To be honest, I can't think of a single feature such a watch would have other than to tell time. What's the purpose of it? Why is Apple building this? It is a jobs program, is it a piece of yuppie jewelry, or what?

For several years now I have had to put up with unsufferably smug idiots telling me that my wrist watch is old fashioned and that anyone who's remotely important in the universe uses a smart phone in their pocket to tell what time it is. So now they've changed thier minds? Their smart-pocket-watch is too inconvenient and they want a smart-wrist-watch instead?

Remember the good old days when you had a calculator wrist watch and everyone knew you were a nerd and thus you were socially ostracised for good reason, but you stuck with it because any true nerd does not follow the herd. Now you'll get essentially the same thing in a smart watch and all buyers will claim they've been nerds all along and that nerds are cool.

The goal is to make code that is readable. And that does not just mean readable by coders. It means you can give the code to the finance department and they can check it for validity or give it to project managers to see if it meets the specifications. Granted it is not perfect here, the data type declarations can be confusing for example. But the goal of COBOL was not to be something only understood by coders or to make the coder have to type fewer characters.

Note that "c = a*b" itself is not simple. In mathematics this is an equation and not an operation. Some languages change that to "c := a*b" but then it leaves people who aren't programmers wondering what ":=" means. And what is "*", is that a multiply or a Kleene star or something else?

COBOL compilers don't need to generate fast code. They just need to generate code that is correct. The compilers are getting faster (duh) but that's not their main purpose. The reason COBOL programs are still around isn't about performance, it's about keeping legacy programs running that are cheaper to maintain than rewrite or replace. Making a new program in COBOL would be silly.

Imagine if your HR department told you that they were going to change all the payroll processing code because they found this kid who claims he can do it better in C#. I am pretty sure that you'd be scrutinizing every paycheck very closely for errors and keeping a detailed paper trail.

And really it's still one of the few languages designed to be read clearly and understood by people who are not programmers.

A family friend donated to me all her deceased husband's RPG-II manuals, thinking that they'd be useful to a kid interested in computers. When I read them I almost gave up on the idea of going into computing altogether.

Yup, a lot of programmers just don't think too well about batch processing. They're used to programs being interactive, or dealing with files byte by byte, etc. There's a whole lot wrong with COBOL but it does what it does well and it will cost a lot of money to port to a different language, almost all of that money spent on figuring out specs and requirements and QA.

You have to pay for the service? What does it do for you besides track achievements and serve up ads?

Which was why MS had their OEM program. New computers would just come with DOS preinstalled. There was a side market for DOS but Microsoft really made the money from the PC manufacturers. Even when Windows came out it was still something that you usually got preinstalled.

Even when I got my first PC (I had other computers before it) I asked to not have DOS or Windows since I was going to put OS/2 on it. But the maker still put on DOS anyway because they put on DOS on every computer just to test the components and it would have cost them more money to pull it back off later.

Pirating DOS or Windows only makes sense if you built your own PC from scratch or were upgrading.

You want to deny Microsoft of their sacred right to get more money out of paying customers? What are you, some kind of commie?

Elections cost money. Religious fervor generates more money than just having a mere feeling that your candidate is preferrable. Also the panic that the country is being taken over by people pushing an un-American anti-religious liberal minority makes them contribute even more money. These are not people with a vague idea that the country is a little bit off course.

Then again this is a Missouri state legislator, running in only one small district within the state. Of course we are going to get people like that elected. You can't stop the nutty conservatives from getting elected in tiny districts any more than you can stop the nutty liberals from getting elected in tiny districts. This bill will go nowhere, it's only been referred to a committee.

If you are serious about making sure that small regional elections go the way you want, then stop living in hipster cities where you step over homeless people on your way to get a latte and instead move to these rural districts so that your vote makes a difference.

This is also a political movement much more than religious. The religious part is there as a sort of cultural identity to get the voters on your side. In some sense I do think the rise in trying to mix religion into politics really comes from a feeling of panic that they're being marginalized.

Britain had a long run while still being very religious and intolerant of religious differences. The rise and height of the US technological and scientific lead was at a time when the country was even more religious. Generally the rulling classes supported and funded the scientific efforts because it made them boat loads of money.

Don't worry. Whatever country you are in now may follow in the same route. The reason a lot of "liberal" countries aren't this way is because they have a lot more people in urban areas and relatively few in rural areas, and so the urbanites have a much more solid lock on politics, and urbanites tend to lean more liberal. You just need about 55% to have solid control over the message, and that means it's not too hard to start swinging the other direction. Lurking just under the surface are all the vices you see in Americans.

From what I've seen many of the stereotypes in the US about how liberal and socialist other countries are doesn't really hold up when you look closely. The people are just as varied in Europe and South America as in the US. You have gun nuts in scandinavia, ultra conservatives in France, religious bigots in Germany, etc. Europe is still lily-white in terms of race and despite having relatively few ethnic minorities and immigrants there is constant grumbling. You go into the workplace and there is a big gender divide. Homophobic jokes come out after a few drinks. And all the European countries are still very religious overall (some may deny it, but I can find those who think mistakenly think there aren't many religious people in California either). Go to South American and it's even more widely divided in viewpoints. Go to Asia and bigotry is easily found everywhere you look.

And let's be honest here, this pushing of intelligent design and the anti-science stance is far more due to politics than religion. It's a way to draw a line in the sand to decide who is with us and who is against us. And it is being driven by extreme positions within a party. With a two party system we're stuck with each party having to put up with the nut cases on the fringe who can drive a message. With a multiparty system that has to negotiate to form a governing coalition the fringe people will still exist but they tend to be left out of the process a lot more often.

Seems odd. It's your personal job to ensure no one else in the company screws up? What if they do this with pen and paper instead, are the pen and paper police? Generally there are company rules to prevent this, flowing from top down, not one department setting rules for all other departments.

Now what about a database of device test results or similar things?

I had some ultrasparcs briefly (not the high end ones described here). I was going to use them as compile servers, and I'd done some parallel builds with distcc on idle PCs and thought this would help. And it was fine for awhile actually. Not quite as fast as the PCs we were using but not slow enough to slow down my build. But then we all got new PCs (finally) and it took nearly as much time to get handle transporting the source and object files back and forth as it would have been to just compile locally. So the ultrasparcs ended up not being useful anymore. Eventually I dropped them off at Weird Stuff Warehouse.

Now to me, "oldtimer" Suns are the ones before Sparc... Sun 3/60 for example, not even a local disk drive, it booted and ran from a remote file server, even used remote server for swapping.

I can disable the carrier's pre-installed apps so that they no longer appear on my android. They're not uninstalled and erased from flash but you can essentially forget their existence and never get reminded about upgrades.