buttons.)
It's good to have both lots of hardware buttons and a touch screen.
Of course, it's different for non-power users who are intimidated by lots of buttons or icons. It might also be different for users who change their device regularly, since it takes a while to develop the optimized usage patterns and customization, and may not be efficient if one switches devices--or, worse, platforms--every two years or so.
You can get Graffiti for Android at least, if you think it's faster than typing. (I don't think it's faster than Swype, which is what I normally use on my Android device.)
Some some Palm phones used Windows Mobile, but most used PalmOS.
A mass of buttons is great. You can assign all sorts of functions to different keys (e.g., using third-party software) and then invoke them very quickly. You can do a lot of things without looking much at the screen (some you needed third-party software for). While you lose elegance of interface with lots of hardware keys, my impression is that PalmOS power users used the limited number of hardware keys heavily, and would have welcomed more. And a built-in keyboard is great for speeding up scrolling through lists, by typing the first letter or two of the item.
My phone is still a Treo 700P. Does just about everything I want in a phone well, except that the web browser is crummy and the best PDF viewer is slow.
Actually, for solar system objects you don't need any fancy tracking with a telescope, just avi stacking software, like Avi Stack. You let the object move across the field of view as you film, and the software does the rest.
You can also put the webcam sensor in place of the eyepiece in a microscope.
On some drives, I've seen sticker-covered holes in the aluminum plate leading to the platters. You can easily punch or drill through the sticker. I assume that's what the holes are.
One can get around the start menu's new horribleness by installing the open source Classic Start Menu. I just installed it on my Win7 laptop--it's really nice, with lots of fine-tuning options. Wonder if that will continue to work in Win8.
Given how low the quality of a fax is, one can do better by just using a point and shoot camera and emailing jpegs. (I've actually done that for various documents, with no complaints from the recipients.) A lot of people have no trouble with getting pictures from their camera to their computer.
I had some strain in grad school but haven't had any strain in the 12 years since (and it's not like I've been writing significantly less than in grad school--I've written two books and a lot of articles since grad school). I wonder if my ad hoc style has evolved in a way that avoids strain by including a randomization that makes for less repetitiveness of motion (or maybe some other feature of the ergonomics has improved--I do a lot of writing on a laptop while lying down nowadays).
(That was my comment you're responding to--sorry, I wasn't logged in.) Surely you need to put the text that you're typing into short-term memory in order to type it, and the more familiarly the text is organized, the easier it's to do that. I would be surprised if you found a study that shows that touch typists type as quickly in an unfamiliar foreign language as in their native language.
Besides, in real life just about the only texts I type are texts that I am composing while I'm typing them. (The exception is when I am typing in a quotation from a source where I can't copy and paste.) Hence they're rather familiar.:-) So the skill of typing things without awareness of content is pretty useless to me (and I expect to the majority of keyboard users in our day--gone are the days when most people using keyboards were secretaries transcribing texts written by others).
1. Moreover, there is quite a bit you can do with adb even without root: the adb shell normally gets privileges that are higher than those ordinary non-system Android apps get, though lower than full root privileges. (E.g., you can silently install and deinstall arbitrary apps from an adb shell.) So keeping debug on and plugging into untrusted devices is probably not such a great idea, whether the device is rooted or not. Moreover, if debug is on, then even if the device isn't rooted, an attacker can often just silently install an app that roots the device via whatever vulnerability roots a given device, and then get full root privileges.
2. The Superuser app that I use can be set so that it remembers su permissions after the first time one is asked and doesn't ask again if the same app requests the permission (technically, it will ask again if the app requests the permission in connection with another su command, but most root-using apps just request permission for an su shell, and then do their work in the shell). I keep that setting active, since I do things that require root so often (my SuperDim app to dim the display below what the OS normally allows for use at night; on boot setting the exec permission on my SD card so I can move app libraries to it; adjusting CPU governor settings; using my Force2SD app to move recalcitrant apps to SD; running a script to do a tar backup of all of/data; etc.). It would be a real nuisance to be constantly prompted. But there is an obvious security cost to the convenience. I am willing to accept that cost, especially since I currently use only two root-based apps that I didn't write myself, and I think they are trustworthy apps. So only two apps that I didn't write have the silent su authorization enabled.
There is certainly room for copy and paste in programming.
