If I were Mr. Obama and had the power that he had, I would initiate a plan of action to require that schools that receive *any* federal tax subsidies can't require ANY textbook that has a one-time use code, or otherwise use any book that has no or limited resale value to future students. This rule applies to ALL classes they offer. Also apply this stipulation to any college that accepts FAFSA pell grants for students. Give the schools about 4 years to comply (about the longest time it takes for every textbook to go through an edition refresh.)
I think those kinds of textbooks are the biggest ripoff in the college industry. Watch how fast the schools get rid of those.
I'm one of those evil free market libertarians, by the way, and I'm not a fan of Obama. But, I'm just saying that is a lot more realistic, and it would be hard to find anybody (other than publishers) who would rally against such a plan.
In fact, if there was a whitehouse petition to this effect, I'd sign it (and I haven't bothered to sign one of those before, because I know how useless they typically are, namely because the petitioners try to ask for big things all at once that don't stand a chance of passing. About the only one that ever had any actual meaning was the one to ask for cell phone unlocking to be legal again.)
Basically you do all of the meaningless community organizer liberal arts classes at community college, and you do your core degree classes at university. If you do 15 credits per semester, then you only need two semesters. In my case I did one of the hard classes during the summer, making one semester 12 credits and the other 15.
I have a bachelors degree at Northern Arizona University (one of the state's three universities) and my grants paid enough that I made a net profit by going to school.
Community college was about $800 per semester, which was under the total dispersment that FAFSA gave me, university was around $2300 per semester, which was below the combined FAFSA grant and university grant, and the program I did only required a single year while at the university so long as I did 90 credits at the community college (I just had to take the degree's core classes at university, and they didn't make me bother with the liberal arts crap so long as I did enough of it at community college, where it's much cheaper.)
I'm not a minority, nor do I have any minority status, so this is literally something that anybody can do.
Let's assume for a second that I was responsible for ALL costs:
800*6=4,800 2300*2=4,600
So far that's $9,400 in tuition. Now lets look at the cost of books: In a typical semester I didn't spend more than a net of $200 on textbooks. I say net because I'm also counting the fact that I bought and sold the textbooks used. Amazon is a great place for this, I tend to find that they sell for the lowest price while buying back for among the highest (you get a gift card, which you can use to buy more books next semester.) One semester I even came out with a net $16 cost on books, another semester it was something like $400 (two of the books were only available on campus and had one-time use codes, which I'll address later.) Also, PIRATE THE e-TEXTBOOKS IF YOU CAN! This is a HUGE money saver, at least it was for me anyways. The publishers are out to rip you off because they KNOW you can't buy from anybody but them, so don't be shy about returning the favor.
I actually probably spent a net of less than that even, but let's assume $200 anyways:
200*8=1,600
So my total school related costs were about $11,000. In my case, grants covered all of that and more. But still, that's hardly something you'll be in debt for the rest of your life over. Here's another pro tip while I'm at it: Go to school in an area where the cost of living is at or below the national average. For example, if you go to school in New York City, then your living expenses alone will put you in big debt. So be smart like the college educated person you want to be: Live in a cheap area; it pays off.
Do you even know anything about the FBI? Obama literally gets to appoint its leaders, from the Chief of Staff to the Attorney General. And I don't know if you keep up with current events, but the AG is A) Very loyal to Obama B) Doesn't give a shit about actual justice C) Is a total dick. Painting a false picture is right up his alley, just like how he tried to find a way to charge George Zimmerman with a crime after he was acquitted (hence why I say he doesn't give a shit about actual justice.)
In fact the Assistant Director of the FBI recently wrote an open letter to Obama complaining about how much of an overall antagonist Eric Holder is. It may or may not be coincidence, but he is resigning soon, only waiting for Obama to appoint a new AG before he leaves.
Carterâ(TM)s presidency was doomed before it started because of the mess he inherited, and there was very little he could do about it.
