Why not just use the touch screen to determine whether the user is holding the phone to their ear or in their hand? Your cheek has a much larger surface area than a couple of fingers, so turn on the touch input for x% of the screen covered, and turn it off when >x% is covered during a call. Before reading this article, that's how I thought phones determined how the user was holding their phone anyways. hum.

Probably because barnacles evolved to attach to whales too. I'm just guessing, but the pressure for survival is probably greater for barnacles to attach to whales than for whales to get rid of barnacles, as they are not that affected by barnacles anyways.

NO PLEASURE FOR YOU!!!

My school has multiple entrances, but one main one that's open at all times. However, the other 20 or so entrances are locked off to the outside, but open from the inside. I'm positive many other schools are engineered like that, because in the event of a fire or other emergency, there's no way a school can disperse their population out quickly enough without multiple entrances.

http://www.last.fm/charts

They have detailed week-by-week charts going back to 2005. Lady Gaga is in fifth place this week is at 1,923,168 plays by 92,208 listeners.

Muse, The Beatles, Radiohead, and Coldplay precede her, but that's likely due to the fact that Last.fm is based in the UK and the majority of their users from the UK* and that those bands are much much better :) What do you call someone from the UK? I wanted to say British but that excludes Northern Ireland.

Yes but the article also did say "120 million minutes of music were streamed" during the first week of their Xbox Live service launch.. which translates to 228.159 years, impressive in itself.

This ABX test interested me so I decided to take a quick test. It's not scientific by any means but I downloaded an ABX program from a site Hydrogen Audio suggested (http://www.kikeg.arrakis.es/winabx/) in order to see if I could tell the difference. I used a secure lossless rip of Queens of the Stone Age's "3's & 7's", a somewhat complex song with varying frequencies and converted the FLAC to a lossless wave, and a MP3 V0 version (highest quality MP3 variable bit rate, same as 320 CBR), and converted that to wave. With one quick run through of the song, I took four ABX tests, I got 4/4 tests right with a 6.2% probability of getting them all right if I was purely guessing. There was an extremely subtle difference between the V0 and FLAC, but it's possible to hear. The highs were easy to distinguish as the MP3 codec cuts off at that range which was the biggest clue in differentiating the formats. Factors to account for: Now I'm 17 so my hearing's still intact. I'm pretty sure age would degrade your auditory senses over time, especially with high frequencies. My equipment is actually plain. I'm using Vmoda Vibes, a pair of $60 mid-end earbuds, and I'm using my laptop's onboard audio, so equipment isn't that much of an obstacle to be able to tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio. My two cents: It is possible to tell the difference, but unless doing side-by-side comparisons and listening for differences, it's nearly impossible to tell if an audio is lossless or lossy alone.

There's this game called Crayon Physics where you draw objects in order to get a ball to the end point. It sounds simple but it challenges you to overcome various physical obstacles like getting your ball uphill, or to get your ball into a little catapult, and creating a counterweight to launch it to the end point. Neat game, check it out. http://www.crayonphysics.com/

For some people, a laptop is their only computer. Laptops have been outselling desktops for years, if you haven't noticed.

How do you explain the whole "police had full-on camouflage trousers on and body-armour" deal then? BBC (YOUR newspaper) said four cruisers, and a RIOT van arrived after the police helicopter watched fifteen people grilling and eating. This was in a private field and nothing illegal was happening. Instead, they took drastic measures by controlling people to stop a "potential" crime from happening. Kinda like in that one book by Orwell.

Who wants to hear the same jokes over and over anyways?

It's not like as if they haven't done this before :-/ The $200 Billion Broadband Scandal

When there's a ton of supply (or unlimited in digital's case) of course the cost to consumers is free to cheap. I suspect once we get to the bottom, it'll stay there because people will expect free. Maybe some fluctuations when new, innovative features come out, but it'll eventually be free again.

So instead of replacing batteries, you'll have to replace the flypaper? I'd imagine that being a lot more inconvenient.