I've re-used code between different PalmOS applications I've developed. I could, of course, set up a library, but to do that for small snippets of code is a nuisance. Plus I will often want to adapt the code for different applications, and if I wrote general purpose library code, it would be bloated (a shared library would help, but that would require an installer to install it). The same piece of GUI code occurs over and over. For instance, several utilities I wrote need to scan through the device's files (or, more precisely, databases) and create a pickable list of them. It's not much code, but if I wrote it from scratch, I'd have to look up the order of the arguments for a lot of the OS functions I call (PalmOS has some OS functions that take about ten arguments, most of them typically being passed NULLs, and remembering which is which would be a nuisance), and it's easier just to copy in working code I wrote already.
In a current project, a GPL astronomy app for Android, I'm re-using ephemeris code from GPL'd applications for other platforms. Why should I spend many hours trying to figure out and optimize all of the math myself, potentially introducing various bugs and inaccuracies? Instead, I can adapt mature code from other people's GPL applications, and then just include the appropriate copyright acknowledgments. Granted, there are obvious educational advantages to doing it myself from scratch, but there are advantages to adapting code.
1. Make sure to type in a bibliographic reference for the pasted text right away when you paste, though, or you might later forget to add a reference and be suspected of plagiarism.
2. I think the simple alt-e,s,(select with arrows),enter is slightly faster and smoother than windows-key,r,ctrl-v,ctrl-a,ctrl-x,alt-tab,ctrl-v or alt-tab(repeat to get notepad),ctrl-v,ctrl-a,ctrl-x,alt-tab,ctrl-v
I'm pretty used to using alt-e,s,(select with arrow),enter in Word (there is no doubt a new shortcut in Office 2007+, but the old one works, too). It IS more awkward, but most of the time when I copy and paste, it's text within or between Word documents, so I want the standard paste to be easier to access, and I use it often enough (though not as often as ctrl-v) that the combination has become second nature.
If most of your pasting is from external sources, you can re-bind ctrl-v in Word (and I assume in Open Office, too) to Paste Special. You'll still need to select the "unformatted" option in the dialog box, but at least it's one less keystroke than alt-e,s.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a lawyer either. Note that according to Wikipedia there was a lot of specificity in the copying in Steinberg v. Columbia Pictures: "the court cited the angle, layout, and details of the four city blocks depicted; the use of color on the horizon and sky; the distinctive lettering used in both for place names as well as the title at the top; and the overall stylistic impression of the two works". I am uncomfortable with that decision myself, though, and I'm even more uncomfortable with the alas well-settled law that fictional characters can be copyrighted.
What is most relevant to the Zynga case, though, seems to be the fact that US Copyright Office refuses to issue copyrights on game rules.
When the Tetris folks try to squash all the Tetris clones, people here think that's bad, and we're right that it's bad to squash Tetris clones. There is no copyright on concepts. But the same applies here. It shouldn't matter too much if it's a big company copying the ideas of a small developer did or a small developer cloning the ideas of a big company. It would, of course, be polite for the big company to offer some sort of thanks, though.
I looked at the side-by-side screenshots, and while the basic (uncopyrightable) gameplay ideas are very parallel and presumably copied, the graphics (which are copyrightable) are significantly different in style. And looking at coin amounts in the two screenshots, it looks like the rules weren't copied either (not that there would be anything wrong with copying rules, since there is no copyright on game rules, only on their written expression).
Early in January, I released on Amazon's Appstore a popular app aimed at the Kindle Fire to dim the too-bright screen. About two weeks later, two others appeared. I don't know if there was copying of ideas going on. But even if there was, what's the big deal? The competing apps have somewhat different interfaces, and differ a little bit in feature set, and now consumers have more choice. And inspiration in respect of additional features can go both ways, and as a result all the apps can get better.
If you don't take any notes, you'll be in trouble if there something detail-oriented that's not in the book, unless you're really smart.
I wonder if the recommendations depend on how detail-oriented and textbook-centered a course is. I teach philosophy. It certainly happen when I teach more advanced classes that I come up with new arguments and proofs right on the spot. They aren't in the assigned books, they aren't in the assigned articles, and because I came up with them on the spot (e.g., in response to a student question), there is no handout with it. But few students will correctly remember an eight step metaphysics argument or a hard logic proof without notes, or at least without taking a photo of the board.