I don't know about that, I think Carter handled a lot of things very poorly. Look at how badly he handled things that were exclusive to his administration, such as Iran-Contra.
Today the US (along with most of the world) is dealing with unhealthily LOW interest rates and inflation. Large businesses are sitting on giant piles of cash while many households have unhealthy levels of debt.
I don't think interest rates have much to do with that. Usually when people borrow the way that they do, they're just dumb. In my state, there's no such thing as usury, which means you can charge whatever interest rate you'd like on any kind of loan. Some people are so desperate to borrow money that they go to those title loan companies that have upwards of a 300% interest rate.
Which by the way, I don't have a problem with this. If they lived in places with usury laws such as New York, then instead of going to places like this, they'd be going to loan sharks. With a title loan company, at most they lose their car. With a loan shark, you stand to lose a lot more than that, and unlike the title companies, they don't give two shits about any laws.
Not only that, but large businesses, even the ones with a lot of cash, still carry debts. For example, I'm looking at Microsoft's 10Q (yes, I opened it up while writing this) and they state that as of September 2014, they have $23.7 billion in outstanding debt. But I don't think I need to explain why that isn't unhealthy.
Like these businesses however, I don't consider most consumer debt to be unhealthy. Yes there are a few outliers, but the lending institutions for the most part won't lend their customers more money than they think they'll ever be able to pay back (exceptions being if the law requires them to lend anyways, such as what caused the real estate collapse in 2008.) Over the last decade, the banks have gotten really good at making those determinations, which are usually AI driven, by the way, which means that they statistically/mathematically learn from their mistakes.
The GP said harmful bacteria. There will be bacteria in your bladder, hell there will be bacteria on your genitals as well when it comes out, but chances are it's going to be benign in nature, much the same as bacteria commonly found on your skin. The bacteria found on your hands and in your mouth is invariably going to be far more dangerous.
The bacteria may not, but dehydration definitely can, and that's the effect of drinking urine.
That depends on the content of the urine. If it is super high in electrolytes (which isn't atypical,) then yeah it probably would dehydrate you. The contents vary from person to person and further depending on that person's diet at the time they took a piss.
I remember a quote from Neil Armstrong saying that he felt there'd only be a 50% chance that he'd actually be able to land on the moon successfully (a failed landing probably meant a slow death.)
Not really hypocritical. The bible actually says not to murder. Most people who say not to kill just quote the King James Version, which was horribly translated, even by very old standards. It goes without saying that the Jews would be unfamiliar with that verbiage.
And, according to the actual bible, that particular commandment was written by Moses for the Jews, long before Christ even had a name, and also before the Jews conquered Israel, killing its previous inhabitants in the process.
If you want an accurate translation, read the NIV, which specifically says "you shall not murder" for that commandment, which seems pretty distinctive from the word kill.
NIV is also easier to read because, among other things (such as forgoing the "thou"s "ye"s, olf ye olde English) every verse doesn't begin with the word "and."
Disclaimer: I'm an atheist, always have been one, even at the time that I read that bible (because all other reading material is forbidden during US Army BCT.)
Your kidneys filter at the molecular level and thus are VERY good at preventing bacteria from entering your bladder. If bacteria ever entered your bladder, you'd routinely have bladder and/or urinary tract infections, namely because no blood flows to those regions so you have no T cells to combat it. While urine smells foul and probably tastes worse, it wouldn't kill you to drink it. (But still don't do it anyways because it contains waste materials that your kidneys removed from your blood for a very good reason.)
That said, we also have the artificial means of doing the filtering job that kidneys do, so it wouldn't surprise me if this technique also worked on poo.
If I am going to drink water recycled in this manner, I'd prefer to have the engineering studied by an independant water quality professional, say, an environmental engineer? And for the output water to be studied by health professionals and microbiologists.
Bill Gates didn't invent it, and he isn't trying to sell it to you either. Chances are you'll probably never even see one unless either you're a humanitarian aide worker and/or you live in a third world country. He's trying to promote it as a means of helping people who have difficulty accessing potable water.
