"smart watches aren't the easiest sell, and Ars Technica's review of Samsung's entry illustrates why." Ars' review has nothing to do with whether or not smart watches are a hard sell; it is all about the fact that THIS PARTICULAR smart watch is a piece of garbage. You may disagree with Ars' conclusion, but don't try to pretend that it is something it is not --- it is a very pointed criticism of the Galaxy Gear and of NOTHING else.

WTF is wrong with the Slashdot editing system that it never preserves carriage returns? EVERY TIME I try to write a nice, carefully structured piece, with logical paragraphs, and it gets vomited up as this single glob of text, like I'm an illiterate troll.

DARPA is the US Ministry of Planning. The people in America who actually know WTF they are doing give it a nice militaristic name to get the twits in Congress to keep funding it, but let's not be stupid about this. Its job is the same as any other ministry of planning, in Russia, China, or Japan --- to look into the future, make guesses as to where technology is going, and try to steer research in such a way as to benefit (for some meaning of "benefit") the US (for some meaning of "US"). Where the US has a great advantage over other countries (including China) is that the totalizing tendency has not got very far here. So while DARPA is out there doing its thing and supporting its favorites, we also have NSF supporting a different set of favorites. Or ONR supporting yet another set. Or the National Labs doing their own thing. Or NASA supporting yet another approach. Or various SBR programs supporting small companies. Or even research funded by the various large foundations. It's easy to claim that this results in higher overhead, duplication of effort, blah blah. But we have more than 60 years of experience with the US system, along with a variety of other national systems, and, really, there's no contest. The very minor additional overhead in the US system is vastly compensated for by the fact that malicious or simply stupid or shortsighted individuals cannot capture the system as a whole. The head of DARPA may, for whatever reason, be absolutely unwilling to spend money on, I don't know, THz lasers --- maybe he thinks they'll never work, maybe he hates the guy who invented them, maybe he thinks they're so "obviously" desirable that private industry will invent them without government money. Regardless, if UCLA wants to work on THz lasers, they're not screwed; they can still talk to ONR or NSF or a dozen other funding sources and IF they have a credible story, they'll probably find someone willing to help them.

" It's not like these whales are flying out of the stands like a NASCAR crash gone wrong and killing people in the crowd.

I smell a hit movie: Orcascar!!!

Oh give it a fscking rest.Apple Maps works just fine. The 3D viewing mode, in particular, is smoother and easier to interpret than Google Earth, more useful for an overview than StreetView, and easier to navigate than either of those two. Complaining about Maps today is like whining that the MacBook Air doesn't include an optical drive. It marks you as a deluded fool, lost in the past and determined to find something to hate about Apple, regardless of facts or reality.

Oh for crying out loud! This is why the rest of the world has no patience with Blackberry (and, for that matter MS) anymore. Claiming some obsolete way of doing things is an advantage just because it happened to be a good idea fifteen years ago is the sign of a company that is headed for death, not a sign of competence. Persistent connectivity via TCP over the cell network is taken for granted these days. If you want to optimize your system around the technology of the past rather than the future, don't be surprised when the world views you as part of the past.

I have no idea what you mean by "So if you think plaintext or reversible encryption storage of passwords is the problem, that's all devices everywhere, with or without Google". This is absolutely not the case with iPhone. Apple is, in fact, so paranoid about this that for years one of the UI complaints about iOS was when you recover from a backup to a new phone, you have to re-enter all your passwords. Why? Because passwords were not stored in the backup. They are stored in the backup now --- but ONLY if you choose an encrypted backup, not for a cleartext backup.

And this statement "It just doesn't stand up so well, when governments step in and bail out the industries and or insurance companies " would be quite true IF THERE WERE NO SUCH THING AS LIMITED LIABILITY. But good luck finding a libertarian who wants to abolish limited liability. The goal, after all, is to remove protection of the poor, not protection of the rich.

Well, we'll have a natural experiment about this soon enough: will the same phenomenon appear in China? On the one hand China is obviously poorer, which makes this more difficult. On the other hand China (supposedly, I have no first hand experience) has the same "coddling" of children, especially sons. On the third hand, there's an even stronger driver to this in China, namely the grossly skewed sex ratios. I always though these would end in some sort of mass violence, either internal (gang fighting? extreme crackdowns by the state leading to lots of male executions?) or external (xenophobia leading to war). But another way this could play out, with Japan as an example, is with the population of males which felt most disadvantaged in high school, least able to make it with girls, simply retiring to their rooms and abandoning society.