Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does. Your implication is that this watch is literally useless except for making people that buy Apple products feel good.

First of all, it actually has functions that people theoretically feel useful. There are certainly Android Wear and Pebble owners that have similar functionality that feel that those devices fill this need. So as long as the Apple Watch does at least as much as those watches do, there's utility to some people. Even if all it does for someone is tell the time, $300 is not even close to the high end of what watches cost.

But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons. Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices. But they look good, and there's a aesthetic value to knowing that what you're wearing is mechanical and hand crafted. It's over $5000 for a Rolex STEEL wrist band. But you're not here criticising the idea of all luxury watches in general, or even all Smartwatches, just the Apple Watch.

You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?

What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it. Just say that out loud and move on. Or don't comment at all. I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?

To me, every 'smartwatch' has to pass this test: would I wear it if all it did was display the time? Does it look and feel good enough? After that, the $300 is either easy or impossible to justify. I'd wear the Apple Watch. I'd wear one of the Withings Activite watches.

I will probably get one once I feel like the first-gen problems are worked out.

I don't think it can solve any problems for you--if you're overwhelmed by notifications, your watch will just be a new point of contact for your frustrations.

You need to consider what's actually worth being notified about. I have a personal email account and one that I use to sign up for forums and get shipping notifications sent to. Only my personal account displays notifications, and I have a few people on my email VIP list. I switched my other mail account to sound notifications only. That way I know something happened and I can check it when I care.

At first it really feels like I'm missing things, but it actually worked out really well. Start with the assumption that nothing is worth as much as your time, and turn off every notification. Then add them back in one by one if you think it saves you more time to know that information immediately rather than once every hour or so.

NOPE.
It's because culture, cultural artifacts and works by there very nature have no expiration date - unlike humans who are limited by their mortality.

You are confusing the rule we came up with to try to harness that natural quality of cultural works in order to monetize them - with the reason for the existence of said rules in the first place.
I.e. You're engaging in circular reasoning where "old works can't belong to one person - because authors died so long ago that copyright ran out".

Which is another way of saying "There is no copyright - because it ran out".
Which is an ignoratio elenchi claim regarding the issue why " works of CULTURE AND ART AND STORYTELLING... can [NOT] ultimately belong to one person or a group of persons".

I.e. That it is THAT very property... attribute... of the works of culture to transcend any physical limitations through which mortal humans might try to limit access to such works in order to monopolize their value - WHY we had do come up with the idea of copyright.
Cause you can't expunge information and ideas from someone's mind.

You can't physically unhear a song or unsee an image or force others to do so if they don't want to pay for experiencing that work of culture.
You can only create a rule that they MUST pay.

I really can't go into other "points" you make there, other than to point out that they are all based on more ignoratio elenchi.
That is, ignoring that I am making points on WHY we have copyright laws instead of the HOW - i.e. particular nature and implementation of such laws.
Sorry.

All in all you're just a-nother layer of sediment...

Close.
Animals are incapable of being held responsible.

Much like children or mentally challenged (i.e. retarded) humans who are not in control of their faculties or incapable of understanding or holding on to agreements, rules and contracts, including but not limited to social contracts.

A human child is literally millions of years ahead of a chimp in mental development, but no one with any sense would dream of treating a child as an adult, capable of agreeing to or signing contracts.
Including those that the society one is born into has established for that child centuries and millennia ago.
Do not steal, do not kill, do not attack other people, don't light fires on the carpet...

Accepting those preestablished societal RULES (i.e. responsibilities) is the basis of having RIGHTS - or the society puts you in a cage.
Or, if you are REALLY incapable of following rules, keep hurting others and live in a place which practices a death penalty - society kills you to protect others from you.

And while you CAN explain such abstract concepts as good and bad to children or retarded adults, and have them obey the rules based on those concepts, you can't do that with animals.

You start treating animals like humans, you better plan for mass killing of said animals.
Cause that's where it ends at, very quickly - as they CAN'T FOLLOW HUMAN RULES AND REGULATIONS.
They will continue to break the rules they can't even understand, you will continue to punish them for that, until you either end up killing them or you get them to try to kill you.
At which point someone will HAVE TO kill them.

You seem obsessed with the idea that programming languages are better if they're close to English, but this is a long debunked theory so you're living in the 70s/80s on that one. If closeness to English was an overriding priority then we'd all be using COBOL.

