It's a release candidate, so it's meant for testing and preview purposes, like the developer preview of Android L.

If you label something as a release candidate, what you are saying is "we think this has been completely finished. Everybody check it out, and if we haven't screwed up, we'll rename it as the final version". Hence the name - it's a candidate for release. "Release candidate" is not another name for "preview" or "beta".

This is the kind of crap that gave KDE 4 such a bad reputation. Labelling things as done when they are still major works in progress. If you don't think it's finished, don't call it a release candidate. Don't label it as a new major version. If it's not finished, then it's neither of those things.

I could sit in an empty room for days without issue.

So could I. But if I was sat in an empty room with a button that gave me a shock, I'd definitely press it - not because I couldn't handle the boredom, but just to see what it's like. I'm not sure this study really measures what it intends to.

there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Stop making excuses for a shitty UX. Android development is an utter pain in the arse in a lot of ways and as long as people like you make excuses instead of complaining about it, it's going to continue to be an utter pain the arse for years to come.

Consistent experiences across mobile platforms is not useful. You want consistency across the applications on the platform that the user actually uses. Normal iPhone users aren't going to care if Android users get a different UI to them, and normal Android users aren't going to care if iPhone users get a different UI to them. But both groups of users do care if the application they are using works differently to the other applications they use on their phone.

Manual doesn't bother me in the same way. If I'm shifting gears, that's fine - the car does exactly what I expect it to do.

The thing that annoys me is shift pauses in automatic. The only thing I told it to do was go faster, and it takes a break do do something else. On some cars, this can be like a 1.5 second pause.

The Matrix is discontinued.

A 4-door Yaris will probably come in at $16.5k new. It'll give you 15.6 cu ft of cargo space and burn a gallon of gas to go 30/36 miles.

A Prius will come in around $25.8 new. It'll give you 21.6 cu ft of cargo space and burn a gallon of gas to go 51/48 miles, while having a much more comfortable interior.

A better comparison would be the Prius C, which will cost about $20.1k new. With that you've got 17.1 cu ft of cargo space and go 53/46 on a gallon of gas.

Toyota doesn't actually sell a car cheaper than the Prius C with more cargo space.

I've got a 2002 Prius which still runs great. It's still using the factory battery pack, which isn't showing any signs of needing replacement.

Admittedly, they're expensive. I recently got a 2013 Prius C as a second car, and the reasonable alternative would have been a Honda Fit for about two thirds of the price. But after driving a car with a no-shift transmission there's no way I'm going back to the stuttery shifts of an automatic. When I hit the gas, I want the car to go - not start going and then pause to think about what gear it should be in.

The biggest change happened in late 1800's / early 1900's when refined sugar and bleached flour became widely available. There are a bunch of interesting studies when native groups who ate traditional diets transitioned to high refined carb diets. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

It turns out that you can have this problem even with a RAID. I'm running RAID-1 with 3 disks for my long term storage, and I need to move it from ext4 to btrfs at some point to avoid the failure case where it selects a bitrotted copy to read from. It would be nice if the RAID layer were smart enough to use the matching two of three, but that would make reads slower...

Btrfs (at least) can store multiple copies on one disk and use a checksum to identify the good copy to read. Obviously more disks is better, but...

The point of the web is not so that resources are dynamically loaded from servers every time you access them. The point of the web is that you have a decentralised set of resources that are linked together.

Why even have "providers"?

Just give me an IPv4 address and a /64 of IPv6 addresses and charge me a reasonable price for the link and bandwidth. Maybe have an upcharge for 5 static IPv4's and a /48 of IPv6's. Charge local providers for datacenter space and advertising space in the "how do I get email, streaming television, and VoIP phone service" brochure.

This was clearly a tongue in cheek remark. He put a bit of mild ribbing in to get a laugh out of the audience. Calling it "berating" is a complete mischaracterisation. See for yourself, it's 45 minutes into the keynote video.

When you start comparing crime rates, violent crime rates, gun deaths, or any other socially important data, you really need to pay careful attention to terminology. It matters little that the UK may experience only 1% of our gun deaths, if they also experience 800% of our violent crime rate. After you are mutilated or dead, is it really going to matter to you that you were killed with a gun, or a knife, or a stone, or you were choked to death? Violent crime is violent crime.

You're half right. You are right in that you really need to pay attention to terminology. You are wrong when you say "violent crime is violent crime". Why? Terminology.

"Violent crime" in UK stats is a very wide term that covers a lot of things. "Violent crime" in USA stats is a very narrow term that doesn't cover a lot of things. The terminology means different things in the two countries, so what is being measured is different.

Read this for more details, including links to the definitions being used. The fact is that the UK is less violent than the USA once you look at what's being measured instead of assuming "violent crime" means the same thing in both cases.