Really they are not the first. They are a group of early manufacturers trying to develop a market for connected watches. About the only company that appears to be manufacturing and shipping actual watches to actual customers, as opposed to just promising to ship watches to customers eventually, is Cookoo. Yes I know that Pebble is shipping watches, but those are to those to are to kickstarter people, that is investors.

Apple will take over the market because only Apple has the means to integrate the watch and the phone. Fair or unfair that is the way it will be. Therefore, while Pebble has said it is the watch to integrate with iPhone(at the time iPhone had all the market) really what needs to happen now is they need to be the preeminent Android phone. Given the new funding I would say drop iPhone support completely. Be the first fully functional Android watch. Why make a sucky watch that works with iPhone when they could make a mass market watch that works with Android. Also, they need to get some fashion and industrial designers in there so the watch is not so ugly and can be made efficiently.

We need technicians that want are good at the job. It really does no good to try to push people to careers that they have no interest in, be it coding, plumbing, driving a bus, or becoming a professional engineer. Obviously the one contraint here is that becoming some of these requires much more training, and specialized skill, than others.

And the difference in skill is really what guarantees long term income. For instance, suppose you were going into construction. One could start as a framer, or go directly into the crane operator union, take the classes, and wait for seniority to get you regular gigs. Of course the risk with the crane is that you may not be good at it, and you won't make a lot of money initially, but the reward is if you are good then you can probably find work, and do the work even with a bad back.

So yes the idea of plumbing as an honorable trade that is as reasonable a path to employment as college is correct. OTOH, the idea that just anyone can be plumber or an electrician or whatever is really an insult. College is not the top tier of achievement, and tradespeople are not the lowest. Each requires a different skill, and while the supply of skilled people for one may be less than the other, the two are not interchangeable. Both require people who have an ability to educate themselves in their craft.

And, to be clear, a less academically adept student is not automatically going to be a plumber, and a more academically adept student is not automatically going to be employed as a fantastically high wages doing little or nothing. There are plenty of students out there with more than perfect GPAs who have no marketable skills, but do have hope with training to attain them. But instead they will go to college, build up student debt, and then have no way to pay that money back. On the other hand there are students with low GPAs that could go to college in a subject that interests them, muddle through, and because they have mad skills leverage that education in a profitable carrer.

The fact that we try to pigeon hole students based on superficial markers is the whole reason we might have a tech deficit. The question to ask Bloomberg, whose kids presumable have the freedom to follow their dreams, is if he would ask another parent whose child wanted to play with horses to tell their kids to a plumber instead.

Uhura was a major character, she was black, and she was a telephone operator. So take the good with the bad. The woman who is and will always be Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, has, evidence suggests, had a great impact on the self esteem of young black women. So take the good with the bad.

The first episode of Star Trek, The Man Trap,certainly reflected women in a negative light, as demon who will suck you dry as quickly as they say they love you. Predators who are only interested in what they can get, and will give only as much as they have to bleed you dry. When they are done with you they will just find another, and when they are done with them, and you are rejuvenated, they will deal with you. Yes very misogynistic.

But Star Trek changed with new episodes and new series. While this is called the reboot, really ST:TNG did that, by advancing time and creating a new reality in line with what we in the late 80's saw our hopes to be. Then DS9 and Voyager continued to match Star Trek to out expectation of a universe accesible to everyone.

Though they were criticisms, the series and film continued the story, until Enterprise. I think that they messed up on Enterprise because no one really wants a starship that is broken, we saw that from the films, and the earth that was presented certainly wasn't the earth that would be expected given the very rich and varied mythology of the show. The way to deal with the past was not to go to the past, but to jump to another future, as was done with TNG.

That said what Abrams is doing is not a reboot. BSG was a reboot. The new Doctor Who is a reboot. What this Star Trek is more akin to the new Charlie's Angles, a brazen attempt to generate huge amounts of cash based on old ideas. This is, as some characterized the remake of Indiana Jones, purely physical and sexual assault.

There would have been so many ways to use these actors in different characters. What would, god help us, the children of Riker and Deanna look like and do? The DS9 timeline is not popular, but there were some interesting life forms. Everyone is complaining about the mythology and timeline, but that is not the problem. The problem is the characters of Star Trek is stuck in the 60's. Trying to make them fit what we have today is not rational. The black woman is not automatically the telephone operator. The white man is not automatically the leader. It seems that the movie is made to promote the nostalgia that so many feel, that the 60's, when everyone knew their place, was better.

