It doesn't seem to have a significant impact, AFAICT. I haven't benchmarked with and without, but at leas on my Nexus 6 I didn't observe any obvious decrease in battery life when I turned it on.

Uh, no, this can't work. Security settings changes require password authentication, and there probably isn't an app API to change them anyway (for good reasons).

I've been using this feature for a few months now (I work for Google) and I think on balance it significantly improves my security. It means that I can set my phone to lock instantly on display timeout, with a one-minute timeout, lock instantly on power button press, and use a long, complex password... and not be inconvenienced by having to constantly re-enter a long password. This is a security win, because if I did have to enter a long password two dozen times per day, I wouldn't do it; I'd choose a simpler password and settings that lock my device less aggressively. Even better, I find myself subtly encouraged by the phone to keep it in my pocket, rather than setting it down on tables, desks, etc., because if I put it down somewhere I'll have to re-enter my password.

If I were mugged, I'd just hit the power button as I remove the phone from my pocket. Actually, what I'd really like to do in that case is to power it down, but I'm not sure I could get away with that, since it requires holding the power button for a couple of seconds, then tapping the confirmation dialog. Since my phone is encrypted, getting it into a powered-down state makes my data quite secure. Not that the lockscreen is necessarily easy to bypass, but it's part of a large, complex system, which means there's a lot of attack surface. Once the device is powered down, the risk model is very simple and well-understood: If the attacker can't guess my password, he can't get at my data. Thanks to the hardware-backed encryption used in Lollipop, password guessing is rate-limited by the hardware to a level that would require, on average, about 70 years of continuous trials. Even if the attacker were that patient (a) nothing on my phone would be worth anything after a decade or so and (b) I doubt the device would last that long. Mobile devices aren't built to run flat out for years.

I've also used the bluetooth proximity Smart Lock, paired to a smartwatch, but I've decided I like the "Trusted behavior" feature better, so I've stopped trusting proximity to my watch. The range on bluetooth is large enough that I can set my phone down and be far enough away that someone could use it but still within range for keeping unlocked. Plus, I really like the encouragement to keep the device on my body. In the long run, that user training will, I think, do more for my device security than anything else.

I do still use bluetooth, but paired to my car's bluetooth, so I can put the phone in a cradle or on the center console and have it stay unlocked. I also set the phone to trust proximity to the bluetooth headset I use when cycling, because I put the phone in a cradle mounted on the handlebars and want it to stay unlocked as I use it to track my ride.

The discussion on this thread about phones being snatched from hands, though, makes me think that perhaps I should re-enable trust of my smartwatch. That would address high-speed theft pretty well. I just tested and taking the phone out of range of my smartwatch does lock the phone, even if it's in my pocket. So a thief couldn't just grab it from my hands and drop it in their pocket to keep it unlocked.

However, this means I lose the on-body self-training. I suppose if I turn the smartwatch linkage on only when I'm outside my home or office, I'd get the on-body training most of the time but the smartwatch linkage all of the rest. Hmm... I wonder if I can create a Tasker profile to automate that...

The proximity sensor (same one that prevents you from hitting buttons with your cheek while talking on the phone) should turn the screen off and disable input without locking the screen when it senses your leg/hip.

Does she prefer monolithic or microkernel?

These people want to put a stop to progress because they think humans are some kind of holy ground that must not be tred upon.

Actually, those people are involved in (at current count) at least two companies that have targeted therapeutic modification of humans as their primary business goal.

Bullshit:

research is needed to understand and manage risks arising from the use of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Considerations include the possibility of off-target alterations, as well as on-target events that have unintended consequences. It is critical to implement appropriate and standardized benchmarking methods to determine the frequency of off-target effects and to assess the physiology of cells and tissues that have undergone genome editing. At present, the potential safety and efficacy issues arising from the use of this technology must be thoroughly investigated and understood before any attempts at human engineering are sanctioned, if ever, for clinical testing. As with any therapeutic strategy, higher risks can be tolerated when the reward of success is high, but such risks also demand higher confidence in their likely efficacy.

I will continue to do work in this area and continue to work to improve humanity

Considering how little thought you've given to the potential downsides of such experiments, I'd guess that it's considerably more likely that you'll fuck up and produce a bunch of horribly malformed fetuses and live humans with fatal genetic problems. Fortunately, the ensuing lawsuits should put you out of business quickly.

I also have not ethical problems with genetic engineering on humans.

