What moron would sign a contract like that? Are you really that dumb?

I was going to add 3- A Clown, But then I remembered the Principal from my daughters public school...

Because people are too fucking stupid to do it on their own. Maybe if we require IQ above what degree they paid for this problem would not manifest as much.

nobody employed at a K-12 school has the ability or IQ to properly run and terminate cat6/fiber/etc let alone install a clean network rack.

Ever single school my company is called in to fix was an utter nightmare that had to have most of the infrastructure gutted. Idiots just running non plenum wire in the ceiling ducts, etc...

If you want it half assed, let the school do it. If you want ti right, hire a real company of professionals to come in and install it right so it has a chance to survive the school's staff.

You volunteering to install all of it for free?

In my old days the laptop battery did not charge, you simply replaced the standard 4 AA batteries and kept on truckin... Tandy 100 FTW!

I even had the acoustic coupler modem, hacked many a UUNET dial up nodes from payphones with that wonderful laptop.

The one that doesnt suck.

Pebble.

All the others from Samsung and the rest have two major SUCK failure points...

1 - Have to charge it daily : FAIL.
2 - cant read it in direct sunlight : FAIL.

The pebble does both perfectly and for Under $150 if you buy the normal one.

The question should be, can a smart watch replace your smart phone?

To me, at least, the answer to question would determine whether I would invest in smart watch. Any device that requires me to carry another to work how i expect it to work is just a non-starter in my book.

The commoditization of these designs depended on several factors happening all at once.

First, processor power had to pass a threshold. Having a processor that is fast enough to handle an embedded system running a custom operating system (or more likely just a simple set of interrupt handlers and startup code) is a lot slower than the processor needed to run a full fledged kernel like modern Linux. The custom Software saves huge amounts of unit-cost, at the cost of time-to-market.

The second item that was needed was price point. Even $45 per unit is still high for the BBB black, but the RPi at $35 is pretty close. Even the BBB is close enough to work with.

Third, mainstream OS support. This is critical, because it turned a legion of higher-level programmers into embedded programmers. This, again, helps to reduce TTM

Last, the availability and maturity of simple to wire peripherals, and the availability of software libraries for using these peripherals. This is probably the most key part because you now have the ability to buy a modular set of components, and wire them all together with very little, if any, electronics knowledge and get a working system. Again, it all drives TTM, and in todays world TTM is everything. Just ask Microsoft how their tablet and phone business' are doing to find out how important TTM really is.

Who claimed that?

With enough money to get you into the right schools you can get the best jobs, but that has little if anything to do with intelligence. Or education for that matter.

and the MSP430 doesn't have enough horsepower for most things I want to do, and even if it did, the additional resources needed to design with it, and the additional time-to-market that these would introduce make it non-viable in todays world. As I said, time-to-market is everything. MS didn't get where they are because they made a superior product, they got there because they had a working product when the market opportunity arrived. Short TTM doesn't guarantee success, but TTM that is too long guarantees failure...

This actually presents an interesting problem. Many carriers contractually require that shippers not disclose the discounts they are being given. That means that if Amazon discloses the discounted shipping rates they are paying, then they loose their discounts, and everyone pays retail. This basically royally screws the shippers, and the consumers. As usual, the French have completely failed to think through the consequences of their actions. It continues a fine decades long tradition of fucking up in the name of protectionism. Its the reason, they have double and triple the rate of unemployment of the rest of the world.

Protectionism only works if your society is close to export parity. If you can afford to close your borders completely without collapsing your economy, then protectionism will work (and you actually don't need it under those circumstances). Whenever there is an imbalance, protectionism screws up the local economy. If there is a trade deficit, then your economy hemorrhages money until everyone is broke and in debt. If there is a trade surplus, then protectionism shuts it down, as no one wants to buy from the over-priced asshat who actively blocks foreign competition. With parity, you can afford to significantly reduce trade in both direction (and you will), but any other time its a bad idea.

40 years is already more than what's sensible. Imagine I invented something that ensures I'll get more money than I could sensibly spend per month. Where's my incentive to invent again instead of spending the rest of my life in a hammock?

That is true.

In fact, that is the purpose of the comma, which is often incorrectly replaced with parentheses.