Always on and listening doesn't seem to bother Amazon Echo users. That was Amazon's best selling product this Xmas.

No one was forcing you to buy them.

The Kinect was probably the most innovative thing Microsoft has ever done. It was amazing that it worked as well as it did. I will never understand why its mere existence was so hated by so many people. Microsoft, of course, also shares the blame for mishandling the Xbox One version, and then running away from this amazing tech due to a few vocal complaints.

It says that only growth has slowed, but 20% of people use some sort of smartwatch. While that's a lot less than the 77% of people who use smartphones, 20% is still a pretty large chunk of people. There are a ton of products that never even come close to reaching that kind of market saturation, and yet no one labels them "failures". The bar is set ridiculously high for what it considered to be a success for smartwatches versus almost everything else in them marketplace.

I love the smartwatches I've had and think they are about the greatest things on earth. I love having quick notifications that I can feel on my wrist vibrating. I like being able to quickly get all the stats I want to see like weather, time, and steps without having to pull my phone out. I even like the speakerphone on my Android Wear watch. There seems to be significant public resistance to even the concept of wearing a wristwatch, much less one that can offer some utility. It goes beyond the, "Meh, I'm not interested," and is more like, "Not only am I not interested, but I can't understand why anyone would be interested. It's a social menace! It should be outlawed! Smartwach users should be thrown in jail!" I simply cannot understand the extreme hostility. For me, the smartwatch has been a godsend. Can I live without one? Yes, but it's worth the extra value that I get having one.

Cost is an issue. Most smartwatches today are extremely expensive, which is probably the main reason why people aren't getting them. Drop them to under $100 and there would be much more interest. Once people have used a smartwatch, they realize all the things they can do with them and how useful they really are. I've never known anyone to abandon their smartwatch once they've tried it. Even the skeptics seem to be impressed. Battery life is also an issue, of course. Too much focus on making a pretty OLED screen instead of a less power hungry transflective LCD one.

Pebble got both the price point and battery life right on their watches. Unfortunately, mismanagement did them in. Meanwhile, I see so many people with Apple Watches, which means that it can't be all bad. There are a lot of smartwatch enthusiasts out there, but they are a relatively small niche at the moment. It's just hard to get over the, "What do I need a watch for?" resistance that is incredibly intense for some reason. Apple has been quite successful in busting through. It's really time for Google to step up their game. At least Samsung is trying. At some point, someone will figure out a way to break through the doubters and make people want to try something that really can be something worthwhile if they try it.

Net Neutratilty existed for decades before 2014. It was the founding principle of the Internet. Now there are no rules. It will probably end up like cable TV.

From the very beginning, there were ALWAYS net neutrality rules. The Obama administration merely reiterated the existing rules that had been in place for decades. Now there are no rules at all. We will see how disastrous this ends up being in the long term.

I hear that's coming soon. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at the local planning department on Alpha Centauri for 50 years now!

"baseball on the other hand... I can't see that catching on anywhere. It's cricket without the good bits, and cricket's got the market sown up for "sit around drinking while some people play a technical, but not terribly energetic sport"."

Well, baseball has caught on in a lot of places. Pretty much the entire Western Hemisphere plays the game and is more popular in Latin America and South America than it is in the United States of America. Even Canada enjoys the game. Of course it is very big in Japan and several other Pacific Rim countries. Like Cricket, baseball was exported through imperial influences and has little chance of waning. It's more popular outside the US than in it. It is also showing surprising popularity in places you wouldn't expect, like Australia and the Netherlands (!!!). While it will never reach the worldwide popularity of Cricket (which is the most 2nd most popular sport worldwide), it definitely can be considered a global sport.

Anyways, I'm a big fan of Cricket, but it's hard to argue that it is the more "energetic" sport. 3 day matches of endless batting where the nearest seats are 75 meters away. You have to be really committed to the game to appreciate it (which is also similar to baseball). As sportswriter Henry Chadwick, considered the "father" of Baseball, said about Cricket: "Americans do not care to dawdle over a sleep-inspiring game, all through the heat of a June or July day. What they do they want to do in a hurry. In baseball all is lightning. Thus the reason for the American antipathy to cricket can readily be understood." Few would say that Baseball is "lightning" today, but that just shows you how less energetic Cricket would be in comparison. I realize that nowadays they play much shorter one day and Twenty20 matches most of the time, but it's really something you have to be really committed to appreciate.

Soccer's popularity has gone up significantly in the US. Generations of kids having played the game who have become adults certainly has helped, but the all-sports/all the time TV and streaming networks has helped even more. The biggest winner is the Premier League, as American fans want to watch the best teams and have adopted their favorite ones. If MLS soccer ever is able to compete on the same level, it too will become significantly more popular.

The younger generations are interested in "extreme" high action/less strategy types of sports, so soccer (despite it's low scoring), basketball, lacrosse (the new hip sport), rugby, and hockey are sure to make gains in the future. Golf, football, and baseball are sure to continue their declines, with baseball's decline being arrested somewhat by its high youth participation and high availability (your favorite team has a game on TV almost every day).

I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.

The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.

They're teaching the crews with a self-taught course on CD-ROM, which they have to do at sea, but they don't because they only sleep 3 hours a night.

A friggin' CD-ROM course to learn how to pilot a ship...Amazing! Is it narrated by Troy McClure, too?

Some heads need to roll for this... seriously! This is beyond unacceptable.

That is both horrifying and scandalous. Really, how much could real training cost? Certainly less than a couple of cruise missiles. It's horrifying to think that our Navy has practically no one who can pilot a ship on their one. It's inconceivable to think you could have a whole bridge crew that doesn't know what they are doing! Everyone should have at least a basic course on navigation and seamanship. Every officer, at the very least, should be able to navigate by sextant, compass, and longitude recordings based on speed and direction. Even recreational cruise ship crews know how use those tools to backup their instruments. I can't believe that skills that had been developed and mastered for thousands of years have simply been thrown away for unreliable, hackable technology. And yes, they should also learn semaphore and mores code as well. What are they teaching these crews,--anything at all?

It did have higher resolution than NTSC and much better color, too. The reason why it was 50Hz is that their electrical grid was 50Hz and back in the old days, the TV's would use the AC frequency as a sync timer. Since the US has 60Hz AC, NTSC used 60 Hz as their "clock".

"300 baud is the hotness"???

Yeah, like 40 years ago when just getting connected was really cool... But even that speed become completely outdated by about 1984 or so...