Joanna Stern of the Washington Post did a full EKG test with a bunch of fitness bands and a Polar heart rate strap. The fitness bands were all terrible, and the Polar Strap was pretty much spot on. Her testing of the Apple Watch seemed to indicate that it was within about 5 beats or so of her Polar-measured HR. It's by far the most accurate wrist-mounted HR monitor that she tested.

The highest level person that explicitly signed off on the strike should be fired. That's not the president--he authorises programs like this with the intention that they're carried out properly. (Whether or not this is an action the USA should be taking is a matter for elections.) If something goes wrong, someone should be punished for their incompetence. It can't be the lowest level person, because they're not the one calling the shots--it has to be someone high in the chain of command. Only explicit accountability can keep this sort of thing from happening again, assuming that this program must continue at all.

(I'm all for banning this sort of thing, but let's be real. Of course, if we're being real, we probably won't hear about this ever again.)

They don't hate jews, they hate zionists. They're not the same thing.

Since we already know it's an area for rich people, it's likely that the land costs drive the price of the project up. Besides, if they're meant as rental properties, the idea won't be to get the money back immediately; the rental income and the theoretical dividends that it will pay back to the community will cover the costs in the long haul. Normally, the city would front some of that cost because there's value in that sort of diversity, but perhaps Lucas is shouldering a bunch of the costs that the city/developer normally would.

So say I'm searching for something with really common words in it. I can't think of anything specifically right now, but this is my most common search failure.

I get back a bunch of results. They have all the words I'm looking for, but they're all about two or three more popular topics. I'd like to be able to select a search result and tell the engine that results like this are incorrect for some semantic reason. Maybe it's a band name and I'm looking for a book titleâI should be able to say I don't want anything related to music. No bands, albums or songs. I'd be willing to tag results with some context to provide hints to the algorithm.

Things like 'windows' tend to mess up results; Google assumes that I either mean the Microsoft kind or the house kind, but sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a particular application window. I run into this sort of thing surprisingly often.

Yeah, and Microsoft and Blackberry had phones YEARS before Apple did. Just because you've been doing it for a long time doesn't mean it's better than what Apple's done. Just because Apple's been working on it for a couple years doesn't mean it'll be perfect out of the box. This is a first generation product, and it suffers from everything a first gen does. Nobody escapes that.

Apple nailed a couple things with the watch, from all accounts. The watch looks good--which is critical if you want to sell it to non-nerds, the HR monitoring is good, you can use it with Apple Pay. Give it a couple years. All sorts of tech needs to advance and have something like this watch driving it to be good at exactly what they need.

You think he'd have a soapbox in prison? I rather think not. He'd be in solitary and that would be that.

Oliver is a master of taking a terrible, boring and critically important subject and making it palatable. Net Neutrality, predatory lending--we've seen people cover these topics for years and get no traction. But John Oliver keeps us watching for the whole thing.

I find it sad that nobody knew who he was to begin with. I do, and I live in Canada. I think it's a really important piece of news. But then again, I'm a nerd, and I'm bombarded with this information, relatively speaking. I guarantee my non-geek friends only have the most meagre understanding of who he is.

Snowden's information is important, and he has the right idea of what should be done with it. But John Oliver is one of the best ways to communicate the information. He managed to get Snowden to summarise things into really relatable chunks of data--it was brilliant.

Until I started using nintype, I couldn't find a single swiping keyboard that was faster or more accurate than tapping each letter. I used at least 4 different keyboards and they were all terrible. (Nintype lets me swipe and tap in the same word; it's a far better implementation of a swiping keyboard. And as far as I know, it's still only officially on iOS.)

I think the iPhone 6 is too bigâI think all 5-ish inch phones are too big. I have a 20cm handspan (8") and long fingers. The ergonomics are terrible. Even with the reachability feature, I find it incredibly irritating to reach the top far corner. Apple had the ergonomics of small devices entirely right, the problem is that most people prefer seeing more over better ergonomics.

Anyway, you don't find value in Apple products and that's fine. But many of us appreciate the design decisions they make. Don't try to pass of their work as merely being about marketing and high margins. I like their products better for HCI and quality reasons. I've used a nexus 4 and 5 and Samsung S5 and found them all sorely lacking. Just because you have some beef with Apple doesn't mean they don't actually make good stuff.

The reality is that those things are actually becoming less important for the consumer market. I hate to be of the '8GB should be enough for anybody' ilk, but for the kind of things that people are actually doing, that's probably true.

Think of it this way: the Macbook is the laptop you should be recommending to MOST people that ask you for advice. You only deviate from that advice if they have some sort of restriction or requirement. There are times where you might want to recommend the air, and for nerds you should recommend the pro. But the stock Macbook is going to be my recommendation every time without any extra info.