I generally try to have apps I work on support Android 1.6 and up. It's really not at all hard to do that, unless you need OpenGLES 2.
Actually, cheap data plans in some cases can be a reason to stay on a relatively dumb phone, as long as it has a decent browser (and I think there is at least one HTC feature phone that has a good Opera browser). I'm on a no-longer available $30/month 500 minute, unlimited data/text SERO plan with Sprint. I am currently using a Treo 700. According to Sprint, if I were to switch to a more modern "smart phone" (by Sprint's definition), I'd have to switch to a new, much more expensive plan. So if my Treo dies in such a way that it doesn't make economic sense to repair it (I've made minor repairs on its keyboard so far), it could potentially make economic sense to switch to a feature phone with a decent browser so I could stay on the plan, rather than paying the smart phone surcharge.
IANAL, but I would think that the actual damages for infringing on a license by unauthorized redistribution (say, redistribution of GPL software without source code) would be a reasonable estimate of how much an alternate commercial redistribution license for the project would cost. If the project has negotiated such licenses with other companies in the past, that could provide data for an estimate. Failing that, I suppose one could look at relevantly similar projects and how much an alternate license costs for them.
Just make a trial version that expires after x days and points the user to the paid version. (Don't worry about the small number of users who will uninstall and just re-install the trial. That's a lot of work to do every x days, if x is small.)
There is still the question of getting the swipes in the right order.
When I wrote a PictureLogin beta app for Palms (back in 2007; no, it's not prior art for the MS patent, as it was tap-only rather than swipe), I made PictureLogin act as a quick login screen, with an immediate fallback to the default passkey login if it failed. It would be very unlikely an attacker would get in on the first try, but it would allow users to have a very fast login with as few as two taps, or maybe even with only one if one was willing to take a risk. That would also help with the fingerprint problem. I think I was also thinking about some security-by-obscurity options, such as a user using some fake form as their PictureLogin image, so that someone who stole or found the device would not know that it's actually a PictureLogin login screen. You turn it on, and you see some normal Palm screen. You tap once or twice in the right place(s) and you're in, and you tap even once in the wrong place and fall back. I never got around to a full release of PictureLogin, though the code is open source.
Including 9366 bytes worth of images. It's been pretty steady since 1992 or so (initially hosted over ftp instead of http as my Dept didn't have an http server yet).
Somewhere around 1/4 or 1/3 of the apps on my Archos tablet use a native library. I know because I occasionally monitor how much stuff is in the /data/data/*/lib directory, and for the apps with particularly fat libraries, I offload /data/data/*/lib to an SD card, and symlink to it.
Here are two examples: The open source APV PDF viewer that I am on the dev team for is just a relatively small java wrapper around a native library that encapsulates muPDF code, with no changes in the core muPDF code, and uses other standard libraries like libfreetype and libjpeg. I expect a fair amount of open source Android ports work like this. I also have on my device one app which is a port of an iPhone app, and the developer has kept all of the OpenGL C code unchanged and wrapped it in a native library.
Sure, it wouldn't be hard for a developer to recompile the ARM code, but then (a) the developer will need to install another toolchain and will ask: is it worth it for a small segment of the market? and (b) will need to either swell up the binaries for everyone by including a MIPS library or will have to go to the trouble of uploading two versions with every release, which is a nuisance, especially if it's a free app.
I just set my Palm TX (ca. 2005) to unlock with a swipe plus a tap using only stock stuff. :-) How did I do it? I set the password to a space, and turned on full-screen graffiti input. Now, to unlock it, I just needed enter a space, and then tap on "OK". And with full-screen graffiti input, you enter a space by swiping right. (OK, you have to make sure you don't swipe too far--the swipe needs to stay in the relevant alphabetic subdivision.
With the TealLock PalmOS app, I could even set a quick password that wouldn't need to tap the "OK" button. I assume Graffiti will still work. So, you wouldn't even need to tap on "OK". You can then use any sequence of gestures that are a part of the Graffiti alphabet to unlock then. So you could unlock with a swipe-right (space), a swipe-down (i), a swipe-up (!), a right-side-up U (u), an upside-down U (a), a backwards alpha (x), etc. TealLock's Quick Lock feature came in before version 5.30, which was released in October, 2004.
