Trying to understand record locks

[James Kleinschmidt]

I am just trying to get a handle on the record locking mechanism and 
have a few questions after trying a few things.

1) How long is the lock on the record for? until the cursor is released 
?

2) Is the lock just for different users? in other words if I get a 
cursor with read/write locks and store it in a global property and then 
update the record later using the baseobject.update methods should the 
record accessed in the cursor  be locked and unable to change or is the 
lock only for another user that tries to access that record from 
another computer.

3) To use the locks should I always try to update using cursors or are 
the baseobject methods for adding and updating okay as well?

I appreciate any help. The test application I made just seems to ignore 
any locks I try to set so I suspect I am just not understanding them 
well enough. If there is anything written about this please direct me. 
I haven't been able to find anything very specific in the docs.

Thanks,

JIm