I hope their RMA department has stopped intentionally bending pins in the CPU socket to avoid having to replace the boards for their customers. I'll never buy from them again.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1694667

I guess you'll just have to use one of the many other apps that have been around for years that already do this without needing to be signed into your google account.

Either set up a backup number for sending codes to that is your significant other's or a someone else you trust, or print out backup codes and keep them somewhere safe.

That is surprising. My GS3 has no problem getting through a day of streaming audio, light wifi tethering, email, and browsing. What does it say is using the bulk of the battery? Are you running a custom ROM?
I've used stock, JellyWiz, and currently Carbon 1.5. Had some battery life issues with one version of JellyWiz, but otherwise it's been great.

There are apps like pdroid that can do this (root required). In my experience, it broke basic functionality of the apps when you denied certain permissions so I wouldn't expect it to ever be standard part of android. Too easy for non-expert users to break things. App developers would need to account for it and build it into the app (don't hold your breath).

The US can exert more of a force on the UN from within, rather than trying to reform it from the outside. That's all I got.

If you bothered to RTFA you'd realize that the chair rotates among all the nations and North Korea will only hold it until August 19th.

Federation II was a pretty big one on AOL back in the mid-late 1990s. A text-based space trading game, you could eventually move up to owning your own planet for other players to visit and trade at. Fun times. The company (ibgames) still exists and they've got a new version of the game going that's also called "Federation II," though I've never given it a shot.

Since I think it's completely on-topic, I'll mention my QuakeWorld Team Fortress Archive. Team Fortress was originally a mod for Quake and it had a thriving clan scene in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but it's largely forgotten thanks to the success of TF's later incarnations. I decided a couple of years ago to put up video of every single QWTF match I could find from that era on YouTube since otherwise, these matches and this era would be almost completely forgotten.

Almost as important as the games themselves in some cases is how the games were played. I'm hoping to preserve at least some sense of the community that grew up around QWTF and show off some of the tactics and strategies from the time. I think it also gives people a look at how a game like TF evolved over time.

It's by no means the most important topic out there (and there's a personal plug here, of course), but online gaming communities have thrived for well over a decade (even longer for some forms) but most of that information has been lost and forgotten. I decided about a year and a half ago to post my old demos of my days playing QuakeWorld Team Fortress (QWTF) on YouTube, a little out of vanity, a little out of preservation, and also because there just wasn't any real footage of QWTF on YouTube. After I got done with my old demos, I decided to start posting other demos that were publicly available on the internet. Some old players found my site and made their own contributions, but I was saddened that a lot of guys would say that they lost their old demos on a hard drive crash or something. Again, not the most important stuff ever, but I think QWTF was a pretty significant part of gaming history because it pretty much defined class-based multiplayer FPS (or at least popularized it), and, as far as I know, there isn't any sort of archive like mine anywhere else. If you're interested, http://qwtf.digitaljedi.com/ or http://www.youtube.com/user/Tickenest.

"The call has already gone out to the animators to put the mouths back on the characters." An Eiffel Tower reference from WWII? The operators purportedly had the elevators working again 10 minutes after Paris was liberated. Very nice.