Do you have an ethical problem with genetically engineering an embryo and accidentally creating new problems that result in an individual crippled from birth, or doomed to a short and miserable life span?

Most of the "ethicsists" are fundamental christian types or outright clergy

The people writing the letter referred to in TFA are not professional ethicists at all - they are practicing scientists, including one of the people who figured out how the system in question works. (Disclaimer: I know one of them personally and I've had a handful of interactions with another.) If any one of them is at all religious, it's news to me. I'd guess they're totally in favor of genome editing in general, especially since several of them are involved in companies that have this goal. The ethical issue is whether to leap right into modifying embryos with an unproven and potentially unsafe technology, which amounts to experimentation on unwilling human test subjects.

What makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix thatWhat makes anyone think mandatory voting would somehow fix that?

In fact it would cause more problems that it purports to solve. In particular, it would greatly increase the incidence of violence in politics and, in particular, the likelyhood of civil war.

Elections aren't about being nice by doing what the majority prefer. Elections are about seeing how the civil war would come out, so you don't have to fight it. To do this they have to be a good enough MODEL of the war, and be run, if not squeay clean, at least honestly and transparently enough to convince the losers that, if they tried to reverse the result by violence, they'd lose THAT contest, too.

That means, among other things, that only people who care enough to fight should vote. Dragging in a bunch of people who could care less and are only voting because they're required to, dilutes the votes of those who care. If they also vote opposite to a group who care a lot and are percieved as a bunch of brainwashed non-threats, those people can easily convince themselves that they could win a war, make it stick, and are justified in fighting to reverse their oppression.

Voter fraud is when an actual voter votes multiple times or tries to vote as someone they are not.

Like the illegal alien who lived down the street from us, who showed my wife (whom he somehow thought would be sympathetic) the more-than-20 voter registration cards and bragged about how he went to a bunch of different polling places every election.

As opposed to election fraud, like the nonexistant guy who votes absentee and claims our house as his residence (whom we've been trying to get de-listed for at least four election cycles), the next-door neighbor who died of liver failure and is still voting absentee - despite her daughter taking the death certificate down to the registrar of voters, again on more than one election cycle, the several thousand "voters" who absentee voted from the same address in Berkeley, ...

Both, of course, are greatly aided by the "motor-voter law", which makes it trivial for anyone with a social security number (real real or fake) to pick up a mail-in form - or a box of them ("I'm working at a voter registration drive") - at any of several sorts of government offices (such as the Secretary of State's). Register yourself (voter fraud) or register a bunch of fake people (election fraud). It's doubly easy if your state has just-check-the-box absentee voting: Mail in a BUNCH of them and vote a BUNCH of times. Industrial-strength election corruption.

That's why there was such a flap about Obama's move to have the DHS issue Social Security numbers to illegals. Sure it's illegal for them to actually vote. But that's enforced even less than the laws against them being here in the first place.

If you have to go to court against your employer to prove that all of the above are true (on your own dime), then you effectively don't really have any of those protections.

Why should you have to prove anything? Especially before you start?

You just file for your own patents, start your own company, and move on. If your idea turns out to be the foundation of a new industry or a disruptive game-changer on an existing one, and your (ex) employer is clueless, he might spend a bunch of HIS money to claim some of the proceeds once you're successful. Then you and your corporate lawyer get to watch the judge laugh him out of court - and maybe order him to pay YOU $ome buck$ on the way out.

Sure you might end up in court eventually. But that's the name of the game with patents on valuable ideas. All a patent IS is a license to sue.

Her grunt work will be done on Linux Clusters. It's a real benefit to have a local development environment that matches this. I'd recommend a laptop where Scientific Lunix 6/7 runs flawlessly.

So while a mac is good hardware and has MS Office, a great PC which runs Linux flawlessly is what she really wants.

No. "Apps featured in Google Play" isn't the same as "Featured Apps in Google Play". Neither phrase was from Google, either, but from the summary.

The summary is wrong in others ways, too. It says that Google is going to begin screening apps. The actual announcement says that this has been going on for several months. It also says that the process is "human-based", which the announcement doesn't say, just that the process "involves a team of experts who are responsible for identifying violations of our developer policies earlier in the app lifecycle." This leaves open the possibility that the team in question automates the actual screening, which is obviously much more normal for Google.

Really, your best bet is to ignore the summary and the linked article and just read the post from Google: http://android-developers.blog...