"If Samsung were to create another version of their flagship phone, but with 4000mAh to 8000mAh batteries (to support the extra GHz and cores without draining the batteries too fast), they can make their phones twice to 4 times as fast, just by upping the Ghz, or the number of cores, or both."

See how easy that was? When it comes right down to it, the processors are on par within the total thermal/power envelope presented by the form factor and battery technology. If we've learning anything since the days of the 486, it's that clock speed and core count don't really matter when the input is a power envelope and the output is useful work done.

[cheapshot]What amazes me is that in all the years Apple has been making smartphones, it's still impossible to add a music file from email to itunes on the phone.[/cheapshot]

"...they actually toss out copies of their genetic mateiral (sic)..."

This is /.; we're familiar with the process.

Tell that to SpiderOak.

What can you do against vendors who do that? At the very best it's a hassle to fix the problem caused resulting in wasted man-hours (bearing in mind that most of us are not tech-savvy). At the very worst, this can result in permanent damage for example iOS 8 bricking your iPhone. What do you do then? What are your consumer rights when a botch (insufficiently tested) OS update results in a damaged device? Who is to blame here?

Yeah, I have several friends who will post/share things on their wall to "find later." Yeah, there's pretty much no way you're going to find that later unless you manually scroll through pages and pages of old posts. Finding stuff on FB is darned near impossible, with their "search" being woefully inadequate. I copy off to Evernote when I can, though FB has taken the genius step of disabling copy (and paste, for some odd reason) in Android, which means running FB in a mobile browser if I really want to archive something.

Of course, searching your own (or friends) history isn't the point of FB, but it seems like a pretty big miss if you want people to stay encapsulated in the system for marketing purposes.

Well, if somebody's paying $500 for dead cats, I'm willing to bounce my dead cat for that kind of money.

No, you just choose teachers who aren't vaccinated.

It's probably not cost effective to do so, though, so you may as well just prohibit them from attending public school if they're not vaccinated and call it a day.

You're playing games with words and statistics. To wit:

"children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis"

There, you could stop right there. But your statistics belie the truth. If we expect that 16% of children are only partially vaccinated and 4% are unvaccinated, in a population of 100000 children, in which 0.1% get pertussis you get:

81 children out of 80,000 get pertussis, or a vaccinated infection rate of 0.01%
11 children out of 16,000 get pertussis, or 0.07%
8 children out of 4000 get pertussis, or 0.20%

In other words, it means that your child is 20x more likely to get pertussis in the event of an outbreak if her or she is unvaccinated vs being vaccinated. The linked studies you made actually prove the OP's point - a successful vaccine prevents transmission: you do not become s silent "carrier" unless you suffer from a successful infection. And in the case of the linked studies, the concern is over particular vaccines which are not as effective in producing a robust antibody reaction. They're saying you need more/better vaccines, not fewer.

An array of 1600 of these 8k monitors? Okay...that's really only 163' across and 92' high - barely in the top 20 of the largest screens in the world - but at 156ppi I'd say you're probably sitting too close to the screen if you can see the pixels. ;-)

5.5" phone screens are at 2560x1440, with 4k on the way. 8k on a monitor...what's the hold up?

Phones seem perfectly able to light the screen and drive the pixels at less than 4W TDP. Seems odd that 8k is such a large challenge given volume, mass and power budgets 20-100x that of a phone.

Lawyers don't laugh - it throws them off their count while going through their piles of money.

Yes. Yes it is. In fact, for an airport, support facilities, hangar and maintenance facilities, and proper air traffic control and infrastructure, you'd be hard pressed to get a commercial project for significantly less with the same specifications.

Yeah, of all the Soviet Russia conditions where "your papers, please" could be used to identify the US as a police state, this is NOT one of them.

How can you safely produce your wallet, which usually resides in your pocket? If you're all fired up worried about getting shot, put your hands on the hood of the car and tell them which pocket your phone is in. Having had my share of traffic violations requiring identification, it's never been an issue. Then again, I'm not black, so I get a lot more leeway in what constitutes a threatening move and what doesn't.

A proper implementation should be by the OS maker, though, which automatically locks the phone when the app is accessed - or in which the license/insurance/registration information can only be accessed from the home screen via a special unlock code/access which does not unlock the rest of the phone contents.

While a super-secure app isn't really necessary for police, since they can just call in your license number and verify you're legal/in the system, for things like age verification, you'd have to add some kind of simple challenge/response functionality for people who don't have access to police records (bouncers, cashiers, bartenders).

Not that it matters. Until Apple/Google get the whole NFC payment bullshit worked out and every vendor has an NFC terminal we're going to be carrying around other slabs of plastic to pay for things. Carrying a license isn't really an extra burden.