That's pathetic. All that effort to make a super-thin device, and you have to put it another case to protect it. Nokia would laugh.

Get a non-toy phone.

It's amusing that Apple can't get sapphire-coated glass to work. Sapphire glass for checkout scanners is a standard product. Every Home Depot checkout scanner has sapphire-coated glass. People slide metal tools across those for years without damage.

• Those that disbelieve all religions.
• Those that disbelieve all except one religion.

For some reason, people in the second category describe themselves as 'religious'. And yet you'll be hard-pressed to find, for example, a Christian who requires the same standards of evidence for the non-existence of the Norse, Egyptian, Greek or Hindu gods as he requires that an atheist from the first category provides for the non-existence of the Abrahamic god.

I had an idea that might not be so dangerous and pulled out my fone. âoeComputer,â I said, âoewhat's the best way to knock that bitch out?â
        The fone said âoeParse error, there are no female dogs on board and âknockâ(TM) is not in context. Please rephrase.â
        Who programs these God damned stupid things, anyway? Back when computers were new, science fiction movies had computers that could think. These stupid computers sure can't. God damn it, I was going to have to talk like I went to college... only I ain't went to college, damn it.

The smartphone crowd assumes they own the user's eyeballs. They don't. What's needed is better voice integration. You should be able to call, receive calls, text, and receive texts via a Bluetooth headset with the phone in your pocket.

Android sucks at this. My Samsung flip-phone had better voice dialing than my Android phone. Wildfire, which is from 1997, did this quite well. But it was really expensive to do back then, and was priced as high as $250/month. Then Microsoft bought Wildfire and abandoned the product.

Business used to have a completely secular moral compass. Rotary International has their The Four-Way Test, a "nonpartisan and nonsectarian ethical guide for Rotarians to use for their personal and professional relationships." Rotarians recite it at club meetings.

Of the things we think, say or do

• Is it the TRUTH?
• Is it FAIR to all concerned?
• Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
• Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?

This is a morality for business. That's a concept that sounds archaic today. It was mainstream from about 1940 to 1975. Many small business owners used to belong to Rotary, especially in small towns. What went wrong? That's a long story, and has to do with the decline in the political power of small business.

Anyway, that's a completely non-religious moral system which is still around and once was mainstream.

Records of human civilization go back over 3000 years. Industrial civilization goes back less than 200. A good starting point is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830, the first non-demo steam passenger railway. There were earlier locomotives, but this is the moment the industrial revolution got out of beta and started changing people's lives.

Only in the last 80 years or so has human exploitation of natural resources been able to significantly deplete them. Prior to WWII, human efforts just couldn't make a big dent in the planet. Things have picked up since then.

There are lots of arguments over when we start running out of key resource. But the arguments are over decades, not centuries or millenia. The USGS issues mineral commodity summaries. There are decades of resources left for most minerals, but a lot of things run out within 200 years. Mining lower and lower grade ores requires more and more effort and energy. For many minerals, that's already happened. People once found gold nuggets on the surface of the earth. The deepest gold mine is now 4 miles deep.

For many minerals, the easy to extract ores were used up long ago. Industrial civilization got going based on copper, lead, iron, and coal found in high concentrations on or near the surface. All those resources were mined first, and are gone. You only get one chance at industrial civilization per planet.

Civilization can go on, but it will have to be more bio-based than mining-based. Energy isn't the problem; there are renewable sources of energy. Metals can be recycled, but you lose some every round. It's not clear what this planet will look like in a thousand years. It's clear that a lot of things will be scarcer.

(And no, asteroid mining probably won't help much.)

Right. Especially since, when you're looking at your smartphone, it's looking back at you.

This would be valuable for vehicle driver speech input, which has to reject a lot of noise.

Yes, nobody will fund their game.

One of their examples shows a motorcycle chase. But the user's option is to select straight ahead or turn right and follow. They're trying to do a canned cut-scene adventure. Those went out with Space Ace.

"In" means at an "dedicated electronic reading point" in a publicly accessable library. Not necessarily the library that contains the paper copy. The main restriction is that libraries may not use this to reduce the need to buy multiple copies to satisfy demand.

This is great for scholars who really need to see some obscure published paper from 1982, and are not near a huge academic library. It's great for people who like to read out of print novels. It won't do anything for people who want to read the latest best-seller when all the library copies are checked out.

No, I'd rather that copyright on music and video be contingent on distribution in a form that does not lock customers into a particular platform.

San Francisco still has trolley buses. They're powered from a pair of overhead wires. The current generation of buses also has some battery backup, so if they lose their trolley connection while turning, the bus can get back under the wires on battery power and reconnect.

They're a pain. Too much overhead wire, and limited routes. NYC got rid of overhead wire a century ago, which was a really good move. SF has these mostly because, at the beginning of the bus era when other cities were converting from trolleys to buses, Diesel buses lacked enough engine power to climb the hills.

This will be a big seller for the big-butt crowd. It should sell well at Wal-Mart.

It's even worse than that. Apparently Braintree is not accepting Bitcoin themselves. They're passing the buck to Coinbase. Merchants who want to accept Bitcoin have to get their own Coinbase account. Coinbase is a broker; they exchange Bitcoins for dollars and pay dollars to the merchant. The merchant never sees Bitcoins.

Coinbase is flaky. Their business address is a mailbox company in SF. Their address registered with the SEC and FinCen is somebody's apartment. They have a "slow pay" reputation on bitcointalk. They have terms and conditions that make PayPal look good.