This is I think the thing that so many people miss about the Apple Watch announcement. The problem with existing smart watches hasn't been that the features aren't useful, it's that the promised features simply don't work. I owned two different smart watches and had the same experience:

- Extremely limited app selection
- Very, very slow and oversimple apps that did exist
- With input that was just plain cumbersome and unreliable
- And bluetooth connectivity that had to be constantly restarted/reconnected (like, every time you tried to use it, bluetooth was down)

As I've said in previous posts, I'm one of those that does still wear a watch every single day, so I could be an obvious target for a smart watch, at least moreso than people that don't wear a watch at all and haven't done so in years, if ever.

But for a smart watch to make sense, it can't be a worse experience than pulling out the phone. Watches will always lose on the screen size front, so it's got to be compelling in other areas. The phone experience does have some problems (you have to pull it out, it's risky to pull out and manipulate in some contexts—walking in the city, for example, where a drop can kill it and jostles from pedestrians can come easily, it's bulky and conspicuous, you have to put it back, and so on), so it's not inconceivable that a smart watch could make sense.

But smart watches thus far have been lessons in user friction—you had to really, really, really want to do a given task *on your smart watch*. One that I tried for a few days (the Sony watch) only recognized about 10% of the taps that you made (Want to tap that button once? Then tap manically on the screen over the button 15 times in rapid succession and hope one of them takes.) and was so slow and oversimple (presumably due to lower processing power) that even aside from UI horribleness, it just plain didn't do anything very well in practical terms.

If the Apple Watch has:

- Processing power analagous to that of smartphones
- A high-resolution display
- Input surfaces and controls that are as reliable as those of smartphones
- Battery life long enough to get through a day with certainty
- Reasonable ruggedness
- Stable bluetooth connectivity without hassles

Then it could well be a winner, not because it claims to do anything new, but because it actually managed to do what smart watches claim to do. So far, my experience with smart watches was that they claim a lot, then do absolutely none of it in practice. It's not that the feature list sucks, it's that the features themselves haven't actually been implemented in such a way that you can use them without sitting down for ten minutes to have a "smart watch session" and eke out a tap or two.

We understand entropy, but have we considered that a symmetrical and opposite phenomena could exist and be primarily responsible for creation of life? That is, some property of information to self-organize that leads to creation of life, and later to creation of intelligence?

While I hate people that drive and text, I don't see the solution proposed by the article as effective. Phones are cheap enough and portable enough that there is no way to enforce such "interlock" if the user does not want to comply.

Fundamentally, text and driving is an interface design problem. Instant messaging interfaces are designed to almost fully occupy your attention while information conveyed is nearly trivial to cognitively process. As such, removing the need to type with your thumbs on a tiny screen to text would be my recommended solution.

You can make similar argument for any life-saving treatment, for example cardiac-health related. Any serious heart-related issue used to be terminal, but we largely addressed this and in process greatly increased average lifespan. Now, if you get to a hospital in time you likely to survive.

Technically, your conclusion is invalid due to hidden premise tied to your Premise 1. What you are trying to implicate with your hidden premise is that life-extending treatment will be forever unaffordable to masses. While possible, this clearly goes against all historical precedent. The likely outcome that at first it will be expensive and unaffordable, then eventually due to economies of scale nearly everyone will have access to it. This "eventually" is short enough that it won't create H. G. Wells' morlocks out of treated population.

I'm also curious how they keep the helium locked up in the drive housing.

Hydrogen is more reactive, and causes some metals to become brittle. Not sure if either of these would be a problem in hard drive applications, though. Presumably the manufacturers have done their homework.

It's probably because your college still uses COBOL and wants to ensure they can still hire inexpensive grads to support them :-)

I am more interested in reinventing of John Romero, the old one only good as a bait for the inevitable flamewars. I am sure we can add more features.

We are guided by consensus a thousand ways every single day, but it's only climate science where people seem to get bent out of shape.

Because trillions of dollars' worth of economic rewiring is being called for on the basis of climate science.

An environmentally-friendly scientist once said that "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." I've never been a fan of that because at the end of the day, "extraordinary" is just somebody's value judgement. But when objectively extraordinary demands are being made, then it seems like a good time to start demanding extraordinary certainty. The language of consensus is not sufficient, because throughout history there are far too many instances of "97% of scientists" agreeing on things that turned out to be completely wrong.

choice. Again—the freedom to do what we want vs. the inability to do the things that we want/need to do, yet labeled conveniently as "more freedom (*though you can't do what you want/need to do with it)."

