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.

Nope, it will be as usual.

"Diplomacy" is absolutely necessary (all governments know that the others are spying, too, which is important for secret behind-the-scenes deals, so nobody can just STOP spying just because the masses are against it). The spying will go on, while the politicians - in public - will claim to be against it. So when the next Snowden shows up and publishes proof that spying indeed DOES happen, the politicians can claim to not have known about it, some heads will roll, the politicians will promise that something like this will never happen again, while secretly handing over more money to fund BETTER spying.

It's not if you cheat in multiplayer games against other Blizzard customers and ruin their fun, because then it causes financial losses for Blizzard (if those other customers decide not to buy another Blizzard product because of their bad playing experience).

If you want to use cheats in single player games, that's perfectly fine (and you do not need to buy a cheat tool for that anyway, Blizzard thoughtfully already provides cheat codes for that).

Yes, the videos made by the Galaxy Note show more details (in this particular comparison which only included sunny outside scenes). But what does that mean? That under optimal lighting situations the DSLR from 2012 which can only do 1080p video shows less detail than a smartphone from this year which can do 4K? I could have told you that before. He could have also used a GoPro Hero3+ Black, which can also do 4K and costs half as much as the Galaxy Note.

Film makers use DSLR to make movies because of the lenses and the low light performance of the sensors, which are far better than what you will ever find on a smartphone - it is simple physics, nobody would want to carry around a smartphone which weighs 2kg or more to get the same optical performance / depth of field which the DSLR lenses allow. Yes, the DSLR makers are a bit behind when it comes to shooting video (as far as I know, Nikon is so far only considering making 4K video available and from Canon, only the obscenely expensive EOS-1DC can do 4K) - but that is because these cameras are primarily PHOTOGRAPHY devices and not video cameras.

If you'd switch the test around and made a comparison of photos shot with the DSLR and the Galaxy Note (and compared stuff like noise, distortion, sharpness in the corners of the picture, picture quality when using the built-in flash of the phone and a dedicated flash on the DSLR), you'll see that the DSLR is better at what it is designed to do than the smartphone and that there is a reason why it is more expensive.

So yes, under optimal lighting conditions, the 4K video mode of the Galaxy Note has a better resolution than the EOS 5D Mark III. It's just a bit of a pointless comparison, because it only compares one single aspect, like only comparing the acceleration of two vehicles and then declaring the faster one the better car, completely ignoring that some people might be interested in a different aspect, like ride quality, space, top speed or fuel consumption.

Maybe not IN servers, but definitely FOR servers. Look up 3PAR, Netapp and so on.

I'd be surprised if those patches won't be watermarked in some way so that it will be possible to figure out the source of the leak.

Well, there IS the option of a 2 cylinder range extender engine. Guess that needs an oil change every now and then.

The range extender is an option. Maybe it is not offered in the US (although it is mentioned in reviews), but it is available in Germany: http://www.bmw.de/de/neufahrze...

It is a 2 cylinder engine which according to the BMW website increases the range to 300-340km total (about 200 miles).

Atari 800 http://oldcomputers.net/pics/a...

=/=

Atari 800XL http://oldcomputers.net/pics/a...

The issue is that it is more like

1. I rent a post office box.
2. I pay Amazon to ship me products to that PO box
3. Amazon pays the USPO the usual, agreed-upon amount of money for delivering the stuff to my local post office
4. My local post office additionally also demands money from Amazon for putting the parcel into my post office box the same day it arrives because people order so much stuff from Amazon, otherwise they wait until the next day.

The graph you link only goes up to 1855, so it is no wonder it shows no warming. Still, this graph keeps popping up to show that there has been no warming in recent years...

From http://www.skepticalscience.co...

"Easterbrook plots the temperature data from the GISP2 core, as archived here. Easterbrook defines “present” as the year 2000. However, the GISP2 “present” follows a common paleoclimate convention and is actually 1950. The first data point in the file is at 95 years BP. This would make 95 years BP 1855 — a full 155 years ago, long before any other global temperature record shows any modern warming. In order to make absolutely sure of my dates, I emailed Richard Alley, and he confirmed that the GISP2 “present” is 1950, and that the most recent temperature in the GISP2 series is therefore 1855."

They publicly stated that the activation servers will not be turned off, so there is no need yet for such a patch.

The thing I always ask myself when I hear people claim that MS has an obligation to "support" Windows XP indefinitely is - where do you draw the line? What IS "support and fixing security issues"? XP is so old by now that it is lacking a lot of newer security features, so it "by design" is less secure than, say, Windows 7 or 8. If those people demanding eternal support got their way, would Microsoft have to "fix" these security issues by providing updates which effectively would turn Windows XP into a more modern operating system? Would Microsoft face lawsuits if they said "nope, those are features only Windows 7 and 8 have, we won't put those into XP" and then the machines running XP got turned into spam zombies due to someone exploiting those security holes?