Sorry, but I don't read religious screeds. Try real science.

So going by that metric, they also had no pockets. Are we to be soon without pockets? Will utility belt only carrying really catch on?

I don't think so.

Integration material chemistry could work really well, because that affected products that were desirable for trade, and as a result affected which cultures came into greater contact with others as a result...

Tablets, on the other hand, are disposable devices. You're lucky to get two years out of them. They break easily, and the software is hard (if not impossible) to update.

That's pretty much as wrong as you could get it.

Tablets being all solid state, and not even a hinged component are generally HARDER to break.

Updating an iPad is way easier than updating a PC.

Perhaps the original iPad was not as useful after a while but from the iPad2 onward, they have been pretty long lasting - my wife generally uses her iPad 2 for many hours per day, and has since launch. That's four years of use now - we've never replaced anything, it works fine for all the software we use, and there's no sign it will need replacing soon. I'd say six years out of it will be easy, and it does not feel slow the way a four year old computer would feel slow...

You just have no idea how good the iPad is and how easy it is to use.

most of the smartwatches have sidetracked by using smartphone operating systems and hardware which gets them unacceptable battery life

That's not at all the case. In fact I can't think of a single smart watch shipping in any volume that uses a smartphone operating system - not Android Wear, not the Apple Watch, not Pebble... also very few are using smartphone hardware - most have very tiny screens and a very small form factor.

That small form factor is the reason for the poor battery life. There is simply very little room to hold a battery, then of course the LCD itself even small adds a large drain. Pebble at least steps around the LCD, and gives you an idea of how significant that portion of battery consumption really is in relation to communications or processing on power consumption.

Smart watches should have focused on notifications and remote control of the smartphone

That I think the the absolute least interesting aspect of smart-watches. They are much more interesting in being a more immediate conduit to networking and sensor data from your phone or on-board sensors.

Pebble is doing it right, but doesn't have the weight to make mainstream.

How is a $20 million Kickstarter not mainstream? I would say Pebble is more mainstream than AndroidWare - I really doubt the combination of all AndroidWear device sales combined matches what Pebble has done.

I do like a lot of what Pebble is doing, the smart straps and related 1mm development time along with a really unique approach to the smart watch interface may with a lot of people over. The advantage Apple has is (probably) a much more polished project and (certainly) a vast array of developer support for the watch out of the gate, and increasing from there.

But what about the politician running for public office?

What about them? They have been impacted in some elections, but have very little say over what intelligence agencies do, and cannot be too publicly against them or be declared weak on crime/terrorism.

The rest of your statements veer further and further away from my point - that it doesn't matter what the impact is to anyone but the intelligence agencies, as far as them being open about what they are doing.

Apart from some meaningless bluster, there has been absolutely no negative impact on intelligence services for spying on citizens.

So why should they not simply say what they are doing, when there are no repercussions for doing so?

It's not like anyone is going to stop using computers, they will just maintain the happy illusion that no-one is spying on them...

At least hard drives are built to endure the movement that happens.

Graphics cards - graphics cards on the other hand, and built for sheer performance. But It's also built to generate lots and lots of heat when ender pressure, which is added to in a way that the designer of the graphics card cannot fully anticipate when mixed in with all the other heat in a system. As a user you have to pray that the designer of the entire system - motherboard/cpu/graphics card - knew when that were doing when they put them all together.

Over time I've had some drive glitches, yes, some total failures. But thinking back I'm pretty sure I've had more outright failure in graphics components of systems, never mind glitchy graphics at times...

Remember incidents like this when you see lists of countries supposedly being ahead of other countries in terms of test score results... without knowing how much cheating is going on, such lists are usually pretty worthless predictors of real-world results.

And the article you link to doesn't mention that the Peruvian government lets the Dakar Rally use said monument as part of its route.

Well since that would be a lie (as shown by the fact you provide no link) it's hard to fault a real news article for not mentioning it.

Even the IPCC has said the same thing, ask them.

It's your priests spreading inconsistent messages, don't ask me to make sense of them.

They hardly apologized at all. Of note is that what they did was a CRIMINAL ACTION in Peru with very severe fines - a REAL apology would be to turn over the people responsible.

What they did was no apology at all.

"One strike, you're out Greenpeace!"

If that strike is destroying monuments thousands of years old and causing irreparable damage to a very fragile desert ecosystem - yes, absolutely I would be strongly against ANY entity that did that, but more importantly didn't even consider it to be a problem.

Thanks for the 45 years of environmental activism, it was nice knowin' ye.

Greenpeace has not helped the environment in any meaningful way for at least two decades now. I consider helping them to be morally as questionable as supporting human trafficking, especially since you are taking away funds to help groups that actually help the environment instead of themselves (like the Nature Conservancy).

If we were to engage in climate engineering, warming things up and adding a little CO2 is exactly what we'd want to do.

Except that despite large increases in CO2, we've seen no statistically significantly warming in almost two decades now. So it's ver questionable now if that would be the right approach to take if you wanted to cause warming.