When I'm talking on the phone, the timer for the screen-lock should NOT be running. I frequently have calls that last more than 15 minutes, often set the phone down and use headphones during the call, and it's really annoying that after I hang up, the phone's locked. (If somebody else calls me when me phone's locked, locking when the call's done is fine, but not when I'm the one who made the call or the phone was unlocked when the call came in.)

I'm running 4.4.2 on a Samsung. The phone is provided by $DAYJOB, so they specify which locking options are available (face-unlock isn't), but otherwise it's pretty vanilla. The code used to require 8 digits, now it seems to be text-input instead; both require me to put on my reading glasses to unlock the phone, especially because the numerical unlocker was really bad at touch-screen control, so I had to look at every digit I pressed and count how many actually got detected. Keypress beeps help, unless you're trying to unlock the phone after silencing it, which I often do, but those have a non-zero time lag after the keypress before it notices it should beep, and you can't always tell 1 beep from N beeps. I can now use Swype, which I couldn't when the requirement was all-digits, but it's not much of an improvement since my password isn't a dictionary word, though I suppose I could set it to "qwertyuiop" or "asdfghjkl".

Agreed. People already move about the world completely immersed in what's happening on their smart phones. The fact that you need a certain screen size to have a usable interface and enjoyable experience puts a serious limit on the evolution of that technology. I think there's also going to be a saturation point in the app space when the "cool" has worn off. Something like Google Glass has got to be the next logical extension.

Very possibly worse. Glyphosate is believed to harm gut bacteria. Bt is *known* to do so, and to a much greater degree.

Stop, take some probiotics, and start altering your diet to include yogurt, sauerkraut, and other fermented foods. Most of the known mechanisms of glyphosate's toxicity in humans revolve around its propensity to kill beneficial gut bacteria, with which we are symbiotic. Do your best to take care of them, from this point forward, and you should be fine.

Very misleading summary of the current evidence. Consumption of fructose in the form of fruit, bound together with fiber, reduces morbidity and mortality. In the form in which most of it is consumed, however - HFCS and sucrose - it is among the leading causes of death. It is now known to trigger most of the incidence of metabolic syndrome among adults and even children in the developed world, and much of it in parts of the developing world as well. Other refined carbs are partly to blame, but if we could even halve the consumption of refined sugars it would be a HUGE public health win, comparable to eliminating tobacco and alcohol combined.

They are indeed not comparable. The U.S. government has murdered hundreds of thousands of Arab and Muslim civilians over the past few decades. ISIS? A relative handful.

You have to enter the old passcode before entering a new one, same thing to disable it altogether.

Wired had an article back in the late 90s about Julian Simon's predictions of "The Long Boom", where our high-tech economy with the Internet connecting everybody and delivering education and liberal economics was going to keep growing and making the world a better place indefinitely. Wasn't the Late 90s a great time!

Yeah, unfortunately, several sets of thugs decided war was a much better way to run a world, but even before that hit us, we'd started to question the value of buying dogfood online, and the parts of the tech boom that depended on Y2K-driven replacement of everything were thanked for their fine job and let go, and people started manipulating the US interest rates to affect the upcoming elections (2% rate change in a couple of months), which really didn't help a capital-intensive tech sector that was already getting threatened with anti-trust. And lots of other bad things happened, and good things stop happening, and good things happened in ways that make stuff enough cheaper it's hard to make a profit (Moore's Law etc.), and yeah, too bad.

There's starting to be some interesting science fiction about the problems of what happens when we can cure Alzheimer's.

And I suspect Sir Terry Pratchett would have volunteered to try this if they'd announced it a few months earlier.

I picked storage, and that's what I've had the most problems with at home, but it's especially what I've had the most problems with at work, because if the storage goes bad, I can lose data, whereas if most other parts of the machine go bad, it's the IT department's problem. Back in the 1980s, when I used VAXen instead of laptops, lots of things had problems, but it was still usually either disk head crashes or tape drives doing something odd.

Reality? It's the SOFTWARE that's been the problem.

Here is what is also true: greenpeace and other "green" organizations have been found to be taking millions of dollars in money from Russian oil interests, through shell corporations

Hey, you left out your link to a reliable source for this claim.

According to the GAO, $106 billion was spent by US government on climate research by 2010.

A total over an unstated number of years is meaningless. According to Forbes -- hardly a lefty source, and this is a denialist article -- the U.S. Government spent $32.5 billion on climate studies over 20 years between 1989 and 2009. That's $1.6 billion a year. About $5 per American per year. Accoridng to the GAO (notice the hyperlink, please starting using them, thanks) federal climate change acivities in 2010 were $8.8 billion, but that includes "technology to reduce emissions, science to better understand climate change, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes" -- so climate research is only a small part of that. Figure a quarter to a third of it is climate research. So we're looking at something on the order of $2 or $3 billion a year spent by the federal government on climate change research.

For comparison, the Iraq war was is estimated to have cost $1,100 billion in total.

Exxon Mobills's profits -- not revenues, profits -- last year were $32.5 billion. And that's just one company.

The Army's R&D budget -- not the whole military, just the Army -- is around $21 - 32 billion.Climate research funding is chump change. I kind of liked this line of bullshit better when it was "those scientists telling us smoking causes cancer are just riding the research gravy train!" At least it was a fresh and audacious sort of intellectual dishonesty then. Now it's just pathetic.

I run an SGI Indigo R4400 with "Elan" graphics, and a 2nd rev Blue & White Apple G3. ;-)

Now, stop crossing areas of domain knowledge in ways that create false correspondence.

No warming for nearly twenty years.

How do people still believe "no warming" bullshit? There is no pause. Please stop speading misinformation. Thank you.

Such a system is easily subverted, and you have to be a fool or a democrat to claim otherwise.