It's a losing argument. I'm happy to pay for a view. The market has set prices reasonably well. I'm happy to pay for Kindle books, for an iPad, for Adobe Creative Cloud, and many other things. They enable me to do the things that I need to do before I *die*.

Free software can offer none of these things right now. My life is finite; I don't have time to wait for the second coming before doing my computing. The freedom to be shafted? Sure, I suppose if that's how you want to see it. Nonetheless, it's what I want to do. Telling me not to, then selling that to me as "freedom" is just not persuasive. Paternalistic, sure. Persuasively free? Not really.

I used Linux exclusively as my desktop for 17 years (1993-2010). I did it because Linux did what I needed at a price that I needed—for most of that time. Toward the end, it became clear that Linux wasn't able to do the things that I wanted to be able to do—that it was restricting my freedom. The pendulum had swung; I switched to the GNU toolchain way back in the SunOS days because it gave me more freedom, not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones—the freedom to get stuff done that I couldn't otherwise get done; by 2007 or so, being stuck with the FSF world was like using stock SunOS back in the '80s—there were things I wanted to get done that I just plain needed other tools in order to accomplish. I was willing, and remain willing (and most consumers are willing) to pay a reasonable cost to accomplish those things. When powerful computing cost $tens of thousands, GNU was persuasive. But now that it's priced reasonably, we're happy to pay.

The heavy costs of a complete platform switch in mid-life kept me on Linux from about 2007 through 2010, but eventually it became clear that a switch was in order. My labor in maintaining a working Linux desktop and trying to bang free and open software into shape to do the things I needed was exceeding the costs of buying an off-the-shelf solution from a proprietary vendor, by several orders of magnitude.

FSF advocates can argue all they want that somewhere down the road, as a result of my having chosen a "non-free" platform, my freedom will be restricted—but I'll be happy to deal with that eventuality when it comes. I have no interest in sitting around for decades to wait and see if more freedom to accomplish my tasks arrives in pure FSFland; by then, my working years will be over. It's not a tenable proposition.

I began to use the GNU toolchain on SunOS in the '80s; RMS and I are of the same generation, and I value his code and contributions.

However, at the end of the day, his utopian and context-independent understanding of freedom falls flat. Freedom is not about potential, or about futures unrealized. It is about agency, today—at least for most people.

In very simple terms, if what you want is the freedom to watch DRM'ed content that you value, then RMS has no answer for you other than sacrifice—i.e. give up that freedom in the interest of some other freedom that he promises will be better. But that's not an answer to the question, nor is it—practically speaking—freedom at all. I want to watch that movie. RMS suggests that I should choose not to, as a matter of ethnical responsibility and self-interest.

But I already know where my self-interest lies—in watching the movie. And the ethical responsibility to others may be laudable—but it rings hollow to call that a measure of freedom: "Your freedom lies in not doing what you want to do, and others not doing what they want to do."

That's a strange definition of freedom, indeed. It's rather like other utopian versions of freedom, say under the Soviet system—"We are all setting each other free! We have almost no freedom at all today, particularly in comparison to others, but by god, someday, maybe a few decades or a few generations down the road, we'll get there and have far more than them! In the meantime, heads down and sacrifice, everyone! And stop complaining!"

You just won't get that far in the world if you're selling that as "freedom."

So process is in place but is not actually followed. Absolutely no surprise, but it will be your company's problem when root cause analysis of this or that fiery crash turns out that quality review wasn't actually conducted.

I am more excited about spoofing V2V with 'no-movement-congestion-ahead' signal to get all autonomous cars clear from the highway while I drive home with no traffic.

No you don't have expectation of anonymity anywhere, but with Tor breaching your anonymity is prohibitively expensive for most scenarios.

It isn't about bug free on first compile, it is about a) failure-tolerant design b) multiple redundancies. We generally trust airplane auto-pilot systems, there is no reason why similar approach could not be used here.

The real concern is not 'autopilot' feature, it is V2V and introducing remote attack surfaces.

To play devil's advocate, highway driving (at least in North America) is rather simple tasks that does not require extensive computational and sensory demand that city driving would require.
 
I think the key is to clearly map system limitations and have it fail to engage when it isn't up to the task. (e.g. construction or bad weather).