I don't know, the message from No-IP includes the statement: "While we are extremely pleased with the settlement terms, we are outraged by Microsoft’s tactics and that we were not able to completely and immediately restore services to the majority of our valuable customers that had been affected." This sounds an awful lot like code for "Microsoft paid us a metric crap-ton of money, but part of the agreement is that we wouldn't tell how much."

I've been doing technical interviews for 15 years. And any day of the week I'd take someone with a degree over someone with 5 or 6 years more experience without one. Oh, I'll miss a few good hires that way, but I'll miss out on more bad ones. And that's what far more important- its better to miss making a good hire than make a bad one. In those 15 years I have seen perhaps 4 people without a degree have even a basic knowledge of the fundamentals of the craft-- and 2 of those I'm thinking of dropped out their senior year of college for medical or family reasons. The rest have all been language of the week cruft who I wouldn't hire to write webpages. I won't even interview them anymore- too many have failed, the small percentage of useful hires you'd find aren't worth the time.

Umm, Einstein wasn't bad at math. Apparently you're bad at history though.

http://content.time.com/time/s...

See my statement above. I apologize for spreading false information, but I DID get that false information from an error message on Google's web page.

Looks like you're right. Although, today, when I tried to install it in firefox (version 29), I got this error message, which told me that I needed to download Chrome (it did NOT tell me that my browser was too old).

So I stand corrected, I apologize, but I do cast some of that blame onto their own error message.

But equivalent work experience is a lot longer. I might believe that someone with no degree and a decade plus of experience is as good as someone with a degree and 3-4 years, but he'd have to prove it. I find almost nobody without at least 3 years of college has a decent grasp of the fundamentals of computer science- data structures, algorithms, critical thinking and design. The people without degrees tend to just know how to google for answers and copy the results, and god forbid you change frameworks or languages on them- they're hopeless. Its to the point that no degree and less than 6 or 7 years of experience isn't going to get an interview over a guy right out of college because the odds favor the college grad having a higher ceiling.

This is coming from the company that recently decided that Hangouts only works in their Chrome browser.

Google Play Store and Google Play Services aren't free, and Google doesn't sell them to individual users. You can pirate them, but you can't use them legally.

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.