There are a fair number of people out there who happily traded the 2-week battery life of their perfectly functional cell phones for dead-in-a-day smartphones. As it turns out, the inconvenience of having to constantly recharge a smartphone was worth putting up with in exchange for being able to do all the things you can do with a smartphone. Clearly, not everyone shared this sentiment, as you can still see any number of people using non-smartphones today--but significant numbers of people chose functionality over battery life.

It's hardly a stretch of the imagination to see the same thing happening with smart watches.

Even before that: have a business plan. Do your best to determine what you want to create, how expensive it will be to make it, how many people you'll need to manage, how much you expect to charge for it, and how big your likely market is. If you discover that there's no way to make your endeavor even close to profitable, you can save yourself months of heartache and mountains of lost money. Always have a plan, even if you don't stick to it in the end.

This, folks, is a textbook example of "damning with faint praise".

...and as I recall, the guy who founded and ran NeXT was someone who not only was an Apple founder but came back to Apple later, as well. Ended up being pretty important at Apple, too, I think.

No, no, his name's right on the tip of my tongue...give me juuuuust a second...

Yes! You're both presenting a perfectly defensible argument against marketing and reinforcing my original point! Because geeks tend to abhor marketing, we dismiss its significance, and are perennially gobsmacked as to why an intrinsically emotional, manipulatable species is so susceptible to emotional manipulation.

So long as humanity is what it is, reason will only ever get you so far. You either need to blow the doors off with a staggeringly amazing thing, or come to terms with the fact that every single entity who might care about your thing has feelings, and bending those feelings in your favor can work wonders.

It's not all bad, though; emotional manipulation works under much the same constraints. Unless you're a Level 80 Snake Oil Salesman with a hat full of luck, you're going to have a very hard time making your thing last if it doesn't live up to the hype--and your reputation will suffer for it.

It's pretty straightforward, to my mind. With the exception of all but the most staggering technological advancements, widespread adoption of new technology typically requires:

1. a sound implementation,
2. a robust support infrastructure, and
3. an effective marketing campaign.

Geeks, for a variety of reasons, tend to respect the first, grok the second, and abhor the third. I personally believe it's what drives our perpetual cycle of incredulity on this subject--because we so detest the last part of this equation, we refuse to see its importance in getting all those squishy, distracted, emotional bags of water to adopt cool new stuff.

NFC has never had the effective marketing campaign in the US, and only kinda had the support infrastructure. The iPhone has incredible inertia on the marketing front, and Apple have clearly done the legwork on building a good starting lineup of financial institutions and retailers for Apple Pay. It remains to be seen whether this'll be sufficient to make NFC catch on, but it's easily the closest we've come to covering all three of the bases above.

Because each time we overcome a monumental challenge for the first time, we expand the frontier of human knowledge and endeavor.

As our frontier expands, that which was undone becomes possible; that which was possible, replicable; that which was replicable, automatable; that which was automatable, trivial; that which was trivial, obsolete.

Just over a century ago, tinkers managed to propel a glorified kite a few feet through the air. The tangible benefit of this flight of fancy is that today, we complain about the comfort of the seats in mass-produced aircraft that can send us around the globe for a historically infinitesimal cost in time and money.

Seventy years ago, the US government was one year into the construction of ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose digital computers ever created. Upon its completion two years later, it would occupy 680 square feet, require the power of roughly six modern households, process up to 500 operations per second, and spend roughly half its time being repaired. The tangible benefit of this monstrosity is that today you likely carry, on your person, roughly 25 million times more computing power than ENIAC. It is quite likely that use the bulk of this computing power primarily for your own personal entertainment.

45 years ago, after years of research and significant government funding, ARPANET was launched. Not many people expected it to be of any significant practical value; in fact, the first message ever sent over ARPANET only managed to deliver two characters before crashing the entire network for an hour. The tangible benefit of this boondoggle is that today, we have the Internet, the direct descendant of ARPANET.

You've got it backwards--it ain't an error-prone text editor, it's an error-prone human. Even conscientious, process-driven users make stupid mistakes and forget to save their work (especially when they're on a roll.) This protects us from ourselves, not the machines we're working on.

