Unless you like carrying a smartphone in your hands all the time in crowded places, or like leaving your smartphone on the table where it can get lost or stolen, the smart watch is better. Nothing beats a watch for quickly checking something. Constantly fishing a phone out of your pocket, unlocking it, checking stuff and putting the phone back in your pocket can become extremely tedious quickly.

Can't say I've ever left mine anywhere. And I have no problem getting it out of my pockets. Meanwhile a watch is fucking uncomfortable to wear, and tends to break within a few months as you accidently bang it on things. I cried tears of joy the day I realized my new cell phone meant I'd never have to wear a watch again. I think taking it out of your pockets is a problem only about 1% of the people in the world have, everyone else seems to prefer the phone.

There's a few other things in the hardware that would bring up issues:

*Battery- smaller form factor, smaller battery, less life. People complain about that already
*camera- is there any place to put a camera on there that isn't going to be blocked by write hair or inconvenient to take a picture with? Can you see the screen to see the image? is it easy to hold your arm steady enough?
*Text input- voice recognition isn't there yet, and even when it is you don't always want to be public with your messages. How do you type on one quickly?
*Is there enough physical room for everything?
*Heat- if we do all that in a watch, how hot will it get? Will it become a safety hazard or uncomfortable to wear?
*Power- even if everything works, a phone can have the same stuff and more, due to form factor. So why would you limit yourself to the watch?

Two seconds in a year!?! That means in a mere 30 years you'll have to adjust it by a minute. In your life you'll have to adjust it 3 times! DO you know how much effort and time you'll save by buying a $10,000 high end mechanical watch? You'll only have to adjust it once- that's got to save you 2 minutes over the course of your lifetime. Isn't 10K a small price to pay for that?*

*Math void if anything heavier than a feather ever touches it, as it may break the delicate alignment of gears.

Even more real answer- I'm in the subway. I'm not getting that call/text because the signal isn't reaching me through 10m of solid earth.

* Displace smart phones/dedicated GPSes used for turn-by-turn directions (visual and audio) while driving. It's going to be great for motorcycle users. I'm not sure yet whether it will be legal for this use.

So could smartphones, at no additional difficulty. In fact they'll do so better if you have a bluetooth earpiece, as the audio will be routed right to your ear. There's nothing here a watch will do better than a phone. (There's also good reasons for continuing to use the dedicated GPS, as they tend to lose signal less, have maps predownloaded in case you go to an area with spotty internet, and have better databases of nearby locations. But I can understand wanteing to ditch it).

It will make the policeman's job more difficult by allowing drivers to check their emails/texts while driving without it being obvious to an observer.

Here's an idea- on the extremely rare occasion you actually have to deal with the police, wait 10 fucking minutes to look at your texts. Also, if you need to deal with the police more than once every 5 or 6 years, take a good hard look at what you're doing wrong with your life.

Provide quick updates to stock/commodity traders who are on the go or not near a desktop/laptop.

So does a smartphone, with a better UI, and more screen space for easy access to information

Allow joggers to skip songs without carrying their smartphones in their hands.

Or they could use voice control. But I doubt holding it in their hands or fishing it out of ones pocket is really all that much worse than trying to fuck around with your watch while jogging. In fact I would bet either of those are easier.

Yeah, still no valid use cases for a smartwatch.

Weasels that know corporate double speak are ruining everything though. You know we don't mourn the T-rex. We talk about the dinosaurs as being really big and dumb.

They were all psychopaths!! Lizard brains.

When the cockroaches are mulling over what our existences might have been like, they will all say that the weasels died out because of our stupidity and overconfidence. They'll say we were monsters, too. Big and dumb. Lizard brains.

Unobtrusive to me means that the technology does only what I want it to but we all know that technology today serves its master, which is NOT the end user. This is an invasion.

Let's apply this towards eventually getting Matrix-styled learning models. Eventually we could implant memories of how to perform any skill. We could enable permanent muscle-memory learning instantaneously. Not only learning karate but being able to apply the lessons with strength and precision. Never having to work out to be in shape. Understanding advanced physics without ever taking a course at a university or even having any partial interest in the subject. That's a step towards singularity.