We don't need to manufacture everything domestically, but we need to be capable of manufacturing everything domestically
That is already the present reality, but things are often manufactured overseas for a few reasons:
- Chinese companies have the capability of rapidly adjusting manufacturing processes as a result of last minute design changes. While technically US companies have this ability, most companies just won't do it (in some cases labor unions are the biggest hindrance because they only permit their members to do one job and one job only, and instead of re-allocating existing labor, they're forced to hire new people, which just isn't economical or practical.)
- Even though it is possible to find the required skill set in the US, often the workers you do find aren't as good at a particular task as some people who live overseas and do that kind of work all the time. For example, how many Americans do you know that are good at operating the machinery used for making textiles? Chances are, they're harder to find than in China, but if you really wanted to get it done here, you could, just you'll pay more, it'll take longer, and the craftsmanship probably won't be as good.
Sometimes for really small jobs though, it does make sense to hire local talent instead. For example, it's probably cheaper to have a special kind of shirt made in quantities of 10,000 in China, but if you need only 100 of them, then it's probably cheaper to have it done here instead.
At any rate, the US is still the top place to go for very high end semiconductor fabrication. Presently the worlds most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant is located in Chandler, Arizona. Though any products that come out of it will probably end up being stamped "Made in Malaysia" or some similar location, mainly because the final package is assembled there rather than here, which mainly has to do with the scenarios described above.
That was my first thought. If there was a fault line that is being activated, then they're effectively settling the tectonic mass before it can buckle any further, effectively giving us a few small harmless quakes now instead of a big highly destructive one later.
I don't think that would be enough storage for a typical audiophile's full collection if it was all lossless, which this device espouses. For $1,200 it should be at least 512GB IMO, which the NAND storage alone should have a BOM cost of less than $100.
Anyway it seems that Sony made the same mistake in the MP3 player market that Microsoft did in the smartphone market; they saw the incoming demand for a new kind of product and just flat out ignored it.
most movie theatres will not allow you to consume food and drink you've bought elsewhere on the premises.
That's exactly my point, because in this case you're applying it to a whole country rather than just a movie theater, and worse is that since most content ends up being paid for in some way, you're effectively being forced to pay for something you may not even give a shit about.
I don't think this theory quite explains it. I have my own:
In the past, nice things weren't necessarily easy to come by. Either most people were too poor to afford to simply dispose of the broken things so they fixed it themselves, or they were so pricey that it was worth paying somebody to fix it rather than replace it.
Take for example major appliances, like washers and dryers. It used to be that being an appliance repair man was a legit career (it still is on occasion, but rarely.) But now (and you can ask appliance repair people yourself if you don't believe me) people would rather just buy a new washer than have somebody fix the old one. Why? Because new ones cost less. The same can be said for TVs and TV repair men (there also used to be such thing as a TV delivery man who would come bring your TV to you and professionally calibrate it so that the picture would display straight -- a necessity that TVs haven't required for over 40 years now.)
Still though, poor people who can not afford to replace tend to prefer to try to fix it on their own, or ask a friend of a friend to help them out, or something similar.
The main reason we don't fix stuff as much any more, is that in spite of socialist doomsaying, everybody is now wealthier than we have been in the past. Rich and poor alike; all wealthier. The metric frequently used to argue that there are more poor now than ever is based entirely on income. However money is not wealth; income isn't either. Material goods are wealth.
To further drive this point home, let's look at Cuba's automobile economy. In Cuba, most people to this day still drive American made cars of the 50's era (the rest drive Russian made cars of sometimes later years.) This is mainly because after the communist revolution, cars were VERY difficult to obtain, and therefore expensive, so replacement was rarely ever an option. So, the solution to a car breaking down was to find *some* way to fix it, fighting tooth and nail to do so. In the US, if you wanted to keep a car from the 50's running well, you were just hell bent on keeping that "classic" alive, and it isn't cheap to do so either: Parts are scarce and usually involve finding some way of creating your own. The same was true for the Cubans, but for them it was far cheaper than replacing.
