Well, you may laugh about that, but in the past that is exactly what happened, and we try to cover it up now in scientific circles.

It took a religious liberation to stop people to adhere to ancient texts that could only be interpreted by priests. People started looking for the Creator by investigating the creation. This religiously motivated search has added tremendously to science. For example, the Frederik Ruysch collection in the KunstKammer in St Petersburg is from that period.

Alas, we like to think that science is "neutral", just observing and deducing. Any other motives are left out of the educational system. So we learn that Newton saw an apple falling and wrote his laws. And then deduce Kepler's laws from them. It actually was the other way around: Kepler thought that the creation had to be "harmonic" and therefore brilliantly simple. So planet movements could not be governed by more than second order formulas. That (and being brilliant in measurement of position of celestial bodies) led him to discover his laws, from which Newton derived his.

Now I am not in favour or against religion, but I am very much against rewriting history. Especially in science. Some problems are much easier solved with one school of thought than with another. For example, Pythogoras' theorem is easily solved with greek math, and very hard with arabic math. Even schools of thought that you might considered "flawed" can accidentally yield insightful results. Suppressing any school of thought in science is a crime to science itself, and making even making science into a form of religion (with believers in "neutrality").

Off course not, but you must combine it with XML, and XSLT. What purpose does it serve to only write a program in SQL at run-time, and have it interpreted at run-time if you do not let the database server wrap the results in a human-hostile text format at run-time and parse it at run-time with the client? Especially if all the object-oriented techniques now make it possible to have enough separation to request the person details at index locations 3, 17 and 173?

If you program blind-panic-style, I can imagine that you fire a zillion overly complicated queries at a server. But if your code is even halfway organized, ISAM-style requests (sorry the buzzword is "NOSQL" these days) work faster, are easier to understand and maintain, and support optimizations like caching out of the box.

But an official regulating authority presenting itself as a complete idiot is not? Off course, they did that numerous times in the past, and always got away with it.

I owned a Seiko MessageWatch (see http://mako.cc/copyrighteous/t...). It was functional for about 3 years. Off course, a modern-day variant can be connected to a laptop or desktop computer to upgrade the firmware, which the MessageWatch could not. So the idea is ancient, but maybe the time is ripe now.

On the other hand, My Nokia N900 was supported for about 3 years as well. Maybe people want to spend a lot of money on phones, but I doubt if they want to spend that much money on a watch that is already obsolete when you open the package.