Everything appears on your bill. How it is shown depends on the phone company and if you want fully itemized billing.

The app doesn't need to be open. It registers itself as a NFC handler so when the phone receives NFC comms it starts automatically. Having said that the app typically runs as a lightweight background service so that it can process the transaction instantly (so you can move quickly through the gates at the train station for example), but what I mean is you don't have to do anything to use it, just touch the phone to the payment pad.

I'm glad they are doing this but I hope they also mandate Qi for wireless charging. It seems to be the de-facto standard but it wouldn't surprise me if we see a few more proprietary systems in the next few years.

Cables are so old fashioned. I charge and sync wirelessly now, never plug my phone in.

My mum just bought a brand new Nokia 100 for £9, including SIM card and charger. The charger has a special Nokia proprietary connector on it, not USB. If USB were the cheapest option I'm sure they would have used it, but I imagine they are actually hoping to rip her off on spare cables and chargers. Fortunately I already have a USB adapter, otherwise it would have gone back to the shop.

How come you hardly ever see anyone using one then? On the train you see lots of Android phones, mostly Sony and Sharp, and quite a few Samsungs and Nexus 5s. iPhones are somewhat unusual. I use the trains every day.

The only explanation I can think of it is that it is mostly older people buying them as they are less likely to use their phones in public. Only a little less these days though.

I have in fact done this in the past. Years ago when I had a HTC Hero I installed a modified GPS driver and upgraded the radio modem to one ported from another HTC device.

You have an app. What you spend appears on your bill at the end of the month. Everything is recorded and itemized, great for claiming back business expenses.

Double WHOOSH. A personal best.

It's not irresponsible to notify the vendor at the same time as everyone else. People need to take steps to secure themselves and chances are others (e.g. the NSA) already know about this and are exploiting it.

Besides which if you want people to disclose bugs in your products to you exclusively you should pay them a bounty. Otherwise don't expect them to work for free or agree to your irresponsible NDA, expect them to put the public good first instead.

This is the early PRNG that is used before the system is booted and the sensors are working. It is used for things like address space randomization.

I think you will find that pi! is actually ~7.18808272898.

Pi Day outside America is 31/4/2014. Next year will be the closest we have ever come to the perfect Pi Day as the date will be 31/4/15 in two digit year format.

Okay, just don't be surprised or upset when foreign governments do the same to you. If you want a cyber cold-war where pretty much anything goes just carry on as usual.

That's complete claptrap. Yes, very recent (last 5-10 years) widget toolkits have started to force use of features that result in bitmaps being sent across the network, but that's hardly a reason to throw out X. And it's essentially a lie to pretend it means, somehow, that X11 doesn't have network transparency.

I find it pretty bad, to be honest, that the same devs who are protesting that X11's network transparency isn't what it could be are:

1. The devs that did this in the first place, refusing to advance the protocol to include the features that GTK3 et al required.
2. Apparently think the solution is getting rid of network transparency altogether.

I'm staggered, to be honest, by the whole thing. I appreciate old code is sometimes awkward to support, but the solution isn't a wholesale replacement of the project. Mozilla's developers may have made many mistakes in their decision to throw out the Netscape code that delayed the release of a great browser for many years, but they were NEVER, NEVER so stupid as to say "Well, we looked at the Netscape source code, and we think the solution is to get rid of HTML. It's too kludgy! I mean, just look at it, it's impossible to add features to it cleanly!"

If we were talking about a rewrite of X.org, nee XFree86.org, nee X86, that'd be one thing. It's probably necessary by now although I'd still say they need to seriously think in terms of refactoring the project. But throwing out the entire protocol because they refused to add the features necessary to make the protocol efficient? Fuck that.

Sorry, that's rubbish. The Japanese value features in the electronics above all else. Their entire economy is built in consumers replacing perfectly good appliances with new ones just to get some new feature the old one didn't have. Even mundane stuff like rice cookers keep adding new things and you can pay over 100,000 yen for a top of the line model.

When the iPhone first came out it did have a bit of an edge on features in some areas. The problem is that it was rapidly overtaken. There are a lot of Japan-only phones that it was competing with but which people in the west know nothing about. These days the lack of things like NFC is a big issue. Even stuff like the camera, traditionally an Apple strong point, is looking weak in the face of competition with optical stabilization.

It is absolutely about substance and tangible features in Japan. Style is important too, but the Japanese actually research stuff before buying and specs matter. Just visit any bookshop and see the shear number of books on which smartphone to buy, and how they evaluate them.