I'm one of the guys who got the phone two days ago. You can read my quick review here.

To summarize: the user interface based on swiping works quite nicely, even if a bit confusing at first, and the phone works OK as a minimalistic smartphone. On Day 1, there still are quite many bugs and usability issues that need to be worked out.

Compared to Android or iOS, the visual simplicity of the user interface views is extreme, no buttons or decorations almost anywhere. When you open the phone app, you just see a very plain call log. In the email app, you just get a list of emails, and when you open an email, there's just a title followed by text. On the downside, views are often rather over-simplified, so that things are hidden too well, and workflows to get to what you want are often a bit complex and unintuitive. There's no status row that is always visible, system settings aren't accessible immediately everywhere, but you need to go to the start screen, etc.

Some critical features such as WiFi access point missing (or I just haven't found it after poking around 2 days).

Around 30 native apps; some Android apps work just fine, but many do not, and the selection is in practice very limited.

I think that it is "Evolutionary Psychology" that is the religion -- not science.

If you said, "Evolutionary Psychology is ritualized Nuttery, like Economics," then I would be in complete agreement with you.

A bit of a preview for the future: Rainbow's End.

Oh, here, you can read some of the ideas and thoughts from this presentation he made.

It doesn't only seem plausible at this point, it seems practically guaranteed to arise.

A pack of hair color costs something like $10 at your local store. One problem solved. (If someone has good tips for coloring beard, I'd like to know.)

My guess is that if you want to apply to an organization that uses formal screening process, you're off worse. Networking is the word of the day and if you have a lot of previous work experience, you might already have a professional network. Use it, and sidestep the screening. If not, build your network. Participate in groups, attend conferences, etc. Be active, social, and ambitious, in the right way. Create your own projects, team up, work hard. Target smaller companies that may be more flexible about their hiring practices.

Previous accomplishments are not necessarily a proof of anything, the problem is that everyone can boast about their accomplishments, so nobody pays attention to them if they don't know you, but school grades are official and considered "objective". So, your accomplishments only matter to people who know about them - mainly your network.

Of course, you must be able to develop yourself to the tip of your field. You need to show that you have experience about the field - perhaps write a professional blog, or something, be social. Younger people often have more ambition than us older guys, and you have to rebuild that ambition in yourself, even though I know it can be hard. Be proactive, smart, and develop something bright.

'nuf of pep talk. More booze, sleep.

I can see an argument that a person's device is effectively part of their brain or their body.
I own it, I control it.
Also. Both my device and my body can catch a virus.

Perhaps the problem with BYOD is sick days.

A bunch of anti-vax types on my FB page were posting articles about how schoolchildren showed that plants that were grown with microwave water didn't grow, with side-by-side illustrations.

Snopes debunked it by repeating the experiment.

Until I see confirmations of the experiment, I am highly skeptical.

One of the biggest advantage of a watch, is that it is practically ALWAYS on your body.

So it should have a virtual button somewhere, to ** ring your cell phone ** for you, so that you can find it.

I've been a professional programmer for ~15 years now; What you've said here strikes me as fairly odd.

Object Oriented Programming is nothing mystical. "Associate methods with your data structures by type." There's half of it. "Now inherit the methods in subtypes." There's the other half of it. We could talk about interfaces and polymorphism as well; It doesn't take long: "You can plug a lot of different things into the wall to get electricity, if we share the interface to the wall plug." People have been talking about that in different ways, for at least a thousand years.

Technical thought is broad and deep. Back in the early 80s, people were talking about "Structured Programming," (within the "procedural" world,) and they really hammered in the concepts of encapsulation and cohesion -- much before the popularity of OOP (itself derived from Alan Kay's ideas) in the 1990's. If there are deep ideas in Object Oriented programming, the deep ideas are ideas that share across technical domains of all kinds.

So I don't think "Object Orientated Programming" is any kind of real barrier.

What robots cannot be programmed to do, is answer the question of: "How do we want to live?"

You have assumed that humans have a specific purpose: propagating genes and having kids.

I don't see it that way. Yes, we have a sex drive, but there is no such encoding in the mind that says: "Your purpose is to breed."

I wake up in the morning; I have a million more desires than "just breed." Some of these desires include: I want to live in an enlightened society. I want clean air and water and plants and life. I want a society where people genuinely like one another and grow and learn and develop. More ambitiously, I'd like people to be able to live longer lives. I'd like people with self-discipline and care. I'd like people who want to do what is right, and feel confident that they can do it. Also sex: I want a world that is much more sexual.

But all together, this is a bit more than just, "just breed." We have hearts. In particular, YOU have a heart. You might be depressed in your outlook, but the fact remains. You have a heart.

You've said: "Human beings are not special." I don't see the point of your statement; What does it matter if human beings are special or not? I care more about the kind of life and world that you are wanting to make.

If you're disappointed with how things are going, that disappointment requires a sense that things could be some other way -- the "appointment" that has not been made.

Exactly so.

There's a much better alternative - Vaadin. It allows pure server-side Java development of Ajax web applications much the same way as you would develop desktop applications with Swing, etc. Vaadin renders the server-side UI in the browser with widgets and a JavaScript rendering engine. However, you can also develop client-code in Java. The Java code is compiled to JavaScript with the GWT Compiler, which is also included in Vaadin. In Vaadin 7, the Java objects are serialized transparently between the server-side and client-side, so you can essentially work with the same objects on both sides.

So, there is no real reason for node.js, unless you're really good at JavaScript and want to work with it instead of Java, or you have some JS code that you need to run on both sides. If you have already made a client-side JS library, you can integrate it with Vaadin quite easily.

They use lenses and software to expand the field of view to more than 110 degrees diagonal.

The proper sequence should be:

Humans reason (with their morals) --> Humans write laws/code --> The laws/code go into the machines --> The machines execute the instructions.

Laws are not a substitute for morals; they are the output from our moral reasoning.

It's not about states. It's about cities.