That's what it is, and a horrendously limited, unintuitive messaging app at that. I was forced to install it by friends in Hong Kong recently while I was there, and uninstalled it the day I left. I see zero reason for it to exist, not even limited text billing plans -- you have to pay for Whatsapp too after the first year, after all.

It only works well when the hardware is perceived to be equal. I've never owned a Playstation, have bought Xbox from the start and own almost every game in the Halo franchise. It's far and away my favorite non-racing game, but at the same time, it's not enough to skew me towards the XBone over the PS4.

I still remember how Microsoft screwed the pooch on the XBone's launch, how clearly they deride the gamers who keep them in business, and I can also see how their hardware is nowhere near the caliber of that in the PS4. So for the first time, when I upgrade it will be to a Playstation and not an Xbox.

And that shows rather nicely that exclusivity doesn't work if your hardware or overall offering is considered inferior by your potential customers.

Mod parent up. This is the reason I've stopped playing games almost entirely -- I am sick of being nickel-and-dimed to death.

Why waste your money on a standalone GPS when you already have all of the same hardware in your smartphone? Garmin, TomTom et al. are dinosaurs. With Sygic, I have lifetime maps for the majority of the world for next to nothing (and they're the exact same maps you get in a TomTom device). * disclaimer: I have no connection to Sygic except as a paying, satisfied customer

If you want quality and repairability too, those prices will be going up by another order of magnitude or so. Enjoy your $8,000 microwave, three for $250 lightbulbs, and 150-year iPhone contract. We live in a disposable society based around the creation of the maximum possible waste, we are at its epicenter, and we spend all of our free time pointing our fingers at others in blame.

"Set the level so that it does not effect [sic] the U.S.A." -- you do realize that China's pollution is, in large part, there because US companies moved or contracted most of their manufacturing there, right? This is a nice example of reaping what you sow -- America avoids pollution itself by offshoring, but the process of offshoring trades the pollution for severe weather instead.

Speak for yourself. I run both Windows 8 and Windows 7 machines, and my Windows 7 machines are demonstrably more stable and less buggy than my Windows 8 one. (Note: I say one because I've had such a piss-poor experience with Windows 8, which rapidly degrades in performance to the point of near-unusability. And even straight out of the box with a fresh install, it likes to do things such as take multiple *minutes* before task manager appears on a core i5 machine with 8GB of RAM and 50% CPU utilization or less. There's no way I'm buying another machine with Windows 8, let alone installing it on one. If I could downgrade to Win7 without needing to pay for an OS when I already paid for Win8, I'd do it in a heartbeat. And no, Linux is not an option for people who need to use real software.)

Windows 8 is a total dog, and has been from the day it shipped, even before one takes into account the absolutely godawful UI.

Suuuure you do. And there are plenty of owners around here, but I've not seen any of them do *any* of the things you claim are common, so I'm going to say they're figments of your imagination.

If there's one thing a 2CV does not provide, it is comfort.

36mpg is also not what you get in a Smart car, driven properly. Last time I measured mileage and fuel consumption over 5 or 6 tanks of gas, I averaged more like 45-47mpg in mine, and I don't even try that hard.

Way to generalize. As it happens, I own a Smart (as well as another, larger vehicle). I own it in recognition of the fact that most of the time, my wife or I drive somewhere alone, and dragging along five seats and sheet metal weighing extra three quarters of a ton (yes, that's the difference between the curb weight of my Mazda6 wagon and my Smart convertible) simply doesn't make sense.

However, it is only *ever* parked in an actual parking space or on my own driveway, it has never been on a sidewalk, I never block crosswalks or even pull into them if there's somebody legitimately allowed to cross by the signal, I never ignore lights, and I have never driven the wrong way down a one-way street. In fact, I would be willing to place a bet that I am a more careful and law-abiding driver than you ever will be. And my wife doesn't do any of these things, either.

But in your world, because you've got a big, fat, imaginary bee in your bonnet, damaging random, innocent people's expensive vehicles is just fine? Well hopefully somebody keys your Hummer and pisses in the gas tank. You probably did something to deserve it, after all.

Once you check in, you're in the airline's system.

That's not how it works, or even remotely so.

Not to mention that digital camera sensors -- especially the cheap ones that would almost certainly be used -- have limited dynamic range, limited low-light sensitivity, noticeable display lag, and issues with blooming when dealing with bright sources such as sunlight, and most LCD / OLED screens suffer from visibility issues (glare, too-weak backlighting, etc.) that simply don't exist for a mirror. Like much of Tesla's form-before-function design, this is a solution in search of a problem that simply doesn't exist.

[citationneeded.jpg]

I don't believe for one second they got even remotely near 3-4mpg difference from side mirrors, even if they were spectacularly badly-designed. The frontal area of the mirrors is microscropic compared to the frontal area of the car.

Using the same here, but sadly they've recently blocked tethering -- even if you're just tethering an Android tablet to your Android phone. (So effectively, simply increasing your screen size.) That rather kills the deal, for me -- unlimited data is pointless when you can only use that data on the phone itself.