To what extent are we able to compute safety related human dynamics issues and what is slowing us down in this particular programming area?

Can we ever come up with a safety system for a workplace that would be able to overcome employee buy-in issues early on, especially if the typical large corporation is in a constant tug of war with profit and employee needs?

You see whenever we introduce changes in policy in the workplace, employees assume they are going to be required to do MORE but they are not getting more money for the work so this tends at times to cause resistance from employees to safety policies. Management doesn't often understand the issues at hand so they tend to make contradictory safety policies as well, saying that things need to be addressed in a timely fashion.

But in the aftermath of this complexity, companies are often just faking safety in order to appear to be safe when in fact they are running at a significant moral hazard to everyone (their staff, the general public and anyone else for that matter).

This particular problem is of great interest to me and I find that whenever there is an imbalance between management and employee needs there is a systemic problem that is solvable but yet only once all the variables are on the table. The problem with human safety is that most of the variables are unknown.

The general equation for solving safety related issues is:

For every task an employee is required to do or will reasonably be presented with, the employee must be trained to perform the task safely within prescribed safety policy. This idea is fundamentally at odds with bravado in the workplace, hero complexes, profit margins and it goes directly against human psychopathy that is prevalent in modern corporate culture.

What's the best approach to stabilizing a safety model?

Unless the particles aren't the message but the means of communication. Maybe they form some kind of field mechanic communications bridge to enable instantaneous communications?

We should consider something like this instead of probes like Voyager. Eventually we'll find a way to use fields or lasers as a communications field conduit that enables immediate lagless communications. Someone is probably working on this right now. To some extent the teleportation technology we've seen for communications could use such beams as guidance and accelerators that cut down lag. So maybe instead of thousands of years the lag is like a day or an hour or a few minutes.

A darker side of this could mean that the existence these focused particles could prove someone is communicating with their homeworld from Earth.

The film Kpax used this kind of idea as his transportation method, which was a pretty awesome film.

Makes for some awesome sci-fi even if it's far fetched!

It would be really cool if we discovered these particles were actually packets of alien data. I mean if WE found a new civ and we decided to contact them I wonder how they would adapt to our technology. Wouldn't it present in a kind of similar way?

Because if these particles are pretty special, which they are, then can we not assume they might not be naturally occurring?

Mobile industry is afoul with moral hazard. They simply don't care about their clients because they only want to get paid once and then milk the clients for information.

Google's Android phones flat out REFUSE to uninstall Facebook, for example.

Users do not have control because we're experiencing what Oligarchy feels like.

Some of us remember what it was once like when you wanted to buy something and they would kiss your ass and make you at home while you were shopping. If you had any problems they would bend over backwards to serve you. That mentality is dead in the goods & service industry.

We are approaching the dusk of the psychopathic corporation era. Nothing after that folks. Thanks for playing.

JS is totally impulsive for a site designer. They just decide to add so many different bells and whistles that they don't have enough time to do penetration tests on any of it. They grab source code from ANYWHERE and tack it on their site. Nobody checks that stuff.

Run NoScript and there are tons of sites calling 10+ different JS blocks.

Moral hazard.

I've been doing technical interviews for 15 years. And any day of the week I'd take someone with a degree over someone with 5 or 6 years more experience without one. Oh, I'll miss a few good hires that way, but I'll miss out on more bad ones. And that's what far more important- its better to miss making a good hire than make a bad one. In those 15 years I have seen perhaps 4 people without a degree have even a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of the craft-- and 2 of those I'm thinking of dropped out their senior year of college for medical or family reasons. The rest have all been language of the week cruft who I wouldn't hire to write webpages. I won't even interview them anymore- too many have failed, the small percentage of useful hires you'd find aren't worth the time.

Umm, Einstein wasn't bad at math. Apparently you're bad at history though.

http://content.time.com/time/s...