From what I read there, stuff like https://lists.debian.org/debia... (trying to make technical decisions via politics when there actually is no disagreement between devs which needs any help with the decision-making) also contributed to his decision to quit.

Nope, I actually was surprised about this a couple times, too. For example, on the German amazon website, there are quite a few sellers which offer cheap 1-2 euro stuff (like e.g. USB adapters, ink cartridges for pens, ...) with free shipping, from china or japan. I needed a USB OTG cable for my android tablet, so I bought one from such a seller. And indeed, one week later, I had a padded envelope with that cable, from china, in my hands. 2 euro item with free shipping from china, the profit on that sale cannot be very high, even if the cable itself cost only a couple cents for the seller.

Funny. In my circle of friends, anybody who would insist on communicating only via Facebook would be the "weird guy" (actually, as far as I know, most of them do not even have a Facebook account, specifically because of privacy concerns). We communicate via e-mail, or, if we need to talk to someone Right Now, via telephone. It works, try it.

All three videos you posted just regurgigate the same old hoax arguments which have been debunked countless times. For good examples of the debunking, just go to e.g. http://www.clavius.org/index.h... or watch any of the videos (on youtube) by e.g. Phil Plait / astrobrant2 / GreaterSapien (or any of the countless others). Don't even mention Jarrah White, watch the astrobrant2 videos for debunking of his crazy theories.

Also good: Neil deGrasse Tyson discusses (among other stuff) the moon landing hoax with Joe Rogan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Whenever people talk about "the fake moon landing", I like to point them to one of the many youtube videos which explain how DIFFICULT it would have been to fake the moon landing, like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... It actually would have been easier to just send people to the moon instead of faking it.

So you say a car engine is made out of only 40 parts? Looked like more parts to me last time I looked under the hood of my car.

Nope, indeed Dresden IS about 15000 miles or so EAST of Chernobyl. And about 800 miles WEST of it.

The expectation is that the sender reads the automatic reply, which says something like "X is on vacation and cannot be reached, so your mail will be deleted. If it was about something important, please mail Y". So you should not have to ask people to resend the mail, because they either wait for you to come back, or send a mail to your colleagues who are not on vacation (and if it is was something private like "want to go see a movie tonight?", people surely know your private email/phone number, too).

In theory you could just let the emails sit there until you are back at work, but in practice sadly it is often expected that you check your email inbox every now and then. Employees often feel that they can't say "no" to the expectation that they have to be available via email even while at home off work hours. To protect employees (because vacations and off work time are to be protected, for health reasons), there are discussions in Europe about introducing new regulations which would make any such "off work work" paid overtime, by law - effectively making it financially interesting for companies to prevent emails from reaching their employees when they are off work. This Daimler story is just one example of that.

Included =/= being used. My TV is 3D capable, yet I never use that feature, because I consider it to be a gimmick. If there had been a cheaper version of my TV without 3D capability, I would have bought that one (same for all the "smart TV" Internet features, btw - all I want is a huge display with a couple HDMI inputs...). Sadly, that option did not exist. My totally unscientific research among friends/relatives shows that if they have a 3D TV, at most it has been used for one or two 3D movies like Ice Age "for the kids" to try it out, and that's it.

The smart watches, as they are being offered right now, do not interest me at all. They look ridiculous, the battery life is horrible and they are not good at being WATCHES.

A "smart watch" which would interest me would have some or all of these features:

- looks like a normal, elegant watch - i.e. leather or steel wristband (NO plastic!), round, not too heavy, elegant design (either like a standard chronograph or some "bauhaus"-y look). Basically nothing which screams "I am a geek".
- long battery life. By that, I mean AT LEAST a week, better a month or more.
- maybe health monitoring features (pulse, steps, ...)
- shows time without having to be "activated" (i.e. no having to touch the screen or hit a button to show something)
- best "display" option for battery life would be standard hour/minute dials plus a tiny little LCD screen for text (a line or two)
- possibility to link to a smartphone to show notifications (e-mail subject lines, sms), but nothing more, since tft/amoled screens plus touchscreen features plus voice recognition plus apps mean low battery life, so it's simply a no-no. Basically, I just want to have a look at the watch to see if it is worth taking out my smartphone to read the e-mail which just arrived or not. I do not want to actually read the e-mail or type a reply or make a phone call via the watch. Especially NOT make a phone call. Holding your watch up to your face and talking to it might look cool in some old James Bond movie, but in reality it is just stupid.

something which is kind of there, except for the little LCD display for notifications, is the Withings Activité:

http://www.withings.com/activi...

Looks like a standard, expensive watch. Has health monitoring which can send data to an app on your smartphone. Has a battery life of A YEAR with a standard CR2025 battery, despite low energy bluetooth connectivity to the smartphone.

It happens a lot here in Germany, people ordering e.g. clothing (several trousers, shirt, etc.) and only keeping the ones they like, sending the rest back again. It really is pretty common, people use the right to return merchandise bought online as a replacement for trying out various items at a shop. A big reason for that is that until yesterday, the SELLER had to pay postage for the returns, so there was no penalty for the buyer if he ordered more than he actually needed. Guess we will see soon if the new law (buyer has to pay for the return shipping) servers as a deterrent. For the same reason, it was also not unusual for people to order e.g. a digital camera, use it for a week (e.g. to take photos at a wedding/birthday/...) and then send it back for free. I remember reading reports about Amazon, Zalando (another big online shop in Germany) etc. "throwing out" customers because of a return rate which was too high. E.g. here is a thread (in German) in which customers discuss this, and their general opinion seems to be "I order x items and return half of them, that's normal because I want to try out": http://forum.glamour.de/thread...

Another thin - I always wondered why even items which usually are not returnable for hygienic reasons (e.g. underwear, towels, stuff like that) ARE returnable when bought online. There was a TV documentary a while ago on German TV in which online shops explained why the return rights hurt them a lot - online shops for electronics etc. can just restock the stuff, maybe at a reduced price if it already has been opened, but items like underwear etc. CANNOT be restocked, they (by law) have to be thrown away. So it really makes not much sense for an online shop to sell stuff like that if it is so easy for customers to return the items - the shop has to pay for postage AND loses the money for the items because they cannot be sold again.

I do not understand your problem. The 4S WILL get iOS 8. Like the parent posters wrote, only the 4 (non-S) won't receive the update.