Pebble is very nice... very useful, very open, very extendable, and much cheaper as well!

Well,, they still function as a watch when not connected, so you aren't totally tethered if you are interested in what time it is.

If you're worried about the battery, buy a Pebble. The battery lasts a good week. Even more if you shut it off at night like I do. It's also significantly less expensive and is very open to developers.

They are better now, but decades of, "You are stuck with our monopoly, so suck it up," has hurt their reputation and brand.

Perhaps, but you have to find them on your phone, the functionality is often limited compared to the actual web site, and it takes up valuable memory. I prefer using the actual web site to a stripped down app version of the web site whenever possible.

Except people never really liked using Windows on their PCs. The experience for most is neutral at best and irritating at worst.

Microsoft still makes a lot of money. So does IBM. Their products are mature and stable, which allows them to make a lot of money, but they aren't setting new standards for the industry like they used to be able to do. No one cared that Microsoft wanted to replace Flash with Silverlight. They just ignored it. They don't have the mindshare dominance that they used to, where they could dictate the terms and the industry complied. That's long gone. They have become a lot less relevant, even though they still make a lot of money selling their old stuff.

RT bombed, because it looked like you could run x86 applications on it, but you actually couldn't, so you had a laptop that would only run Windows Phone apps, which are very few and far between. If this surface phone uses an ARM processor as has been rumored, then it will fail, too. Even if it is an x86 phone, which will be quite interesting, I'm not sure how they will be able to make traditional desktop apps work in a small, phone-sized form factor. That will be the big challenge. If they can pull that off, then they may be onto something. I'm not particularly optimistic.

And so were Blackberries. That's what "smart phones" were back then. Apple changed the paradigm by removing the stylus and the keyboard and Microsoft just couldn't catch up--it was too big of a shock for their system. However, prior to 2007, they really were the cutting edge of smart phone technology. Blackberries were very popular as well, but the Windows Mobile phones could do so much more. Palm was pretty much done at this point, as their OS and app interfaces couldn't adequately handle the multitasking required for networking. Microsoft had the field pretty much to themselves at the time. The biggest problem with Windows Mobile was fragmentation. Some phones had touch screens. Some did not. Most didn't have enough memory to run well, so it crashed a lot (as Windows so often did back in those days). IE mobile was horrible, but there were third party browsers. I really liked having a computer in my pocket, and I think that Microsoft could have easily been the leader in smartphone technology had Apple not changed the way we interacted with smart phones.

The news essentially ignored it. There is nothing on TV, no show marathons or special programs. Google didn't even do a doodle for it. What a bummer... I didn't even find out about it until I saw a buried story about the 50th anniversary. I guess Trek really has fallen off the face of the earth, and its influence has truly waned. That is a real shame.

Shatner will outlive them all...

He'll outlive all the original cast.. just you watch!!

DVD recorders won't record commercial tapes encoded with macrovision, so it will only work with personal home recordings. Most video capture cards will also reject the video input if it's copy protected with macrovision. There are ways around this, of course, but it requires time, effort, and money to do so.

To be fair, scientists once believed that there was a "luminous ether" that propagated light as well, even running elaborate experiments to prove it's existence. It just "had" to exist, since science at the time couldn't think of any other solution to the problem. Of course, they eventually figured out that light acts differently than other energy waves and dropped the matter entirely. The "dark matter" issue feels very much like the luminous ether... something that "exists" if only because the current models don't work very well otherwise.