I don't know if it counts as animation exactly, but Graffiti will draw a line following the touch contact.
Within reasonable limits, the greater the number of customizable control options there are in a device, the better for power users. It's useful to be able to press or hold a button and pop up a calculator while using some other app. It's handy to be able to do a gesture and pop up a notepad. It's efficient and pleasant to be able to pick up a turned off device, directly press a calendar or email button, optionally press an unlock button (or do an unlock gesture--I think it's best to have both options), and then have the device both turned on and showing the calendar or email.
It's often useful to have multiple ways of doing something. Say, I'm on a PC and typing something in a textbox, like this comment. I want to change the second-last word I typed. The fastest thing for me to do is probably to press ctrl-left, ctrl-backspace, retype (with space, alas), ctrl-right (or ctrl-end). I want to change a word further back. The fastest thing to do is to reach for a mouse, move the cursor there, double click, retype, and then press ctrl-end. I don't want to be limited to one of the two ways of doing things, because each one is optimal in its own context, and what works better in which context differs from user to user, making flexibility important (while it's a good idea to make commonly used functions more easily available, what functions are more often used differs from user to user). And as one uses a device a lot over the years, a power user will develop a lot of optimized patterns of usage that use different control/input modalities to accomplish the same task depending on the context.
We do that outside of technological contexts. Sometimes I nod, sometimes I say "Yes" or "Yeah" or "OK", sometimes I grunt "Uhu", and there is a time and place for each. Sometimes to pick up an object from the ground, I stoop down and sometimes I pick it up with my foot. Flexibility (in multiples senses of the word) is worth having.
For any portable computing device I own, if a magician were to offer me an additional fully customizable hardware button for it, without reducing the size of any of the existing buttons or the screen, and without making the device noticeably harder to hold or keep in my pocket, I'd go for it. Of course, this wouldn't go on to infinity, which is why in the first paragraph I said "within reasonable limits". My Treo 700P is closest to reasonable limits, though not quite there yet. (There is unexploited space for hardware number and punctuation buttons.)
It's good to have both lots of hardware buttons and a touch screen.
Of course, it's different for non-power users who are intimidated by lots of buttons or icons. It might also be different for users who change their device regularly, since it takes a while to develop the optimized usage patterns and customization, and may not be efficient if one switches devices--or, worse, platforms--every two years or so.
You can get Graffiti for Android at least, if you think it's faster than typing. (I don't think it's faster than Swype, which is what I normally use on my Android device.)
Some some Palm phones used Windows Mobile, but most used PalmOS.
A mass of buttons is great. You can assign all sorts of functions to different keys (e.g., using third-party software) and then invoke them very quickly. You can do a lot of things without looking much at the screen (some you needed third-party software for). While you lose elegance of interface with lots of hardware keys, my impression is that PalmOS power users used the limited number of hardware keys heavily, and would have welcomed more. And a built-in keyboard is great for speeding up scrolling through lists, by typing the first letter or two of the item.
My phone is still a Treo 700P. Does just about everything I want in a phone well, except that the web browser is crummy and the best PDF viewer is slow.
Actually, for solar system objects you don't need any fancy tracking with a telescope, just avi stacking software, like Avi Stack. You let the object move across the field of view as you film, and the software does the rest.
You can also put the webcam sensor in place of the eyepiece in a microscope.
On some drives, I've seen sticker-covered holes in the aluminum plate leading to the platters. You can easily punch or drill through the sticker. I assume that's what the holes are.
One can get around the start menu's new horribleness by installing the open source Classic Start Menu. I just installed it on my Win7 laptop--it's really nice, with lots of fine-tuning options. Wonder if that will continue to work in Win8.
Given how low the quality of a fax is, one can do better by just using a point and shoot camera and emailing jpegs. (I've actually done that for various documents, with no complaints from the recipients.) A lot of people have no trouble with getting pictures from their camera to their computer.
I had some strain in grad school but haven't had any strain in the 12 years since (and it's not like I've been writing significantly less than in grad school--I've written two books and a lot of articles since grad school). I wonder if my ad hoc style has evolved in a way that avoids strain by including a randomization that makes for less repetitiveness of motion (or maybe some other feature of the ergonomics has improved--I do a lot of writing on a laptop while lying down nowadays).
