Which brings me around again to the Lexus system, which just four years ago seemed quite clever and now seems clumsy and naive, compared with the recent crop of systems with capacitive (touch-sensitive, iPhone-style) touch screens.
Windows Phone also takes care of most of the interface slowdowns that often crop up with typical low-end phones.
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That left the Scots as champions by virtue of points scored, but how does the current crop compare with that of 10 years ago?
According to Cristina Milesi, a research scientist working at NASA's Ames Research Center, lawns are America's largest irrigated crop, with 63, 240 square miles under cultivation.
The state used to be among the poorest in the country, relying on the federal government to prop up its farmers with crop insurance and its elderly (who are legion) with Medicare and Social Security.
Popcorn growers slipped in a provision making sure they, too, get government help with crop insurance.
And the 38-year-old said the step-up to league football has provided his current crop of players with an extremely testing challenge.
And it may be possible to engineer a genetic switch, known as an inducible promoter, into the crop, along with the anti-meiosis genes.
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Muhammad Khatami, Iran's president, says he wants to carry on helping with crop substitution, but the warlords of southern Afghanistan are not interested.
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Along with homes and businesses, the flames have destroyed roughly one-third of San Diego County's lucrative avocado crop, along with other croplands, greenhouses and nurseries.
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Scott Bulling is crop insurance manager with the Oklahoma Farm Bureau.
Zambia's problems have been compounded by floods which have wiped out a large proportion of this year's crop, coinciding with a shortfall of grain - particularly the country's main staple, maize - across Southern Africa.
That, along with crop failures in Russia and, more recently, the UK, has helped to turn prices that once served as ceilings into floors for commodities like wheat and corn in the last two years.
Algae at least can be grown, with sufficient engineering, on a large scale that does not require prime crop land in competition with growing food crops (as rules out conventional biofuel strategies beyond grants from governments and the European Union), and there is no demand for freshwater since saline water does even better to promote the growth of certain highly oil-yielding strains.
That's definitely the case with the new crop of cream eye shadows, available in a range of neutral shades with just a hint of shimmer.
Meanwhile, the current crop has to perform with 'for sale' signs pinned to their shirts.
Although that could happen with a crop that has been modified to synthesize a pharmaceutical, it's unlikely.
The BMW 1-Series now being sold in Europe (and pictured here) would fit perfectly with this crop of non-sedans.
Local growers also have more flexibility than industrial farmers to experiment with different crop varieties, which encourages biodiversity and extends growing seasons.
With the crop losses from these most recent storms, Haiti will have little choice but to remain heavily dependent on food imports for at least another year.
Strong corn sales in North America and Brazil, along with strong crop protection volumes in both North and Latin America helped revenue and profit surge in the quarter.
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Experts also say the potential savings here may be offset by higher prices somewhere else as farmers use their more crop land to experiment with alternative fuel crops.
Samsung had the most delightfully loopy messaging of this year's ad crop in tech, with a couple of loose, self-deprecating, 60-second riffs featuring Paul Rudd and Seth Rogen.
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Coffee historians believe most of the world's Arabica coffee crop shares genetic ancestry with two 18th century plants: one brought to Europe from Indonesia, and another taken from Yemen and cultivated in Brazil.
With domestic sugar producers deprived of this profitable and protective tool, external producers might be able to sell more of their crop here, and with the profits buy US equipment or goods in return.
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For example, a farmer here in Iowa who's worried about the price of corn could buy a derivative that increases in value when the price of corn falls, so regardless of what happens with his crop, he has a chance to break even.
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But it should fit cleanly with Bayer's agrochemicals division, creating the world's third-largest herbicides business and allowing it to compete more evenly with biotech crop and agrochemicals giants Monsanto (nyse: MON - news - people ) and Syngenta (nyse: SYT - news - people ).
The Supreme Court prohibited such behavior in the 1930s because it might interfere with a national crop-subsidy program.
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Instead, he battled to save his newly sown crop by drawing out groundwater with the help of a diesel-powered pump.
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