This is certainly a gimmick. The key here is you can play with your expensive toy and post it to facebook. It will appeal to those who want to play soldier, you know, walk through the NRA convention in full gear, and those who love to post criminal activity.

The jiggling of the gun is not necessarily going to be a great problem. The way it seems to works is that you pull the trigger, the gun waits to be pointed in the right direction, and the engages the striker. The movement due to trigger is apparently expected as part of random walk to get the proper aim. However, we assume that muzzle will be in constant motion, and there might be a delay between the proper aim and the exit of the bullet. 5000 feet is essentially a mile. This is shooting that most people cannot do.

My fear is that someone will think they are a hot shot shooter, and try to take out a deer at 1000 feet. A 1/10th of a degree variation, however, means a two feet deflection. This either means that the deer is not shot properly, or the bullet goes off into a random direction. If one is playing in the suburbs, and trying to shoot stop signs down the road, this will invariable lead to bullets entering homes.

So while I think that as a social networking device the fun might be innovative, as a weapon it builds overconfidence and promotes recklessness.

The current version of iTunes also has a more aggressive synch function with online content. it tries to connect continuously to the Apple servers it really is annoying.

Not that iTunes has not always been annoying. One reason I stopped acquiring Apple video content, even after they stored it online for me, is that iTunes is the worst video player on the planet. And I am including WinDVD.

That said, as been mentioned, iTunes sucks and should only be used sparingly. With the past few versions of iPhone, most everything can be down without a computer.The only thing that must be done is a full restore. My music, backups, everything, is online. I believe a basic icloud account is free.

Although past experience does not guarantee future events, MS has been very good at messing new release. At his point I consider it the users fault for buying upgrades. Everything was mostly junk to 3.11 for workgroups. Then all the releases of the MS DOS based MS Windows were junk. (The late 90's was a wasteland for PC OS, with the orginal Mac OS and Windows both being in a slump). In the interim if you would deal with the incompatibles, MS Windows NT was the only real OS. I skipped MS Windows 2000 as well. XP by SP2 was the next good MS Windows, which served for many years. MS Vista was predictably horrible, and Windows 7 was predictably pretty dammed good if I am forced to admit it. It is the best thing MS has come up with this millennium.

Of course they do not learn, so Windows 8 is bad. It might be fixed with a service pack, in the way they fixed XP. But even XP has serious problems that kept it from being used as a real OS, the way that NT could be. Windows 7 fixed many of those problems.

My big concern now is that MS wants to be on the yearly subscription model, which means that they are going to mess up the OS every year. For businesses that can downgrade, or for consumers that know to wait or look for older model computers, that is fine. For consumers that just by whatever MS is selling, we are taking about the mayhem caused by MS Windows 98 all over again.

It depends on your tolerance for downtime and predictability of costs. I once worked in a place where we used a number of high speed pumps. These pumps would fail pretty regularly. If you wanted to minimize downtime you would have a service contract, and routinely take it out of service and either have it refurbished or replace it with a refurbished unit. We could handle random downtimes, so we would just wait for it to fail and pay for the refurbishment. It probably ended up being a bit more, as parts were actually damaged, and the costs were less predictable, but that is what we did. Other places might have gone with the warranty or service plan.

To have all my activity, my searches for sideboob, my stops at the paraphernalia shop, all automatically reported to all the contacts on my phone. It will be better than Facebook!

This has nothing to with anything other than historical laws to solve past problems. These laws are essentially set up to protect local 'small business' from corporate interests. It sound quaint, but one must look at this in the context of selling cars in the 1940's and 1950's, and even the entire climate at the time. There was no Walmart killing main street, there was no Costco cutting deals with the consumer, and no Starbuck serving corporate consistent coffee. And there few if any sophisticated auto consumer. So laws were past in most states that protected the local dealership from the larger auto manufacturing companies.

So the auto manufacturers created the franchise system, essentially to get around the laws. This is little different from McDonalds. The manufacturers pretty much control the operations, and in return offer kickbacks. The only way around this is the used market. It is probably, in the current climate, inefficient. It is probably one factor that makes american car makers less competitive, having to support the dealer network. OTOH, it is good for the manufacturer and consumer because you can go to any dealer who sells new fords and know you will get basically the same thing as any other dealer.

The thing is we probably should not change laws for an individual, which is what Tesla is asking some states to do. If there is good reason to make the change, then make the change general. What is happening is that in some states the law is changing so that only Tesla or a company very similar to Tesla will benifit. THis is probably a not good thing.

