The only multi-tasking ability I wish they would add (back) to the Kindle is the MP3 player/audio. I hate having to use a second device to listen to music while I'm reading

Why? The Kindle is a "second device", you have a phone in your pocket that is perfectly capable of playing MP3s (and radio) already.

Free as in "over the air radio" which isn't really free, having commercials in it is what you pay to listen. TuneIn has an audio ad that plays every time you turn it on, and video ads at the bottom of the screen. That's a fair enough price, but they want to raise the price by adding my address book to the payment. Nope, it's like cable TV. Cable stations used to have no commercials, Now there are ads on-screen even when the content is playing. It's really stupid; OTA TV fed from cable used to be a lot better picture and sound, no static, ghosts, or snow so you were paying for the content by watching ads and paying the cable company for clarity, as well as extra programming, mostly excellent and without commercials. Now that it's digital, over the air serves a better picture than cable. And cable may have hundreds of channels, but hundreds of channels I have no intention of ever watching. They think I'll pay for that? They're insane, I dropped cable over ten years ago.

I can drop TuneIn just as easily, and if it stops working without the update I'll just uninstall it*, which will make their real product less valuable. They surely have competitors.

*Then I'll email radio stations I listen to and let them know they lost a listener, and why. Most stations have their own apps anyway, TuneIn is really only useful because you only have to install the one app.

When I first saw this I thought "finally Apple has given folks a good reason to shell out the extra cash. Now if they were only waterproof and shock resistant like my cheap Kyocera..."

I keep location services shut off as well, but on my phone turning it on or off is just a swipe and a touch. And it's extremely annoying that apps with no real use except stalking me keep nagging me to turn it on. It's why I refuse to upgrade my TuneIn app, the upgrade wants my address book! WTF? Stupid developers writing stupid apps for stupid people. I wish they'd knock off their intrusive, annoying, STUPID stalking. But it seems that most businesspeople these days are sociopathic morons with absolutely no respect for their paying customers (there are places here where they demand that elderly people show ID to buy beer. Guess what? They don't get my business, I prefer to keep my money away from arrogant morons who insist on insulting the very idea of intelligence).

That's a pretty low bar. So to pass the test a computer needs three very low IQ subjects and seven normal people? Hell, the Alice program would probably pass. How about a more reasonable percentage, like 95%?

Yep, for a little over two years. Hated it, except when I got to "fly" a C5-A simulator and walk around inside the computer that ran it. I've never seen so many printed circuit boards in one place before or since. But that lasted maybe an hour :(

Mow there are some saying "you brought him home, what about the tourists that got captured?" Well DUH, they were idiots for visiting a war zone. In the military you don't have the luxury of choice, you go where they send you. I certainly didn't want to be in Delaware, especially since there was nothing there and the climate played hell with my arthritis (which seldom bothers me now that I'm old and not in Delaware).

And as you said, if he was AWOL the army will take care of the matter.

Stylish? Really? You actually care about that??

I have a Kyocera now, but have had Motorola phones in the past. I never had a bit of trouble with them until they got dropped in water and died.

That's the main reason I bought the Kyocera; it's waterproof and shock resistant, and cheap enough that i don't have to worry about losing it.

It is a bit underpowered. It's responsive and fast, but if I'm listening to internet radio over wifi and playing it through bluetooth speakers and Google starts a download (which it seems to do daily) the damned thing reboots. Other than that I've had no complaints about it.

One brand of phone I'll never buy again is LG. It was a flip phone, and was 10 years ago. Most crash-prone, unreliable piece of shit I ever had. Sent it back under warrantee and the replacement was even worse. And ever since Sony deliberately infected my computer with their XCP rootkit I'll never ever buy anything from Sony again. Someone should have gone to prison over XCP.

What's saddest about the Arizona tragedy was that a crime was, in fact, committed, and never prosecuted. How can an unsecured weapon around children not be child endangerment? I've seen newspaper stories about stupid people being charged with it, but none of them involved firearms.

A Turing machine is an abacus. Have a look at schematics of chips some time.

Do you feel that the brain is more than just a electrochemical analog computer, running a simulation of the world in your head using some pretty weak inputs?

No, it is analog but more than a computer. A computer is nothing more than an abacus with electrons for beads and billions of wires (one bead per wire rather than nine since it's binary); given enough time an abacus could come up with the exact same answer as Watson.

How many beads and wires does it take for an abacus to become sentient? Because when you're talking about a Von Neuman computer architecture you're talking about an electric abacus.

Will we ever build a sentient something? I think probably, but it won't be an abacus like today's computers are.

Impossible today, but give it a few hundred years.

Maybe for a city kid, but I've ridden horses and grown gardens before. Except that you load it differently and only have one shot, I'm pretty sure I could hit a rabbit with a musket, I hunted when I was a kid. OTOH someone from Franklin's time would be utterly lost trying to use a phone, microwave, car, even a TV. And what could anyone from that time do for a living?

If you went to his time it wouldn't be that unfamiliar; you've seen westerns and read history books. Our culture and technology would be completely alien to them in every way. Hell, I doubt Franklin could stay out of jail in today's world.