(That was my comment you're responding to--sorry, I wasn't logged in.) Surely you need to put the text that you're typing into short-term memory in order to type it, and the more familiarly the text is organized, the easier it's to do that. I would be surprised if you found a study that shows that touch typists type as quickly in an unfamiliar foreign language as in their native language.
Besides, in real life just about the only texts I type are texts that I am composing while I'm typing them. (The exception is when I am typing in a quotation from a source where I can't copy and paste.) Hence they're rather familiar. :-) So the skill of typing things without awareness of content is pretty useless to me (and I expect to the majority of keyboard users in our day--gone are the days when most people using keyboards were secretaries transcribing texts written by others).
1. Moreover, there is quite a bit you can do with adb even without root: the adb shell normally gets privileges that are higher than those ordinary non-system Android apps get, though lower than full root privileges. (E.g., you can silently install and deinstall arbitrary apps from an adb shell.) So keeping debug on and plugging into untrusted devices is probably not such a great idea, whether the device is rooted or not. Moreover, if debug is on, then even if the device isn't rooted, an attacker can often just silently install an app that roots the device via whatever vulnerability roots a given device, and then get full root privileges.
2. The Superuser app that I use can be set so that it remembers su permissions after the first time one is asked and doesn't ask again if the same app requests the permission (technically, it will ask again if the app requests the permission in connection with another su command, but most root-using apps just request permission for an su shell, and then do their work in the shell). I keep that setting active, since I do things that require root so often (my SuperDim app to dim the display below what the OS normally allows for use at night; on boot setting the exec permission on my SD card so I can move app libraries to it; adjusting CPU governor settings; using my Force2SD app to move recalcitrant apps to SD; running a script to do a tar backup of all of /data; etc.). It would be a real nuisance to be constantly prompted. But there is an obvious security cost to the convenience. I am willing to accept that cost, especially since I currently use only two root-based apps that I didn't write myself, and I think they are trustworthy apps. So only two apps that I didn't write have the silent su authorization enabled.
There is certainly room for copy and paste in programming.
I've re-used code between different PalmOS applications I've developed. I could, of course, set up a library, but to do that for small snippets of code is a nuisance. Plus I will often want to adapt the code for different applications, and if I wrote general purpose library code, it would be bloated (a shared library would help, but that would require an installer to install it). The same piece of GUI code occurs over and over. For instance, several utilities I wrote need to scan through the device's files (or, more precisely, databases) and create a pickable list of them. It's not much code, but if I wrote it from scratch, I'd have to look up the order of the arguments for a lot of the OS functions I call (PalmOS has some OS functions that take about ten arguments, most of them typically being passed NULLs, and remembering which is which would be a nuisance), and it's easier just to copy in working code I wrote already.
In a current project, a GPL astronomy app for Android, I'm re-using ephemeris code from GPL'd applications for other platforms. Why should I spend many hours trying to figure out and optimize all of the math myself, potentially introducing various bugs and inaccuracies? Instead, I can adapt mature code from other people's GPL applications, and then just include the appropriate copyright acknowledgments. Granted, there are obvious educational advantages to doing it myself from scratch, but there are advantages to adapting code.
1. Make sure to type in a bibliographic reference for the pasted text right away when you paste, though, or you might later forget to add a reference and be suspected of plagiarism.
2. I think the simple alt-e,s,(select with arrows),enter is slightly faster and smoother than windows-key,r,ctrl-v,ctrl-a,ctrl-x,alt-tab,ctrl-v or alt-tab(repeat to get notepad),ctrl-v,ctrl-a,ctrl-x,alt-tab,ctrl-v
I'm pretty used to using alt-e,s,(select with arrow),enter in Word (there is no doubt a new shortcut in Office 2007+, but the old one works, too). It IS more awkward, but most of the time when I copy and paste, it's text within or between Word documents, so I want the standard paste to be easier to access, and I use it often enough (though not as often as ctrl-v) that the combination has become second nature.
If most of your pasting is from external sources, you can re-bind ctrl-v in Word (and I assume in Open Office, too) to Paste Special. You'll still need to select the "unformatted" option in the dialog box, but at least it's one less keystroke than alt-e,s.
I noticed that my length-based example could collapse two lines of setup code to one. Replace OR CX,CX and JZ done with:
JCXZ done
It's been a long time. :-(