Why not? High income dropouts are so few that they make little difference in the result, especially if you do your statistics right and report the median rather than arithmetic mean.

Because anything less than a dive watch is a device that I have to be careful with around water. It isn't about the dive functions (made largely obsolete in recent years by wrist mounted dive computers) and there is very little "Special" about a dive watch. It is just an exceptionally robust watch. This is the kind of watch that people who wear watches for function tend to wear, as opposed to those where watches are jewelry.

I wear a shock resistant dive watch. Quite unlike my smart phone, I don't worry about dropping it, hitting it against solid objects, or getting it wet because it shrugs these things off like it was nothing. I don't worry about losing it because it comfortably resides on my wrist regardless of what I am wearing.

I want a smart watch that is like that.

However, much of that advantage is lost if I still have to carry around a cumbersome, unattached, and fragile smart phone. It is fine to augment the smart phone when the two devices are together but if the smart watch is non-functional on it's own than I don't want one.

If the technology is not up to these challenges (And, frankly, I don't think it is) then it is not up to creating practical smart watches. Come back in 10 years and there may be a smart watch worth wearing. The battery problem may be solved by that time too.

Not the first farmers. Early European civilization certainly arrived by sea from the Middle East and invasion/colonization from the sea was repeated many times. It is not terribly shocking to think that agriculture could also have arrived initially by sea. However, that is a very different thing than claiming that the first farmers in the Middle East were also sailors. A thousand years or more could have passed between the beginning of farming in the Middle East and the transmission of that technology to Europe.

Crossover SUV != sports car. They are bigger, taller and commonly used to carry bicycles, skis, and other sporting equipment on their roofs. Crossover SUV's are highly utilitarian which is very unlike sports cars.

No. Hardware is Silicon Valley's founding religion. Software came later and now real hardware startups can not get funding. Sparce's experience shows that even if your development is trivial (no significant R&D) and you don't do any of the manufacturing yourself, it can still be a bumpy road to selling product.

I see no evidence that this is improving. All that has happened is that ambitious hardware startups no longer happen and people are getting excited over hobby scale development that didn't use to make the news. Well, to be fair, Kickstarter has allowed "super hobby" scale developments to take off that used to fall into a no-man's land. They were too small to form a viable business around and yet too big for a couple of guys to pull off in their spare time. Still, this is nowhere near a hardware renaissance. The promise land is not just some distance away. There is little evidence that we are going there.

The knowing how is the problem. While there is little down that a human level AI could be built if we knew what to build, it is not clear that we are smart enough to come up with a design in any kind of directed fashion.

“If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.”
  Ian Stewart, The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World

This is conjecture, of course but there is scant evidence against it. Some AI researchers have taken this philosophy or something similar to heart and propose that the only way to make real progress in AI is to reproduce the processes that lead to the human brain: random changes and selection pressure. The trouble is, even if it works and a human AI comes out of it (and it is no clear that we are even smart enough to provide the right selection process), it seems we would have little control and less understanding of the result. Benign but useless seems the most likely outcome.

Well, not exactly. But certainly if you proposed having a computer onboard in 1961, the first reaction would be: The B52 is big but it's not that big!

Second would be "What would you do with one?"

Point of Sale systems usually operate under more controlled conditions than end user machines. Would these updates keep your XP machine plausibly secure or highly vulnerable to threats not considered serious to point of sale systems? What about vulnerabilities in components not present in POSReady 2009 but used in XP?

Citation needed. I looked through the regulation and I see no mention of requiring a certain price for ZEV's.

What it does require is that a certain % of the sales be of ZEV's. If they are change too much, they won't sell enough. This leads to two solutions:

1) Spend little on R&D for an electric vehicle. Sell it just cheap enough (at a loss if you have to) to meet the minimum requirement. Whine about it.
2) Put some effort and investment in developing an electric car that people will actually want with a manufacturing cost that leads to a price people are willing to pay. Refine the design over time so that it becomes that profit center that saves your bacon when the bottom inevitably drops out of the IC car market as the cost of gas heads toward the stratosphere.

Technically we can't be in a recession because that is a macro economic term and the economy is growing. However, we can and are in situation where much of the economy is dragging. That is perfectly compatible with a tech bubble. Here in Silicon Valley (or, more properly the Bay Area since the focus has shifted toward San Francisco), there a many many startups raising large amounts amounts of money and chasing big ticket buyouts or IPO's with questionable business plans. Very frothy. However, it is only party time in the space of Internet and mobile services.

Network infrastructure? No. Telecom? No. Semiconductors? Are you serious? The only "hardware" startups that get funded are those that apply the absolute bare minimum of hardware and wrap a service around it. Outside the bubble, a few companies are doing well (like Apple) but, as you have observed, they haven't passed much down to the rank and file. I don't think it is as terrible as 2008 but it looks a lot more like 2008 than 1998.

Returning control to a human would not necessarily mean giving control to the human in the car. You could imagine a team of remotely connected people whose job it is to drive under circumstances not anticipated by the software.

However, any kind of hand off can only be of a the slow to no speed variety. In any circumstances that requires a quick decision, the automation will have to carry though on it's own. There will not be time to recognize the alert, access the situation and react even if there is a skilled driver already sitting behind the wheel.

Robots stores in Science Fiction are about powerful artificial sentient minds wrapped in an mobile and often human like container.

Robots in real life have been defined as machines with mechanical appendages that can programmed and reprogrammed for a variety of tasks. Their computational capabilities are seldom extraordinary and they usually don't even employ AI.

More recently, "robot" has also been used to describe machines with ai-like programming even if they are single function (like a robotic car).

When a word is used in three greatly different ways, should we be surprised that there is is confusion about that a "robot" can do?

How daft! We do not want people who have trained themselves. If we wanted someone who learned technology outside of a corporate setting, we would hire someone straight out of college and we don't do that. We want other companies to train you.

No need for such contortions. Patents are explicitly defined in the US Cnstitution as a federal matter.

Does patent litigation ever even use the state courts?