Not necessarily. There are different ways to build Android apps. The most common way by far is using java. Versions of Android 4.4 and above compile that as you say via the ART runtime, but prior to that they use a JIT interpreter called Dalvik (except prior to 2.2 where it doesn't use JIT and is slower.)
You can also just compile binaries in just about any language of your choice (commonly with C or C++) or even include your own interpreter for another language bundled with your app (such as Python for Android.)
You can get gapps for just about any architecture. I linked that one because those are the modular packages, so you can get whatever apps you want sans the ones you don't want. I don't know if x86 is linked in there, but you can google search e.g. "gapps x86" (no quotes) to find them if not.
Why can't the local creative community sell its own material based on its own merit instead of being forced upon you? That's like going to a movie theater, asking for a lemon-lime soda, and being told that they don't sell any, so if you want one tough shit, either buy something else or go home because you aren't allowed to bring your own either.
Google doesn't care if end users download and install them, they just don't want OEMs to do it without properly joining the OHA.
Though in all honesty, I'd just leave Windows intact and install bluestax (which is free.) Getting drivers and shit working on that is going to be a royal PITA and probably won't be worth the time you spend on it. Just install something like Start8 and ignore that piece of shit called metro -- it won't bother you if you don't bother it.
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Back in China we had much *MUCH* tougher math training, when we were in our secondary school (equivalent to 'high school' in the States)
Well Asian...of course you're better at math. ;)
Grats though, I like reading stories like these.
If I were Mr. Obama and had the power that he had, I would initiate a plan of action to require that schools that receive *any* federal tax subsidies can't require ANY textbook that has a one-time use code, or otherwise use any book that has no or limited resale value to future students. This rule applies to ALL classes they offer. Also apply this stipulation to any college that accepts FAFSA pell grants for students. Give the schools about 4 years to comply (about the longest time it takes for every textbook to go through an edition refresh.)
I think those kinds of textbooks are the biggest ripoff in the college industry. Watch how fast the schools get rid of those.
I'm one of those evil free market libertarians, by the way, and I'm not a fan of Obama. But, I'm just saying that is a lot more realistic, and it would be hard to find anybody (other than publishers) who would rally against such a plan.
In fact, if there was a whitehouse petition to this effect, I'd sign it (and I haven't bothered to sign one of those before, because I know how useless they typically are, namely because the petitioners try to ask for big things all at once that don't stand a chance of passing. About the only one that ever had any actual meaning was the one to ask for cell phone unlocking to be legal again.)
In >>99% of all cases, a 2-year degree from a community college does not knock off anywhere near 2 years from a 4-year bachelor's degree.
In my case it knocked off three years.
http://news.slashdot.org/comme...
Here's a description of the program:
http://yavapai.nau.edu/blog/Th...
Basically you do all of the meaningless community organizer liberal arts classes at community college, and you do your core degree classes at university. If you do 15 credits per semester, then you only need two semesters. In my case I did one of the hard classes during the summer, making one semester 12 credits and the other 15.
Exactly.
I have a bachelors degree at Northern Arizona University (one of the state's three universities) and my grants paid enough that I made a net profit by going to school.
Community college was about $800 per semester, which was under the total dispersment that FAFSA gave me, university was around $2300 per semester, which was below the combined FAFSA grant and university grant, and the program I did only required a single year while at the university so long as I did 90 credits at the community college (I just had to take the degree's core classes at university, and they didn't make me bother with the liberal arts crap so long as I did enough of it at community college, where it's much cheaper.)
I'm not a minority, nor do I have any minority status, so this is literally something that anybody can do.
