Not legally. You can pirate Google Play Store, then download Play Services through it. But you can't get a legal license to Play Store without paying Google.

Yes, if you pirate it you can run it. The reason it isn't shipped with those devices is Google won't license it to them. Its not licensed to the ROMs either.

I recently read an article (I wish I could find it again) that describes how and why Netflix does this. Basically, they train their viewers to watch for many certain qualities and attributes of movies, which are then tagged and categorized to set up their recommendation and category systems.

For example, they might use a few movies as a baseline for a ratings system so their viewer/ranker staff are on the same page ("on a scale of 1-10, how sweet and sappy is this movie? Does it have a strong female lead? Does it feature cute animals?"), then the viewers watch the film and fill out extensive and standardized tagging information about it, which they build their ratings from.

The article describes it in much better detail, but it's clear that the level of standardization and depth in their tagging and categorizing is beyond what you'd be able to get from the general public.

Not the Play Store, Google Play Services. Totally different things. Google Play Services is a bunch of functionality like maps, geofencing, fusion location detector, activity detection, etc that they only license for a fee to OEMs that agree to a large list of terms they have to agree on. Google Play Services is basically the carrot they use to force OEMs to play by their rules.

If you want to run a custom rom for any reason (for example, privacy and securtiy) you can't run google play services.

But the smartphone allowed people to do things they couldn't already do. The smartwatch allows them to.... not take their smartphone out of their pocket. That's it, its a subset of all the functionality of their phone, and it doesn't do most of them that well. There's nothing compelling about them.

Ah, your post reminds me that I forgot an argument:

5. The pebble already does this!

Ok, the pebble fails at your couple requirements (while it's not much bigger overall than a regular watch, the rectangular corners and whatnot make it more cumbersome. It always get caught in my long sleeves. And it's cheesy-looking), it is waterproof and the battery lasts almost a week.

Here we go again. Let's just skip ahead to the arguments made every time there's a story about smart watches. Please note that the exclamation point at the end of each argument is the indicator that THIS argument is right, and everyone else is a moron.

1. Nobody wears watches anymore, they are just jewelry!
  1a. These are too cheap and ugly to count as jewelry. I only wear a $180000 dollar watch to show off how awesome I am!
  1b. I wear a watch, because I hate pulling my cell phone out of my pocket!

2. These are dumb, the charge doesn't last long enough to be useful.
  2a. My $5 watch from 1993 never needs to be charged!
  2b. My $180000 watch doesn't have a battery, it is wound by a servant that comes into my room every night to care for the watch!

3. They aren't rugged/waterproof enough!
  3a. Neither is your $1800000 jewelry watch!
  3b. I don't care what happens to my $5 watch, but it keeps on working, what about these?
  3c. I regularly go scuba diving, parachuting, race car driving, and enjoying fine wine on my yacht. That's when I'm not busy having great sex twice a day. This watch won't work for me!

4. I don't want to be MORE plugged in! What happened to just getting away from all your notifications and enjoying life?

Ok, now that we've gotten those out of the way, is there any NEW discussion about these things, or should we just move on?

And I gave my reasoning. You can keep on to your infantile libertarian dreams, but a government agency is always more trustworthy than a private company- a government agency has at least some checks and balances and accountablility. A private agency has absolutely none, and is motivated solely by profits. Belief that they will actually do their job is asinine.

Private regulation is no regulation

Sure he does- he says a private organization. There is no way in hell a private organization would ever be legit. First off, a private organization could make more money by reducing their oversight and rubber stamping, at least in the short term. And that's all most care about. Secondly, even if they didn't drug companies could make more money by setting up sock puppet regulators so they'd eventually just do that.

Private regulation is no regulation- period.

Oh look, the Libertardians are out in full force.

Yes, the FDA is supposed to be enforcing efficacy. That's its entire point- to ensure that drugs do what they say.

Nor would regulating apps be about efficacy and not safety. If an app says you should take a certain drug and that drug has side effects, its a safety issue. If it provides a diagnosis and that's wrong, its a safety issue.

In other words, provide no oversight at all while an "independent" firm rubber stamps all the industry's apps for a completely legal fee which ends up going to the executives of the fake company via bonuses, then let it fold and start up a new one.

Privatized enforcement is no enforcement. If it can't be overseen by the government it needs to either be banned. You can open up the question of if it needs to be regulated at all, but providing the illusion of safety and regulation when there is none is far worse.

15 years experience in a mix of small companies (I'm at my 3rd startup, the other two were successfully sold) and large (including HP and Amazon). This includes stint as principal at some of those companies and lead developer at one of the startups.

Net positive shouldn't be more than a month. They're already trained programmers, even if they don't have the business knowledge to take on whole features they can be used as an assistant and start being worth their pay almost on day 1. The only way to be net negative is to take more time from senior programmers than they save by doing work, the only programmers that should have that issue for more than a week are juniors.

You're hiring bad people, or you're a shitty manager. Or both. I have yet to see a job where a mid to senior level hire isn't making positive contributions within a month, and generally they're at least getting something done by the end of the first week, even if its just minor bug fixes. If you're taking 18 months to train someone up, you're getting the absolute bottom of the barrel hires and you aren't doing your job of farming out work to them on a level they can contribute in the intermediate time. Your company would be better off if you were replaced by someone halfway competent.