1. That seems overly drastic. The flashlight apps are useful and kids love those silly apps. The solution might be to add more categories and force apps into the correct category.
2. What? No, that would be horrible. The definition of a smartphone used to be a phone that lets you replace some of its stock apps with custom apps.
3. That is actually a great idea.
4. That would kill something like 95% of the serious app businesses.
5. Yes, again that is a good idea.
6. This might be necessary in order to comply with regulation in many countries, but it would not be very useful in practice in most cases. It would lead to things like...

if timeSinceInstall > 30 min :
disable niceMode
enable normalMode
start asking for more money
end if

It says in their Berlin page, under fine print: "Uber is not a transportation provider." https://www.uber.com/cities/be...

If they're not a transportation provider then I don't see why banning them from providing transport would be a problem, since that's supposedly not what they're doing.

I got a 256GB MX100. I haven't done any testing, but the day to day experience is that it's good enough for everyday use. Small apps take about a second to launch and become responsive.

They would need something better than that, like a camera that monitors the eyes of the driver and correlates the eye movements with the road and the traffic to determine if the driver is actively aware of the situation.

One solution might be to have cars that are always in one of two modes:

Mode 1: Fully autonomous.
Mode 2: Fully manual. A warning signal will sound if the driver does something that the computer wouldn't do, or fails to do something that the computer would do. The computer may decide to switch to mode 1 if it determines that the driver is asleep or drunk.

Your naivete would be cute if it wasn't for all the dead children!

Israel will not stop when Hamas stops firing rockets. I suspect Israel will stop the slaughter the moment when the Palestinians cede ownership of their natural gas fields to Israel for free. http://www.globalresearch.ca/w...

Also, how do you know these things about Hamas if the medias doesn't cover it? Of course the media covers Hamas's acts of terror. The part that is lacking is the fact that vast majority of Hamas's terror is aimed at Palestinians who belong to rival factions or who don't pay their protection dues on time.

Israel's nuclear weapons are likely to be fission or hydrogen bombs in the 50-500 kt range. These bombs would not harm anyone in Israel if they were dropped on the main population centers inside Gaza. There might be a tiny bit of fallout, but nothing too serious.

New Jersey and New York are closer to one another, but you could still nuke central Jersey City without seriously injuring many people in New York if you used a 100 kt bomb. Window panes would be in high demand on Manhattan following the strike and many people would have superficial wounds from shattered glass. A tiny number of people on Manhattan might die on streets and sidewalks in accidents involving unusually aerodynamic pieces of shattered glass falling from tall buildings.

The average Android Phone actually does live up to this if you set the backlight to the lowest setting, turn off WiFi and uninstall any apps that launch background services. Turning off WiFi and removing apps that do stuff automatically pretty much renders it not a smartphone, but you do get good battery life.

The car companies themselves will be building the charger networks, perhaps with some minor subsidies from local governments. And it doesn't have to be all that fancy and probably not particularly expensive either if you build a network of bare minimum unassuming chargers. The car maker can indirectly offer their customers food and other services by placing the chargers next to shopping malls and restaurants with long opening hours.

Here is one of Teslas supercharge stations in Norway for example: http://infratekgroup.com/en/me... I'm sure it cost a good deal of money to wire it up to the grid, but apart from that it couldn't have been too expensive to build.

7. Ha ha ha did you think you could launch a long-running task and not babysit it to prevent Windows from restarting edition...

Oh wait, I have that one on my laptop.

It is probably just corporate stupidity. It would be cheap and easy to work out a deal to bundle a leading keyboard app with the phone, but some bright executive somewhere probably had a different idea.

An ad like that has an expected return of about $10 per 1000 views, so it ought to cost you about $0.01 to skip it. Are you sure you would rather watch the ad than pay $0.01 and save 10 seconds? If you watch 10 videos a day that adds up to a mere $37 a year to never have to wait for the ad to end.

There is of course no payment system that would let you pay $0.01, but theoretically speaking, if such a system existed I think a lot of people would press the $0.01 skip button.

Yeah, by "rednecks and other idiots" I was precisely referring to the Russia-aligned separatists in Eastern Ukraine.

These weapons are designed to be part of a complex system with military radar, civilian radar / ATC and central command in addition to the missile launcher itself. Airliners do get shot down by mistake even with such a system in place. Now imagine that a launcher has fallen into the hands of a bunch of enthusiastic guys who aren't the sharpest tools in the shed and who at best maybe have some training on the launchers from back when they were conscripts, who don't understand the complexity and intricacies of telling hostile aircraft apart from civilian aircraft and who don't have the resources to do that anyway since they don't have access to civilian radar and ATC. If these weapons fall into the hands of poorly organized rebels it's only a matter of time before a civilian aircraft gets shot down.

So does the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
And Ukraine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

The only real lesson is that surface to air missiles are way to dangerous to be put into the hands of the military. Now think about putting them into the hands of rednecks and other idiots who fancy themselves rebels. In retrospect it is pretty obvious that this had to happen sooner or later.

Singapore experimented with it in the 1970's, but the news is that it is now possible to do it at competitive price point. This means that cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles will not have to be abandoned when their natural water supplies run out.

I imagine that if the technology can be miniaturized and made to work in lower than Earth gravity it could also be hugely important for human space flight and colonization of other bodies in the solar system.

That hiss you get is probably noise from the amplifier in the Logitech system before it detects that there's no input signal and turns itself off. Try playing an extremely quiet audio track (make one in audacity) and see if that triggers the same hiss.