It's entirely possible that the only way to "sort it out" with today's technology would be to make something too heavy or clumsy to wear for any length of time. All design is about compromise; in six months or a year, battery technology will be better, but for the mean time, perhaps Google is trying to optimize the wearability and useability of the thing, and battery life is something they're simply not concerned about. Don't like it? Don't buy it; it's not for you yet.

Maybe if people really do want to wear it for all their waking hours, Google will offer a battery pack. I'm sure someone will want to have an electrical cord going behind their ear into their inside jacket pocket.

I was thinking of some sort of a piston attachment which would generate power every time you took a bouncing step. You could even have four or five of them on your head to ensure that you get optimal power throughput regardless of your angle of attack. Now that would be awesome.

I disagree. Early adopters willing to spend their hard-earned money on this product should be smart enough to know that they're buying a bleeding-edge product.

Seriously. I'm not a huge fan of a cyborg future, but proclaiming the death of a future technology based on today's battery capacities is just silly. Once upon a time, most people only had 2400 baud access to the Internet; imagine if people had just looked at that and written off the possibility of high-bandwidth applications because they weren't feasible at the time. Just to name a couple, the Skypes and the Netflixes of the world exist because someone looked ahead and saw a time when bandwidth would be plentiful, and built technologies to allow its use.

If I were a Glass engineer, I would build everything assuming that one day there would be a way to hold a full day's charge at constant use within the frame. To assume otherwise is to artificially limit what will be possible when society is ready for mass adoption of this sort of technology.

Simply put, Amazon are the Wal-Mart of the Internet. Through economies of scale--as well as the fact that the management is heavily rewarded in the stock market for not making any profit--they are putting extreme pressure on small local businesses (as well as some other major players like Target, but I'm not shedding a tear for them), all the while subjecting their employees to slave-labor conditions.

They are like a weed, growing quickly and killing everything around them. I've got nothing against corporations that succeed, but I'd rather see Apple and Samsung battle it out and have one of them come on top (while we're all really rooting for HTC to make a scrappy come-back) than to watch Amazon killing the local bookstore, toy store, and other shops who simply can't compete. The long term effects of this sort of disruption are only now beginning to be felt, but it's going to get worse.

So in short, I despise Amazon because they are a massive juggernaut, destroying small economies and abusing their employees, and they do it by appealing to people's preference for short term benefits over long term investment. Me, I'd rather pay a couple of extra dollars and buy my kid's birthday present in a local shop from someone who will then spend the money locally than save a couple of bucks and basically water the weeds. What I fear is that there will one day come a time where the only place to buy a significant number of consumer items will be via Amazon.

I know that some degree of the same arguments could apply to a number of other large corporations, but for me, Amazon is one of the companies that is far enough over the line that, where possible, I try to avoid them completely.

This is what I was going to suggest. Doesn't Windows have the same thing? And Ubuntu? I can't imagine that it'd be patentable to build a gelded guest account...

Yeah. I understand Apple's policy, but the only people who really lose are the consumers. I remember after this went into effect, the first time I went into my Amazon Kindle iOS app and tried to buy there. No button, no link, no freaking hint of how to buy a book. How do you do it? You buy on the web, then tell Amazon to synch to your device which you've registered.

Works for Apple, I guess. I ended up just going to iBooks and buying there. I kind of despise Amazon anyway, but it would have been nice to have the choice while maintaining a similar end-user experience.

DOS? My father used to build and deploy small nuclear reactors (cyclotrons) for use in medical/research facilities (specifically for creating radioactive tracers required for PET/CAT scans), and now acts as an independent consultant for the clients who've gotten those machines over the last 40 years or so.

He told me a few years back about going into a client facility with one of the older models, which had originally been run using a control system written on a PDP-11. At some point, the PDP-11 crapped out, and what the client did was get a beige box PC with appropriate ports added on in a slot, and with a PDP-11 emulator built in. They then hollowed out the rack cabinet where the PDP-11 had been housed and put the PC in it, along with some other equipment. With the cabinet door closed, it looked like it did the day it shipped.

I'd be a little worried about running a PDP-11 emulator on top of Windows 3.1 (IIRC, that was what the set-up was) for controlling a small nuclear device, but I guess it worked for them.

In Soviet Russia, email old peoples you!

Duh. Google Wave!

I understand the rationale behind the general rule as stated, but is it totally impossible that a strain of this could survive even an extreme change in environment, adapt and thrive to such a degree that it would become a danger to the natives of that environment?

I mean, I know it's more extreme than, say, eucalyptus trees in California or rabbits in Australia, but to write off the possibility completely seems like an exaggerated response.

I was going to be more glib in my response, but your sig implies that you've got some experience with the biological sciences, so my question is sincere.

I always thought it had something to do with the fact that Poland still had a horse-mounted cavalry at the beginning of WWII. Hitler famously staged a fake cavalry attack to justify invading Poland. I think that image of Polish cavalry charging across the border with their swords raised toward's Hitler's tanks has resonated through the ages.

Why did the NK submarine fleet sink? They left the screen doors open.

Why did the submarines have screen doors? To keep the fish out!

I'm sure that Poland is thrilled that NK has taken over their long worn mantle.
full disclosure: there is a lot of Polish peasantry among the branches of my family tree.

I guess the point of my point was not to out-and-out deny yours, but rather to suggest that it's rarely so black-and-white. My faster, lighter, sturdier bike response to your old bike that works fine was to hint at the possibility that with the new one, the point was not just bragging rights, but being able to get from point A to point B faster, in less of a sweat, and with less likelihood of requiring some sort of maintenance.

It's a matter of degrees. I absolutely agree that old things shouldn't be thrown out just because they're old, but with a 25-year-old piece of code, just like that bike, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changes, and if those changes are major enough, there are probably worthwhile reasons to consider changing the underlying technology.

Sometimes, inertia is a good enough reason not to change because the reasons to change are not compelling. Sometimes, inertia is a terrible reason not to change.

Maybe the new bike is lighter and faster, more comfortable, and has more reliable components. Perhaps it's even more sturdy so that I don't have to true my rims every time I hit a pot hole.

No software is perfect; there are always things that can improve. The GP poster doesn't say what the time frame was between coding and seeing it still there, but I wouldn't be surprised to hear that 20 year old code was still sitting there, and that any issues with the code were being dealt with via band-aid pre- and post-processing systems tacked on. Why would they tack things on like that? Because nobody wants to work on legacy code.