I'm not sure what the killer argument for smart watches is. That's not to say that there won't be a market for smaller devices that smart phones. But the real issues are display size and input method. Current smartphone sized displays can't be strapped to your wrist, and its not clear that a smaller display is useful in a general purpose device. If glass-type devices take off then it's possible then you solve the display problem, but then why would you want a watch too?

A lot of the value of gold is simply because people want gold. In that sense it's no different from bitcoins.

Of course additionally it has practical uses in industry, but if that was all there was to it then it wouldn't be stockpiled as a store of wealth the way it is now; and its value would be less.

It's not clear that there is a limited supply... depends on whether you believe the universe to be finite. I'm not being entirely facetious - we could well see commercial asteroid mining operations in our lifetimes.

Equal airtime for the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster!

http://www.venganza.org/

Since Doom came out I've played a lot of games. These days I don't really play at all. I don't know if it's me or the games. I occasionally give something a try, but it doesn't hold my attention.

The ones I spent the most time on were Doom, Doom2, Quake, Quake2, Quake3, UT, UT2, Tribes2, WoW. A few single player games are good, but once I've played them through there's not much more to do.

If I had to pick a favourite it would probably be T2 - best game for real teamwork.

Not really. Either you're pregnant or you're not. Authoritarian is a much more slippery concept...

Of course the UK is part of the EU...

I've completed quite a few of these courses. I've also bailed out of a couple. One because I was doing 3 or 4 at the same time and I realised that I didn't have time to do them all properly. Another because I started a real world full time course and that took up all my spare time.

We were talking about England of course, where we don't have the distinction between "misdemeanors" and "felonies" that exists in some places.

You would not have to report any arrests when applying for a job in the UK. An employer would not have any mechanism for discovering this (unless a google search turns up a newspaper report of your arrest or something).

There are certain provisions for jobs involving children where a more thorough background check can be requested from the authorities. But this is aimed essentially at protecting children from paedophiles and only things that are relevant to that are at issue.

There might be a record of your arrest, but that's not what is normally understood by a criminal record, which is a list of the offences of which you've been convicted or accepted a caution in respect of.

This is a clear reference to Bill Roger's joke about people moving from Oklahoma to California increasing the average IQ of both states.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Rogers_phenomenon

Odds definitely in favour? How do you even go about assigning odds to something like life on Europa?

Plumes don't "confirm" the existence of life. It could be that water makes life more likely - if we're assuming that other life has somewhat similar processes to life on Earth - but we knew there was water on Europa anyway.

I'm not sure that the Advocate General's opinion is properly described as an interim ruling - that suggest a court ruling which has some legal force pending a full trial. The AG's opinion is there to help the court make its decision, but doesn't have any legal force of itself.

As the summary says, its usual for the court to follow the opinion of the AG, but it doesn't always happen.

Before maps people got around by dead reckoning, trial and error or talking to the locals. That doesn't mean that maps are not useful.

By the same token the existence of maps doesn't mean that gps navigation aids are not useful.

... so you don't actually have to do any coding at all?

Hey, just what you see pal.