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...

Without public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Gotta hire a good, hard-working entrant, train them, educate them, move them up.

With public funding and guaranteed loans to get people into college: Cash crop of cheap labor. Lots of risk on individuals (waste 4 years without job on education, possibly get oversupplied degree), the poor are least able to handle this risk, followed closely by the disenfranchised (anyone often passed over in the local culture, e.g. blacks or women).

Tax-funded college and government-guaranteed student loans benefit hiring businesses at the expense of the individual. This is hard to grasp because it looks like money and education and other tangible goods are being handed to the individual, while the market effects are more abstract and difficult to understand without having a huge amount of knowledge in the area.

No we're not. We have to solve the energy crisis first. That requires a dyson sphere, which will provide 13,000 trillion times the energy we use today.

Molybdenum and Cesium are so rare we make them using inefficient, energy-heavy nuclear fusion. We have the ability to literally turn lead into gold, or dog shit into gold, or gold into platinum, or piss into Strontium-90; it's really fucking expensive, more expensive than just mining a brick of gold, so we don't. It's expensive because of the massive amount of energy required.

With thousands of trillions of times the energy available, we could turn anything into anything else. Automation would be a drop in the bucket: those machines are powered by a minimal amount of energy, but they'd be built with material we made dumping in billion of times as much energy to just turn sand into steel. We'd mine asteroids by turning base materials into fuel oils and hydrogen gas, then converting garbage silica rock and other bullshit that's not nickel-iron into nickel-iron, or oil, or gold, or palladium; we wouldn't need to find a high-ore-content rock to bring down.

That's post-scarcity. So much automated, so much that can just be done by magic, we don't need people doing anything. We'd have multi-level structures running hydroponic gardens for farms, rather than large swaths of arable land; it would take immense amounts of energy and material, but all that would be a drop in the bucket compared to the full power of the sun itself.

It's a hand-out to our slave masters.

The push to educate everyone has come from the Government's great support arm. It uses taxpayer money or Federal guaranteed loans and cultural pressure, both decoupled from risk requirements that stop banks from handing out tons of free money, to get everyone to go to college and get a degree.

This strategy churns out piles of cheap labor, freeing businesses from the social responsibility of building a workforce. Without these public efforts, most students wouldn't be able to go it on their own; businesses would have to hire good, solid entrants and send them to school on the company dime, taking the risk of training them. Businesses are good at minimizing that risk, and so would build a well-tuned, highly-selected workforce with little economic loss. Individuals have to assess an opaque market of both business demand and the state of business demand and candidate availability in several years; they take huge personal risks simply not present when a business does it.

This cheap labor costs businesses little in salary, even less in training risk (training useless individuals), thus displacing their responsibility onto the individual. It puts risks most easily handled by the rich and impossible to handle by the poor onto the individual, disadvantaging those who are less-advantaged or who will have more difficulty getting a job anyway (e.g. minorities in more racist communities). It's bad for the individual, but good for business.

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?

Should read, "Jackass shockjock makes up fantasy about Nintendo re-releasing Virtual Boy"

I saw headlines that 50 Cent was shot dead last year and Terry Pratchett died this year. What? Are they BOTH alive?

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...

Income tax: Best Buy gives you $800 paycheck, you pay $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, Future Shop pays $200 in taxes.

Consumption tax: Best Buy gives you $800, pays $200 in taxes. You spend $600 at Future Shop to buy video games, pay $200 in taxes.

Nope.

In a competitive market, costs tend to be more stable. They don't race to the bottom; they just don't spiral out of control. With the hundreds of supermarkets in my area selling fruit at $5/lb, I'm going over to the smaller specialty stores to buy the same fruit for $1/lb. Pizza parlors have the same deal: you keep seeing $2.50/slice pizza and $2.25 for a 32oz soda, but once in a while they all get pissy because someone breaks rank and starts selling $1/slice pizza, $5 whole pizzas (instead of $9.99), and $1 sodas--and turning a huge profit. The independent shops... just keep their prices high, and keep selling, until that idiot realizes he's not going to get 3 times as much business that way.

In a competitive market, the price usually moves toward a cross-over point in the supply-demand curve, where raising the price brings in less profit. Without competitors, people aren't able to shop around, so the price can be raised more before people find an alternate means (harder than just finding an alternate supplier).

Aside, and less related, some markets aren't competitive, but appear to be. Rental housing, for example, is not competitive: entering the rental market is high-risk, as too many players in the market quickly causes massive economic problems; the rental market will tend to supply enough units to meet demand, but won't tend to allow new competitors to come in with lower rent prices to drive costs down, because they won't be able to fill units to cover costs. Prices in the rental market tend to increase when more wealthy people move into the area, as they're willing and able to spend more for the same apartment units.

Market is hard shit.