Let's assume for a second that I was responsible for ALL costs:
800*6=4,800
2300*2=4,600
So far that's $9,400 in tuition. Now lets look at the cost of books: In a typical semester I didn't spend more than a net of $200 on textbooks. I say net because I'm also counting the fact that I bought and sold the textbooks used. Amazon is a great place for this, I tend to find that they sell for the lowest price while buying back for among the highest (you get a gift card, which you can use to buy more books next semester.) One semester I even came out with a net $16 cost on books, another semester it was something like $400 (two of the books were only available on campus and had one-time use codes, which I'll address later.) Also, PIRATE THE e-TEXTBOOKS IF YOU CAN! This is a HUGE money saver, at least it was for me anyways. The publishers are out to rip you off because they KNOW you can't buy from anybody but them, so don't be shy about returning the favor.
I actually probably spent a net of less than that even, but let's assume $200 anyways:
200*8=1,600
So my total school related costs were about $11,000. In my case, grants covered all of that and more. But still, that's hardly something you'll be in debt for the rest of your life over. Here's another pro tip while I'm at it: Go to school in an area where the cost of living is at or below the national average. For example, if you go to school in New York City, then your living expenses alone will put you in big debt. So be smart like the college educated person you want to be: Live in a cheap area; it pays off.
Do you even know anything about the FBI? Obama literally gets to appoint its leaders, from the Chief of Staff to the Attorney General. And I don't know if you keep up with current events, but the AG is A) Very loyal to Obama B) Doesn't give a shit about actual justice C) Is a total dick. Painting a false picture is right up his alley, just like how he tried to find a way to charge George Zimmerman with a crime after he was acquitted (hence why I say he doesn't give a shit about actual justice.)
In fact the Assistant Director of the FBI recently wrote an open letter to Obama complaining about how much of an overall antagonist Eric Holder is. It may or may not be coincidence, but he is resigning soon, only waiting for Obama to appoint a new AG before he leaves.
Not only that but they're suggesting that the NSA doesn't have as good a tap on the global networking infrastructure as Edward Snowden revealed.
Carterâ(TM)s presidency was doomed before it started because of the mess he inherited, and there was very little he could do about it.
I don't know about that, I think Carter handled a lot of things very poorly. Look at how badly he handled things that were exclusive to his administration, such as Iran-Contra.
Today the US (along with most of the world) is dealing with unhealthily LOW interest rates and inflation. Large businesses are sitting on giant piles of cash while many households have unhealthy levels of debt.
I don't think interest rates have much to do with that. Usually when people borrow the way that they do, they're just dumb. In my state, there's no such thing as usury, which means you can charge whatever interest rate you'd like on any kind of loan. Some people are so desperate to borrow money that they go to those title loan companies that have upwards of a 300% interest rate.
Which by the way, I don't have a problem with this. If they lived in places with usury laws such as New York, then instead of going to places like this, they'd be going to loan sharks. With a title loan company, at most they lose their car. With a loan shark, you stand to lose a lot more than that, and unlike the title companies, they don't give two shits about any laws.
Not only that, but large businesses, even the ones with a lot of cash, still carry debts. For example, I'm looking at Microsoft's 10Q (yes, I opened it up while writing this) and they state that as of September 2014, they have $23.7 billion in outstanding debt. But I don't think I need to explain why that isn't unhealthy.
Like these businesses however, I don't consider most consumer debt to be unhealthy. Yes there are a few outliers, but the lending institutions for the most part won't lend their customers more money than they think they'll ever be able to pay back (exceptions being if the law requires them to lend anyways, such as what caused the real estate collapse in 2008.) Over the last decade, the banks have gotten really good at making those determinations, which are usually AI driven, by the way, which means that they statistically/mathematically learn from their mistakes.
False. http://www.sciencedaily.com/re... [sciencedaily.com]
The GP said harmful bacteria. There will be bacteria in your bladder, hell there will be bacteria on your genitals as well when it comes out, but chances are it's going to be benign in nature, much the same as bacteria commonly found on your skin. The bacteria found on your hands and in your mouth is invariably going to be far more dangerous.
The bacteria may not, but dehydration definitely can, and that's the effect of drinking urine.
