HN user
You're quite right. I hadn't realised that the constitution relates to actions between the government and the people only. Reading HN comments is always educational! I suppose it's more correct to say that it isn't in the spirit of the First Amendment, or free-speech in general.
I think they know it's illegal / unconstitutional. They're banking on self-censorship by people who aren't certain where they stand legally.
Basil Fawlty would be proud!
It's a good idea to pick a game framework first, which will shorten the tutorial considerably, since the basic Android specific stuff would likely require several tutorial of its own.
I started a few months back and chose LibGDX for my first game. Although I believe LibGDX was originally developed for Android, it also runs on the Desktop and can also be ported to iOS, which is a bonus. It is designed mostly for 2D games. It's easy to use, there's a good wiki and it's actively maintained.
Here's a tutorial for getting going on a simple game with LibGDX. https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/A-simple-game
And here's a set of tutorials and videos for getting a LibGDX project all set up in the IDE of your choice: http://libgdx.badlogicgames.com/documentation.html
To be fair to the author, there are various issues, particularly for technologists. The uncomfortable relationship between the government and the web, censorship, piracy, and net security all contribute toward a challenging environment for global tech companies.
I think "collapse" is a strong term, but changes will undoubtedly happen in the coming years. Companies and investors are generally very keen to avoid uncertainty. FoxConn is simply doing what any sensible multinational ought to do by mitigating the risks of having all its eggs in one basket.
That's what Marissa Mayer said too :p
This is, alas, the inevitable consequence of the technological progression that most of us here strive towards on a daily basis.
Ebooks are obviously superior technology, however the technology is of more benefit to the publisher and distributor than the reader.
In fact, an Ebook requires a particular device and battery charge; it cannot be readily shared unless you want to give away or lend your device. You cannot easily annotate or draw a diagram next to a description. There isn't yet a satisfactory electronic equivalent to the experience of flicking through a book.
IMHO borrowing another student's well thumbed and annotated textbook will often be more useful than downloading my own pristine copy.
It must be hard to make the case that the domain was stolen, since they simply allowed it return to the market place where it was legally bought by somebody else.
In the UK a trademark is only valid for a nominated category, so two different companies can legitimately have the same trademark if used for different purposes, but I don't know how the rules works in France.
There is also the Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace (http://www.i-comp.org/), a fairly neutral sounding lobby group which (according to Wikipedia) is sponsored by Microsoft.
ICOMP bought an amusing half page ad in a national UK newspaper in the Autumn, quoting the owner of Hot Maps in saying that Google Maps essentially destroyed his promising business. Look at http://hot-map.com/ and judge for yourself..
While I agree that the best way to learn coding is to just get on with it, I'm can't agree about "Forget Books". It is true that there are some terrible books on software (possibly where the need to publish first is the prime objective), there are some amazingly detailed and informative books that provide in one place the content that you'd need to trawl through a thousand blogs to uncover.
It isn't easy, although paradoxically I prefer the 9-5 to be interesting work in its own right. It is surprising how many ideas can flow from your day job into your own projects.