Except for Kin, and I doubt facebook spent a billion developing the phone. Failed phones are not uncommon. Facebook better spend it capital figuring out how it is going to survive the next five years. If not a phone, then something.

It is not uncommon for lobbying group, particularly new groups with little political expertise, to flop. Even groups that should be politically savvy, such as Freedomworks, which got almost no one elected during the last cycle, can be flops, though well funded as they provide means for the middle class to launder money. The problem with groups such as this, as can also be seen in the Susan G. Komen group, is it is high profile and corporate interests don't want to be associated with high profile groups that do things the customer base may object to. Corporate type do objectionable things low profile.

I would not say it was bad. I would say that the school did exactly what is was supposed to do. GIve a bible based education of basic skills need to live a life based on the devotion to the almighty. There were some non academic things going on that I would, as a secular person, consider abusive but within the context of their faith it was acceptable.

The problem with writing and the like only exposed itself when I went to a public school who focused in advanced academic and art and sciences. Though I was able to pass all the tests at a very high level, I was behind in some skills that were not a focus at my real faith based school. That is a school that focused on the building on faith at least equally to the building of academics. A friend of mine that left the private school and went to a regular public school has no issues.

School is too long. Faith based education makes school longer or removes time from exploration. I spent way too much time learning to look up passages in the bible but could not use a dictionary or write a paragraph when I went back to public school after a two year hiatus.

Math and science does not need to be taught harder, but does need to be more meticulous. For instance, it is correlated that understanding numbers as a system and not just bookkeeping convention at an early age coordinates well to doing well in more advanced math. As you mention, exploring science is probably better than just memorizing facts like the order of the planets. The difficulty is that teachers who can manage a class of 30 children are often not likely to be good at teaching math and science conceptually. We need to pay for co-teachers.

Students will participate in gym class at early ages, but those classes focus to much on sportsmanshiop and rules rather than physical activity. I was in one gym class for 2nd grade where each student tried to hit a ball twice (t-ball) and run bases, but otherwise no physical activity. We have to decide whether we teach sports or fitness, or if both do it well.

As more computers are in use, and a new generation of teachers come in, homework should be quite different, if they are trained. Current systems are less based on multiple choice and more based on generated questions that can be graded dynamically by the computer. Likewise the computer programming is a pedagogical challenge. Really for kids it is an issue of algorithms, structure, and predictability, which has to be taught in the context of the students brain maturity. In middle school I was taught to type out basic programs on a teletype, but really did not learn how to program until we spent six weeks writing algorithms in high school.

As far as social studies and language, this is one thing that is done well n primary school. Most people teaching have a good background in this.

They tried to do some NCAAstreaming stuff locally. It failed. Broadcast and cable TV is too much of a profit center for sports. Doing anything to jeopardize that relationship would be death for the sports. Right now, sports is the only thing that keeps men watching TV in real time, so TV needs sports, and TV would be very unhappy if there were other ways to consume sports inexpensively.

entirely circumvent gun control laws

In countries where that are significant gun control laws, I doubt that this is going to change much. Such countries also have other laws that control other things. In the US this would be a very expensive way to circumvent laws that do not exist. Any FFL compliance is voluntary. Anyone can sell gun to anyone on the street. The only prosecutions that occur is when there is knowledge that the sale would otherwise be regulated. I have seen sales go off on school property with no repercussions. Even if new laws are passed, the NRA will water them down like they always have to make it trivial to aquite the toys that the nuts like to play with. Of course it will continue to be non trivial to acquire something that one could actually defend oneself.

This is interesting because it reduces the skill needed to assemble a weapon to something the average adult can do. In many cases we are safe because real weapons requires a level of skill not accessible to the average adult. The average adult does not have the skill to weaponize biological agents. The average adult does not have the skill to weaponize household chemicals.

The average adult does have the skill to go to the NRA gun show in Houston and buy a rifle. The average adult probably does not have the funds or skill to successfully print a gun. As a person who has designed for and used a 3D Printer, it is a non trivial process.

As I said, outside the US this may be a game changer. Assuming that there are not other regulations to prevent it.

We have several dozen windows 7 machines running windows xp. Each of those I suppose was a 7 license reported as a satisfied customer. My main windows machine runs 7 because it is a good OS, and XP is a bit long in the tooth. But my windows machine is to run specific applications for work, and even if I wanted to 8 is not an option.