Now, you may be among that handful of people who never forgets to save--in which case, I congratulate you on being in one of the outlier cohorts that software engineers really shouldn't ever spend their time worrying about. :D

Year 1: "You guys, this is even better than [current industry leader]'s tech! Amazing!"
Year 2: "Hardly anybody who has updated to version 5.4 still bleeds from their eyeballs. [current industry leader] hasn't updated their tech for months!"
Year 3: "Samsung is the undisputed leader in virtual reality headsets! They've shipped five times as many units as [current industry leader], and there's no stopping this tidal wave!"
Year 6: "Hey, you should really check out the high-end Samsung VR units. They're every bit as good as [current industry leader] nowadays."

Oh, I do--haven't had a moving violation in 7+ years, back when I was younger and stupider.

That said, I got nailed by a car that decided to try to make a right turn through my car last November. I was in the right lane, going the speed limit, didn't have anyone in front of me, and even saw the other driver overtaking on my left--but there was no way on this green-and-blue earth I could have reacted any faster than I did. A robot -probably- could have, and may well have saved the annoyance of having to go to a body shop to have the other guy's insurance fix it.

From my own perspective, I'm hard-pressed to see how I could have avoided this collision. And frankly, it doesn't really matter that the other driver could have--that doesn't do me a whole lot of good. I don't get to pick and choose who drives next to me.

You're, uh, kinda preaching to the choir. I'm a speed-limit, right-lane, two-second-rule kinda guy.

There was an article a short while ago written by a journalist who rode in a driverless car for a stretch. There was one adjective that really stood out, an adjective that most people don't take into consideration when talking about driverless cars.

That one word: boring.

Driverless cars drive in the most boring, conservative, milquetoast fashion imaginable. They're going to be far less prone to accidents from the outset simply because they don't take the kind of chances that many of us wouldn't even begin call "risky". They drive the speed limit. They follow at an appropriate distance. They don't pull quick lane changes to get ahead of slowpokes. They don't swing around blind corners faster than they can stop upon detecting an unexpected hazard. They don't nudge through crosswalks. They don't cut off cyclists in the bike lane. They don't get impatient. They don't get frustrated. They don't get angry. They don't get sleepy. They don't get distracted. They just drive, in a deliberate, controlled, and entirely boring fashion.

The problem with so, so many of the "what if?" accident scenarios is that the people posing said scenarios presume that the car would be putting itself in the same kinds of unnecessarily hazardous driving positions that human drivers put themselves in every single day, as a matter of routine, and without a moment's hesitation.

Very, very few people drive "boring" safe. Every driverless car will. Every trip. All the time.

Probably, yes--after all, a strobing emergency light is fairly easy to detect, and as automated cars grow in number, you'd likely see more elegant mechanisms for alerting driverless vehicles of the presence of emergency vehicles. I'd imagine that manufacturers would keep some form of the "big red button" emergency stop button we've seen in a number of prototypes, as well.

Unless you have some pretty heavy-duty strobing Christmas lights, probably not. That said, there'll probably any number of ways you could spoof the behavior of an official vehicle. In doing so, though, I'd imagine that you'd fall afoul of the same impersonation laws that exist and work quite effectively today.

Don't overlook Flash--the development tool, not the plugin environment. Flash CC now does a decent job of exporting timeline animations to HTML5 without the overhead of converting to video. It's quirky, and there's still a lot more they can do there, but I suspect Flash-the-authoring-environment will continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in the web animation department for some time to come.

Oh, sure, next thing you'll be trying to tell us that we're going to have a massive, multi-year drought because some East-coast scientists say that farmers are planting their crops wrong. You:

1. Clearly know nothing about farming,
2. are obviously a shill for the Roosevelt administration, and
3. want us to throw out generations of farming wisdom and spend huge amounts of money on a problem that doesn't even exist.

Only an idiot could look at the past decade of incredible crop yields and scream that everything's going wrong. Get off the telegraph, moron.

Josiah H. Blough (Dust-Bowl-skeptic)