Microsoft's hardware isn't all bad - just think of their human interface devices, which are highly esteemed. Their reputation with mobile devices is much spottier, though, with the Zune probably being one of the better ones. Their smartwatch might be good (especially since they bought Nokia's mobile devices division who know how mobile devices work) but on the other hand Microsoft does have a history of shooting themselves in the foot with anything that fits in your hand but isn't a peripheral. That makes it easy to crack a few jokes about the device.

If Microsoft indeed does as you say (I don't know, I'm not in the market for a smartwatch) then I think the brainpower behind the watch comes more from Nokia than from Microsoft proper. Not that that's a bad thing. If Microsoft defers to its ex-Nokia engineers when it comes to mobile devices that's probably better for Microsoft Mobile, Microsoft prime and the quality of their mobile products. I, for one, would welcome more competent mobile competition from Microsoft. Competition is good.

And, for the record, I don't hate Microsoft's mobile products. I find them amusing because historically they have been the mobile market's comic relief character but I don't hate them.

PHP is the boring, reliable choice. It's popular enough that it's probably still going to be mainstream in twenty years. The ease of entry means a steady stream of neophytes who end up checking out PHP at their first web language.

It's not a pretty language but you can be reasonably certain that for the forseeable future it's going to stay. It's nowhere near as nice as Ruby on Rails or Python/Django but it does have a huge market share so there's both relatively many people who speak it and a lot of ready-to-use code, from snippets to frameworks.

The huge amount of available code is a bit of a mixed bag, though - PHP attracts a lot of entry-level coders and in many cases it shows. On the one hand you have things like Twig (a clone of Django's template engine) that are a delight to work with; on the other hand you have things like most WordPress plugins, which consist of barely-working code written by someone who thinks that "model-view-controller" involves Kate Moss staring at a gamepad. The fact that PHP makes it easy to write code that is wrong but still runs doesn't help here.

PHP has flaws. A lot of them. It's a pretty annoying language to work with. But it's not going to fade away anytime soon and that is its strength. If that makes it desirable to you then PHP is a reasonable choice. If it doesn't you might want to stay with Perl or take a look at trendier languages like Ruby, Python or JavaScript.

Inspections.

Insurance.

Civil and criminal liability.

The worst that can happen with a jail broken phone is that you will brick it.

It'd probably have a 5" display, quadrophonic sound and an octacore CPU and run an unmodified Windows RT. Due to weight concerns most of the battery had to be sacrificed, limiting its life to an etimated fifteen minutes - but no other smartwatch has both Office and HDMI and you can always use the USB port to hook it up to an external power source if you want to use it on the go. You see, Microsoft gets mobile devices.

Or they decide they actually want to make money and release a generic Android-based smartwatch. Their Nokia arm doesn't seem too hung up about reinforcing the Windows hegemony if it gets in the way of business.

Listening, no.

Sharing what you've heard for fun and profit, yes.

Freedom of assembly. Freedom of speech.

How do you tell a small businessman that others can organize and raise funds to win an election and he can't? How do you make that argument to the NRA or the NAACP? The teacher's union or the EFF?

This is as blatantly corrupt a political argument as I have ever heard expressed.

I don't care whether the voice comes from the right or the left.

I do care when the reformer starts to think that because he has the money and the power, he alone has heard the voice of God --- and that anything he does is perfectly all right.

I've been using this wonderful device for controlling drip irrigation:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...

The user interface is brain-dead simple. The dial simply has 17 settings, for
1: Daily for 2 minutes
2: Daily for 5 minutes
3: Daily for 10 minutes ...
7: Every other day for 5 minutes
8: Every other day for 10 minutes ...
12: Every third day for 10 minutes
13: Every third day for 15 minutes

That's it! There isn't an option for "2 minutes every 3 days" because -- guess what -- gardeners don't actually need that level of control! It just has a laser focus on a simple user interface that will be good for 99% of residential customers.

Would my life be better if I had to change the batteries in the irrigation controller every 5 days to power its wifi? Or if I had to run mains power and Ethernet cabling out into the garden for it? Would my life be better if I had a fiddly iPhone/Android app with more settings pages than I'd care to use, maybe a cloud-based controller like my Nest? Do I ever go on holiday and wish I'd changed the watering schedule before departing?

NO.

Every industry has a technological base and a social reason for its existence.

Taxi services have a long history of abuses which the geek conveniently chooses to forget. Perhaps because for him the taxi is a convenience and not a necessity.

In a neighboring city, black and poor, the only accessible, affordable, suburban sized supermarket is a cab ride midtown.

In the hospital district.

What begins as tragedy ends as farce.

How does this help when the tower has to know how to bill the call?

In the early days, ca. 1880, the telephone company owned the phone and the wire.

At least one local telephone exchange in the Northeast began experimenting with phonographic music-on-demand over the lines about ten years later.

The courts began looking at the use of the public airways for paid subscription services no later than the 1920s. Then and now such services were regarded by the courts as far too useful to be compromised by the cheap and the greedy.

Then and now the courts have had no trouble whatever assigning different rights to the energy which falls from the sky and the information it may carry.

Sennheiser has a lot of stuff on the market. You can get a pair of Sennheisers for twenty bucks. They won't be terribly good but they're actually a decent stepping stone if you want to get people off five $CURRENCY supermarket specials without scaring them off with a huge price tag.

Now, there are great budget earphones. If you like in-ear monitors you might want to try some from Visang/Brainwavz or VSonic. Both companies tend to punch above their weight in terms of sound quality while having reasonable prices.

more like a fixed array of antennas serving a great many people.

and marketed to the same audience that began subscribing to community antenna services in the late 1940s.

The Supremes don't take it well when you try to evade their decisions by resorting to half-assed tricks and gimmicks. Tricks that may be particularly embarrassing to the minority who stood by you the first time around.