Until there's background noise, or you have a slightly weird accent, or a speech impediment, or talk a bit fast, or a bit too slow, or push the 'listen to me now' button a bit late. So it's about 80% there in about 20% of cases.

A calculator? On my wrist!!? What is this, the future??

Actually, that sounds quite useful... Sorry about the watch thing...

Guess they didn't quite get the point of "redistribute equally" then, eh?

Or equally rich, depending on which side of the social divide you started from.

Not to mention hideous.

It's perfectly simple. They're slaves. Many other narratives that occupy the same class of universe - which normally means people running around with swords accompanied by wizards - also feature slaves. There's no overt or even sub-textual racism here, R2 and 3PO are pretty diverse just by themselves, to say nothing of the other driods that appear in the background.

Just as most, if not all (Game of Thrones notwithstanding) swords-n-sorcery epics do not concern themselves with the emancipation of slaves, neither does Star Wars. I don't think it's any the lesser for it.

Looking slightly further, perhaps the thesis is that 'artificial life is no life at all', and the droid's apparent emotions are just programmed responses designed to make the robots easier for humans to work with.

These questions we may one day face ourselves.

Note that the above being true, and the original statement being a joke, are not mutually exclusive propositions.

Webvan and Pets.com were both pretty good jokes, after all.

I love that we're getting on so well.

Again with the unsubstantiated claims. What fundamentals of computer science does Apple ignore? Algorithmic complexities? What standards of computer science do they ignore? Actually, I can't think of any standards of computer science.

And why is performing someone else's music necassarily anti-art (for lack of a better term, sorry)? People have done so throughout the centuries, and in fact performing one's own music is a relatively new idea. Actors do not generally speak their own words, nor do dancers typically perform their own moves. Janis Joplin didn't write this, but if you can listen to it without being moved then you're a tougher person than me.

Anyway, arguing musical tastes is pointless, but I will say that one should not generally dismiss entire genres because 'auto-tune' or 'not-original'.

I wonder about that though.

If you're swapping, there's a very good chance that you're about to hit some other area of the disk in very short order. Given that the subsequent disk access is certainly guaranteed to be random, the optimum position for the swap partition is probably in the centre of the disk. Unless the heads changing direction is expensive (I've no idea), in which case the position of the swap partition may have no impact in the general case at all.

Good call, we don't. Let's not. I like things slimmed down, simplified. With too many options, I fail to get work done. It's kind of like an easily-distracted thing. A failing, no doubt. I like the smoothness too - like a car with a gearbox that doesn't grind when you change, and doors that don't squeak when you open then, and an ignition that you don't have to twist just so in order to get the blasted thing to start.

This is the question that was asked:

Should the proposal be accepted, which was submitted by the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund in the Eurogroup of 25 June 2015 and consists of two parts that together constitute their comprehensive proposal? The first document is entitled ‘Reforms for the completion of the Current Programme and beyond’ and the second ‘Preliminary Debt Sustainability Analysis.

Now, I don't know about you, but that doesn't seem to me to mean "Do you ever want to be helped out during a humanitarian crisis?".

Yes, fluffemutter, please do say more. What's wrong with Miley Cyrus exactly? You don't like her music, I presume, can't say I know much about it myself but I imagine it's quite well-produced and it seems to upset the cultural elite quite a bit, which I always think is a good thing.

Maybe, when things are popular, we shouldn't automatically assume that they are generally rubbish in consequence. I'm certainly guilty of this from time to him (Transformers movie? Pah! Although I did see that and it was rubbish).

No it isn't. It's like there only being one way to make the car go faster, and one way to slow it down. Of course, like all analogies, this is imperfect since one can use the engine to slow the car, or use the brake pedal, or even the handbrake.

OS X is full of complex features. Folder actions, automation, launchd for user and system daemons, usable system backup for everyone (no other OS has this out of the box), network locations (unlimited sets of network configurations for when you use your machine in different places that require different setups), custom scripting for applications, services, unix command line, timer coalescing for low power, mach microkernel. Not to mention higher level features like airplay, and the server package.

Which OS features are you referring to when you suggest they lack features that other OS's have?

Not via USB, and it'll have to be an MP4 I believe, but over wifi you could use this :
Air sharing

Anyway, I don't dispute that if you want to use an iPhone or iPad (which I don't personally, but plenty of people do) then you'll need either a Windows machine or a Mac or that airsharing thingy. Or neither of course, if you just want to use the thing as a mobile device without moving files around, which is also perfectly fine for lots of people.

Gosh. You are clever.