That depends on the content of the urine. If it is super high in electrolytes (which isn't atypical,) then yeah it probably would dehydrate you. The contents vary from person to person and further depending on that person's diet at the time they took a piss.
I remember a quote from Neil Armstrong saying that he felt there'd only be a 50% chance that he'd actually be able to land on the moon successfully (a failed landing probably meant a slow death.)
Not really hypocritical. The bible actually says not to murder. Most people who say not to kill just quote the King James Version, which was horribly translated, even by very old standards. It goes without saying that the Jews would be unfamiliar with that verbiage.
And, according to the actual bible, that particular commandment was written by Moses for the Jews, long before Christ even had a name, and also before the Jews conquered Israel, killing its previous inhabitants in the process.
If you want an accurate translation, read the NIV, which specifically says "you shall not murder" for that commandment, which seems pretty distinctive from the word kill.
NIV is also easier to read because, among other things (such as forgoing the "thou"s "ye"s, olf ye olde English) every verse doesn't begin with the word "and."
Disclaimer: I'm an atheist, always have been one, even at the time that I read that bible (because all other reading material is forbidden during US Army BCT.)
Human waste contains heaps of harmful bacteria.
Poo? Yes. Piss? No.
Your kidneys filter at the molecular level and thus are VERY good at preventing bacteria from entering your bladder. If bacteria ever entered your bladder, you'd routinely have bladder and/or urinary tract infections, namely because no blood flows to those regions so you have no T cells to combat it. While urine smells foul and probably tastes worse, it wouldn't kill you to drink it. (But still don't do it anyways because it contains waste materials that your kidneys removed from your blood for a very good reason.)
That said, we also have the artificial means of doing the filtering job that kidneys do, so it wouldn't surprise me if this technique also worked on poo.
If I am going to drink water recycled in this manner, I'd prefer to have the engineering studied by an independant water quality professional, say, an environmental engineer? And for the output water to be studied by health professionals and microbiologists.
Bill Gates didn't invent it, and he isn't trying to sell it to you either. Chances are you'll probably never even see one unless either you're a humanitarian aide worker and/or you live in a third world country. He's trying to promote it as a means of helping people who have difficulty accessing potable water.
I'll let somebody more experienced on it do the talking:
http://theweek.com/article/ind...
(And no, I'm not a fan of him, just I don't see any reason why he'd be wrong on this.)
Does intel even make a discreet GPU? I thought they were all baked into their newer CPUs.
We don't need to manufacture everything domestically, but we need to be capable of manufacturing everything domestically
That is already the present reality, but things are often manufactured overseas for a few reasons:
- Chinese companies have the capability of rapidly adjusting manufacturing processes as a result of last minute design changes. While technically US companies have this ability, most companies just won't do it (in some cases labor unions are the biggest hindrance because they only permit their members to do one job and one job only, and instead of re-allocating existing labor, they're forced to hire new people, which just isn't economical or practical.)
- Even though it is possible to find the required skill set in the US, often the workers you do find aren't as good at a particular task as some people who live overseas and do that kind of work all the time. For example, how many Americans do you know that are good at operating the machinery used for making textiles? Chances are, they're harder to find than in China, but if you really wanted to get it done here, you could, just you'll pay more, it'll take longer, and the craftsmanship probably won't be as good.
Sometimes for really small jobs though, it does make sense to hire local talent instead. For example, it's probably cheaper to have a special kind of shirt made in quantities of 10,000 in China, but if you need only 100 of them, then it's probably cheaper to have it done here instead.
At any rate, the US is still the top place to go for very high end semiconductor fabrication. Presently the worlds most advanced semiconductor fabrication plant is located in Chandler, Arizona. Though any products that come out of it will probably end up being stamped "Made in Malaysia" or some similar location, mainly because the final package is assembled there rather than here, which mainly has to do with the scenarios described above.
