I mostly stopped wearing a watch because my phone does that now. I only need a watch in secure areas where phones (and smart watches) aren't allowed.

Pocket watches went out of style when miniaturized and rugged wristwatches became cost effective. Now pocket watches are "back" in the form of a small computer in a pouch - aka a smart phone. A wristwatch can't have enough of a display area to be useful as "the" mobile computer a person carries around. And there's no real reason someone would want to carry two. So except perhaps as a style thing, the wristwatch isn't coming back.

You'd have better luck with a fallout-style pip boy -- a band covering the forearm with a screen a good 8 inches long.

That's how the raw milk people do it. You buy a share of the cow and get milk from that cow.

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?...

Why don't you tell us what you really think.

Seriously though, this is how patents work. Law isn't math and it pays math no more heed than it pays any other point of view. If you learn nothing else today, understand that from a legal perspective math is just another point of view.

If you ask a mathematician, all the universe is math. Folks who practice law have a different point of view. Unsurprisingly, the legal point of view prevails in court.

Because a "data compression algorithm" is more than a mathematical equation. Indeed, outside the material scope of a computer it has no existence, except perhaps as a thought problem.

The idea of mechanically separating grain is not patentable but a machine which actually does so is. And that patent will cover any machine which works substantially the same way, which is to say follows the same process or algorithm. Do you follow the difference?

What SCOTUS said yesterday was that merely adding a computer to something already practiced in the public domain does not remove it from the public domain. It is not patentable. Not new. That should come as a big "duh" moment for anyone who thought otherwise. But the invention of something that didn't exist in a non-computer form and for which a computer is an essential component, well that is patentable. And the patent will cover any computer or other device running it.

Prima donnas? You misunderstand the nature of 9's. It's not about status, it's about waste. If you waste their time with repetitive work they could eliminate with automation, they resent it. Give them the responsibility AND the authority. Demand that the work be done, but don't set capricious requirements on the how. You'll rarely be disappointed.

As for documentation, 9's document for other 9's and other 9's have little trouble following the work. A 7 can't always follow a 9's thinking well enough to change the code, even when you luck out with a particularly good communicator.

If you follow your approach, you'll have high turnover with any 9's you manage to hire. You don't offer them anyone to learn from and you force them to dumb down every good idea they have. That's why google only hires 9's -- they can't afford not to.

Open source did destroy Sun. But not with criticism. Sun failed to recognize the threat from Linux until well after Linux's performance and reliability had achieved parity with Solaris.

That Java ran very poorly on Solaris also did not help.

The match between Sun and Oracle still strikes me as bizarre. Oracle software favoring Sun workstations can only hurt Oracle. And the only synergy between the two is that a lot of Oracle software can run on Sun equipment.

IBM would have been a much better match. Owning Sun's IP would have allowed IBM to incorporate the best remaining pieces of Solaris into Linux, cementing IBM as THE vendor for large-scale Linux equipment. And Java would have put IBM back on the general computing map without the risk inherent to the PC hardware business they sold off.

A 7 can configure backup software so that a 4 can change the tapes. A 9 can automate the backup process so that there are no tapes to change. And when I go to restore a file from the 9's backup it'll have actually worked. The 7's backups will be more iffy, especially if the 4 neglected to change the tapes.

I'd rather hire the 9. Then I don't need the 4 or the 7. And since the 9 is paid less than the sum of the 4 and 7's salaries, I save money to boot.

As am I. And I well understand the benefits that diverse perspectives resulting from diverse backgrounds brings to a team. But when I have a chance to hire a 9, I hire the 9. I only hire the 7 when I can't afford to wait for a 9 to become available. I'd rather pay the 9 to automate the 7's work down to nothing than pay the 7 to do the repetitive work he can handle.

A 7 is "nearly" a 9? You may have a different definition of "nearly" than the tech folks asking you to hire staff for them. If your rankings accurately reflect the candidates' competence, a 7 will be unable to handle the top 20% of the tasks a 9 can do.

'' Alan Butler, employee number 530, who at age 18 was once Sunâ(TM)s youngest employee, mused somewhat wistfully: âoeWe should have charged $1 a seat for every Java licenseâ and that would have generated billions in cash annually, perhaps saving the company. âoe ''

Fool. You'd have made about $300. With all of Java's other early problems, a price tag would have ended it before it could gain any momentum.

More likely they have a one-size-fits-all set of procedures for sanitizing equipment and simply followed whatever ridiculous steps those procedures called for. For example, FPGA's contain code, so if you're sanitizing a piece of classified equipment containing classified FPGA's then you destroy the FPGA's. If your procedures are one-size-fits-all then you always destroy the FPGA's, even when its a piece of COTS equipment where the classified information is solely on the hard disk.

Hanlon's razor. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Again, why would someone agree to that but not agree to streaming?

You're asking why if someone doesn't want to fly on a jet they're not willing to fly in a propeller-driven plane instead. It's not jets they're against. They don't want to fly. They don't have to fly. So they're not gonna fly.

Get it?

This argument makes sense to a lot of copyright owners -- all the ones who participate in Netflix streaming. What possible advantage over streaming would any of them realize with this "virtual DVD" concept? And why would anyone who rejects streaming not also reject the virtual DVD concept?