Similarly, if you need something with upgradable RAM, you're simply not the market for a Mac Mini anymore. I had my Mom buy a new Mini last year when her old one kicked it. She will never need to upgrade the RAM. For the things she does (playing MP3s, watching YouTube, email) the machine is vastly overpowered for her needs. That they make it in very few configurations is less of an issue because it's reached appliance status. You may as well complain that your fridge doesn't come with an upgradable cooling unit and spare bays for future extensions. It's just not that sort of tool when you're talking to most people.

For my part, I'm still on an early 2009 iMac with a 2013 Mac Mini that runs headless. 8GB of RAM really IS enough for 100% of what we do at home. I'd only want more RAM because it's one of those things that it's always nice to have more of just so you don't have to care about what's running, but it's not really necessary. I'm already running a lot more things than I need to.

Ugh, one of the things that I hate about BMR calculations is that they always seem to think that you're going to have an active job AND be an athlete when you get to high activity levels. I've got a sedentary job, but I'm an active competitive swimmer.

And then not all exercise is created equal. I burn more calories training 6 hours a week as a swimmer than I did training 10-12 hours a week as a cyclist. Part of it is just biomechanical efficiency--bikes make everything easier--but there's actually an effect of being in cold water 6 hours a week that's not insignificant. Not to mention I have more muscles being active while swimming than when I'm cycling.

But I guess at this point, I'm actually beyond using these estimators. I've got good direct estimates of power and calories while I'm on the bike, and my swimming is just more than that. Now I just eat to keep up and stop feeling hungry.

I think they're nice looking watches, but I'm not enthralled by them, certainly. I'm more actively looking at the Withings Activite Pop and Garmin VivoActive because I'd like to have swim tracking, and I'm willing to put up with an ugly (or at least not-pretty) device to get it.

But I'm almost 40 and I'm having trouble figuring out what's actually cool any more. ;)

Some tech writers have made this point already, and I probably won't get it out as clearly as they have, but the problem with smartwatches and our perception of them is that we're thinking about them in the here and now, and not in the future. Microsoft (well, Ballmer) famously laughed at the iPhone as too expensive and useless before it took off and crushed the Microsoft Mobile business into dust. He was thinking of the here and now, and not the future.

This is where Apple's so-called fanboys can be used to bootstrap a tech shift that would've taken much longer otherwise. When enough people start wearing these watches, they'll start to have more applications. Apple Pay will work with the watches out of the gate, so the people that (legitimately) complain that the phone is just as convenient as pulling out a wallet will now have to re-examine the position. The phone is on your wrist and is unlocked by being there and tethered to the phone. (Presumably, one day you won't need the phone at all, but we're not there yet.) And if you can trust your payments to your phone/watch, you can probably trust your car, computer, office door, etc., to that combo as well.

Without Apple, there's more of a chicken-and-egg problem. Nobody wants a watch because the services don't exist, and nobody wants to make a service because there aren't enough watches out there. Get a few million Apple faithful to buy a watch, and suddenly people that are a lot smarter and more creative than me will be making services that can interact with it.

I don't know if this market has legs—I can easily believe that those are things people will shy away from as too insecure or too cumbersome or too ugly. Having to charge one more device every single day doesn't really appeal to ME much, I admit. But if I try to think about the smartwatch market and how it might work in the future, when a bunch of these concerns are addressed, I can see there being somewhere for it to go.

(As to your comment about tablets, my iPad 3 is my most used computing device. I happen to be sitting at my computer right now, but this is the first time I've made a comment on /. from my home PC in months. I bought it originally to give me less of a reason to buy a new phone, but the unexpected side-effect is that I don't really care about home desktop computers anymore either. I'll upgrade in a year or two, when it stops getting OS updates.)

I suppose the arguments FOR it would be that if you're going to be forced, more people will attempt to make an informed choice.

But really, I think the aphorism, "You get the government that you deserve," applies whether there's mandatory voting or not.

But I don't think that these low voter turn-outs is sustainable or good for the democracy of countries. Australia does okay. They elected a bonehead this time around, but their democracy moves along much as it ever has. I think it may be worth the experiment.

We have the same readers here in Canada--or at least the same basic concept. I have my card in a thin (Bellroy) wallet, and even with it open I can't get the touch-to-pay to work without pulling out the card a bit to expose the little symbol. Or at least, it doesn't work reliably.

Paying with my phone wouldn't be any less burden, but it wouldn't be any MORE burden either, and it would save me some space. When I go on long bike rides, I always have my phone, but I may leave my wallet at home and only bring a couple cards instead. This would eliminate the need for me to carry (and worry about) my cards all together. That's pretty nice.

It's the same reason why I have a keyfob on my car-keychain that is hooked up to my credit card. If I forget my wallet before I get in the car, I'm not hopelessly doomed if I need to fill up. It's happened, and the keyfob saved me.