That was my first thought. If there was a fault line that is being activated, then they're effectively settling the tectonic mass before it can buckle any further, effectively giving us a few small harmless quakes now instead of a big highly destructive one later.
I don't think that would be enough storage for a typical audiophile's full collection if it was all lossless, which this device espouses. For $1,200 it should be at least 512GB IMO, which the NAND storage alone should have a BOM cost of less than $100.
Anyway it seems that Sony made the same mistake in the MP3 player market that Microsoft did in the smartphone market; they saw the incoming demand for a new kind of product and just flat out ignored it.
most movie theatres will not allow you to consume food and drink you've bought elsewhere on the premises.
That's exactly my point, because in this case you're applying it to a whole country rather than just a movie theater, and worse is that since most content ends up being paid for in some way, you're effectively being forced to pay for something you may not even give a shit about.
How big was Justin Beiber's budget? Not that I'm a fan, but case in point.
I don't think this theory quite explains it. I have my own:
In the past, nice things weren't necessarily easy to come by. Either most people were too poor to afford to simply dispose of the broken things so they fixed it themselves, or they were so pricey that it was worth paying somebody to fix it rather than replace it.
Take for example major appliances, like washers and dryers. It used to be that being an appliance repair man was a legit career (it still is on occasion, but rarely.) But now (and you can ask appliance repair people yourself if you don't believe me) people would rather just buy a new washer than have somebody fix the old one. Why? Because new ones cost less. The same can be said for TVs and TV repair men (there also used to be such thing as a TV delivery man who would come bring your TV to you and professionally calibrate it so that the picture would display straight -- a necessity that TVs haven't required for over 40 years now.)
Still though, poor people who can not afford to replace tend to prefer to try to fix it on their own, or ask a friend of a friend to help them out, or something similar.
The main reason we don't fix stuff as much any more, is that in spite of socialist doomsaying, everybody is now wealthier than we have been in the past. Rich and poor alike; all wealthier. The metric frequently used to argue that there are more poor now than ever is based entirely on income. However money is not wealth; income isn't either. Material goods are wealth.
To further drive this point home, let's look at Cuba's automobile economy. In Cuba, most people to this day still drive American made cars of the 50's era (the rest drive Russian made cars of sometimes later years.) This is mainly because after the communist revolution, cars were VERY difficult to obtain, and therefore expensive, so replacement was rarely ever an option. So, the solution to a car breaking down was to find *some* way to fix it, fighting tooth and nail to do so. In the US, if you wanted to keep a car from the 50's running well, you were just hell bent on keeping that "classic" alive, and it isn't cheap to do so either: Parts are scarce and usually involve finding some way of creating your own. The same was true for the Cubans, but for them it was far cheaper than replacing.
Not necessarily. There are different ways to build Android apps. The most common way by far is using java. Versions of Android 4.4 and above compile that as you say via the ART runtime, but prior to that they use a JIT interpreter called Dalvik (except prior to 2.2 where it doesn't use JIT and is slower.)
You can also just compile binaries in just about any language of your choice (commonly with C or C++) or even include your own interpreter for another language bundled with your app (such as Python for Android.)
You can get gapps for just about any architecture. I linked that one because those are the modular packages, so you can get whatever apps you want sans the ones you don't want. I don't know if x86 is linked in there, but you can google search e.g. "gapps x86" (no quotes) to find them if not.
Why can't the local creative community sell its own material based on its own merit instead of being forced upon you? That's like going to a movie theater, asking for a lemon-lime soda, and being told that they don't sell any, so if you want one tough shit, either buy something else or go home because you aren't allowed to bring your own either.
You mean like these?
http://forum.xda-developers.co...
Google doesn't care if end users download and install them, they just don't want OEMs to do it without properly joining the OHA.
Though in all honesty, I'd just leave Windows intact and install bluestax (which is free.) Getting drivers and shit working on that is going to be a royal PITA and probably won't be worth the time you spend on it. Just install something like Start8 and ignore that piece of shit called metro -- it won't bother you if you don't bother it.