Sennheiser headphones aren't cheap (certainly not 1/5th the cost, 75% is more like it) and have their own built-in marketing cost. Sennheiser advertises heavily as well. Sure they are good headphones, but they play the exact same game Beats does.

Don't over-value the Dre name. Sure I like NWA as much as the next guy, but if MC Ren released a headphone that was total shit, people would call him on it. Consumer Reports wouldn't give the headphones sounds good/too expensive type reviews.

Obviously Nike profits, and some shoe margins are stupid-high, but in general I'd say the quality of Nike shoes is far higher than what you'd find for $15. Payless shoes hurt to wear and fall apart quickly.

Beats headphones generally get positive reviews, even if they're not considered top in their field. I've listened to them at electronic stores and was impressed. Maybe you can get somewhat cheaper headphones that are better, but certainly cheap headphones aren't as good. Consumer Reports magazine said as much.

I have used Straight Talk for years. They sell BYOP activation kits. It comes with 4 sim card and a CDMA activation code. micro/nano AT&T, micro/nano T-Mobile. I use AT&T Straight Talk.

With the Nexus 5 you take the micro AT&T, and you get unlimited talk, text and data (up to 3GB on 4G, the rest on a throttle) for 45/mo. Its also got LTE as well as HSPA+/HSDPA.

There is a 60/mo plan that allows SMS and calls to international numbers if you need it.

I prepay a year at a time and get this for $495 for 12 months.

I use a rental SIM when traveling to Japan from here ( http://jcrcorp.com/mobile/mobi... ) . Europe I've used Swisscom prepaid.

Anyways, the Nexus 5 D820 seems to go everywhere and work.

Instead of asking Slashdot such a silly question you could also just google getting a gsm sim card in the us.

Lo and behold!

#1) "The best Prepaid SIM Cards"
#2) "SIM Cards - Best Buy"

It's been trivial to do this for about a decade and 5 seconds of googling got me the answer. This is one of the stupidest ask slashdots ever, and they are almost all incredibly stupid. I'm not looking and I'm going to guess tImothy put this story up.
checks the top of the page
Yup. Fuck timothy.

I'm not sure why they couldnt just natively EFI boot Surface Pro OS (Win 8.1) on the Macbooks. That seems like a sounder strategy to get converts than throwing away hardware. Apple hardware is the only reason to use Apple these days. (Nice touch pad, nice keyboard, relatively durable, good display).

You might as well say "don't be cheap, hire a photographer to take the pictures." Obviously while rights management for CC pictures is a small difficulty, raising the funds to pay for photographs is a large difficulty that has its own headaches and expenses.

I don't know why the URL no longer works. http://www.engadget.com/2014/0... might be a good replacement, it mentions the net neutrality issue.

S5 is smaller, better screen (even if it's .1" smaller), better camera, faster, has a micro SD slot, replaceable batter better build quality (my wife recently got the S5 over the similar Nexus 5). Water resistance is kind of cool, I've heard of people destroying their phones that way.

Not that the G2 is a crap phone, I just think something you spend a lot of time on is probably worth spending an extra $.35/day or whatever that works out to.

How has "redskin" turned into a term of honor or a word to be proud of? Nobody would ever say it now, unless it's in a historical context or when talking about the sports team. It's an archaic, vaguely racist term from a time when Indians were generally depicted as war-like savages. It's like a Chinese person saying "Chinaman" is a term to be proud of,

And I think you'll find not all Indians are offended at the drop of the hat, or non-Indians aren't. If you really are Indian you have very weird self-identity issues.

but not a lot of people are buying them on Amazon

Yup. The top two selling phones are Windows, so obviously Amazon top-100 sellers are not representative of larger trends in the marketplace.

If we're actually going to use logic on this... You're likely to drop/break that phone in the first 6 months.

I've never broken a phone. If 6 months was the expected lifetime, I'd pay extra for some kind of insurance plan.

Chinese phones work on unlocked GSM and work fine on AT&T, TMobile, or all the various cheap monthly plan services.

$400 LG G2s are nowhere near as good as a $650 Galaxy S5, though. I can't tell strangers how to spend their money, but personally most people I know, and myself, use their cell phone enough that it's worth spending an extra $250 spread out over the course of two years.

And whether you have a 2-year contract or not is basically not a factor, my wife and I don't, and it seems T-Mobile and AT&T have both made monthly plans the focus of their marketing. I just said 2 years because that makes it about a dollar/day and sounds like a reasonable length of time to hold on to a phone.

A lot of people spend a lot of time on their phone. Maybe 30 minutes or more. If your phone lasts you a couple years, paying a dollar a day for a phone that is (and let's be honest) substantially better is probably worth it.

If you don't use your cell except for emergency phone calls, yeah what the hell, get whatever's cheapest.

Yeah sure, the camera's auto-settings can do a better job with instant results. And a computer can do calculus equations lickety-split. The point isn't to have students take the best pictures possible, but to have them learn photography.