We don't however, because regardless of closeness to English we still have to learn the syntax, and if we have to learn the syntax either way then we read code as if it is English. Anyone that knows C style syntax can read your C style example just as easily as they read plain English, and yet the VB style syntax requires you to parse a double negative which is bad English.

As such, all you're left with with VB is bug inducing double negative mindfucks, and increase unnecessary verbosity resulting in lower productivity.

It boils down to this:

"Is not equal to null"

vs.

"Is not nothing"

The former is perfect English, the latter is terrible, broken English.

The only way you can have a programming language that works with plain English is by allowing it to have a large number of keyword combinations, so that you can express "Is not nothing" as "Is something". Until you do that attempts to create a programming language in plain English are a long verified dead end.

Don't try and pretend my example was intended to be anything other than an example of VB's terrible syntax and verbosity. If I was creating a demonstration of great coding style I'd stay out of any VB discussion in the first place because VB is the antithesis of that. There is nothing readable about VB's syntax because it's broken English end to end and that gets in the way of clean syntax that can be read logically.

Have fun writing low readability code with your reduced levels of productivity if you enjoy spitting out such unnecessary verbosity if that's your thing, but don't try and pretend it's superior. There's a reason VB is hated and unpopular, and that's because it's shit for the reasons I've described here, if you think otherwise it's not because you're some super coder who just sees something no other coder gets, it's just that you're an inept VB fanboy.

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.

Because VB brings us such fucking abominations as:

If myVar IsNot Nothing AndAlso myVar = "something" Then
' do something
End If

The problem with VB is in it's attempts to be English like it's just ended up requiring you to spout nonsense. No one says "Is not nothing", they say "Is something".

It's too verbose and ends up forcing you to write stuff that's inherently less readable than if it didn't try and fudge English into it's syntax.

Whilst I don't really know anything about Swift, what the GP describes makes it sound like the features he's describing are basically exact copies of the way C# does things.

If so, then what you describe isn't really correct. In recent versions of C# you can simply declare a variable with "var". The situation you describe where it determines something to be an integer when you wanted a string shouldn't be an issue because in C# what would happen is the initial assignment of an int would have the compiler treat it as an int, and then any subsequent attempt to use it as a string would throw a compiler error because the compiler already figured out that it's an int by that point.

So you still declare your variables, you just let the compiler automatically determine the type.

This said however, I'm still not a fan of it, I don't like C#'s var keyword. It makes it easy for sloppy developers to write code quickly, but it kills readability and maintainability for other developers, because they have to expend effort figuring out what type the variable is actually meant to be rather than being able to just look at the definition to see what it's actually declared as.

It's a feature that's been added in to try and woo sloppy developers, but frankly all it does is reduce the average level of code quality by allowing people to write such sloppy code in the first place.

It's not an unreasonable viewpoint given that we can use math to describe universes that physically could not exist.

Math obviously exists outside of those particular universes, thus, one must reasonably conclude that either math can exist outside of any particular universe, or that for some reason some universes, such as ours (or perhaps only ours), are special cases where math exists.

"As a nation is not an individual any more than a corporation is a person, your analogy is completely invalid."

Not in the context of the point I'm making it's not. The fact is, when you are outnumbered by a far more powerful group of people, they ultimately get to declare what is law. It doesn't matter if that's happening at individual or state level- the point is that in that circumstance it's no longer your call what is deemed to be a criminal act and what is not.

Goebbel's was on the losing side, the allies got to declare what was and wasn't a criminal act. You may not like this, you may detest the whole concept of international law, but that's really irrelevant to my point - my point is merely that Goebbel's was defined as a criminal by the people who got to define him as such in a manner no different to the fact that a murderer is defined as a murder by the people who get to define him as such.

You mention the right to conquest, and that's ultimately why the allies got to do what they got to do, whatever your personal opinion on the rights or wrongs of it. They could just as well declare things as criminal acts retroactively as well as they could have legalised the extermination of all Germans as they saw fit if they chose to. Fundamentally the argument that Goebbels wasn't a criminal because what he did wasn't a crime at the time he did it is irrelevant, because his side lost the war, and any determinations of legality the Nazis made were replaced and overruled by the conquering powers.

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.