I went to University and concentrated on computing science classes. I've been a professional programmer for 15 years.
But while I was at University, I also took courses in comparative literature, invertebrate paleontology, geology, meteorology, atmospheric fluid- and thermo- dynamics, and philosophy. You know what? It turns out that I'm really interested in those 'useless' subjects that I didn't really need, but was forced to take. As I look into the future, I'm thinking of leaving the software industry and getting a degree in biology or ecology, and using all the things I know from all the subjects that I've taken.
Education isn't just about utility, it's also about opportunity. Teaching children how to code isn't about making sure they use that skill later in life, it's just so that they know how big the world is and that they can do a lot of different things. At the time I did my degree, I did more than my fair share of grumbling at those optional courses, but 15 years on, they feel like some of the most valuable parts of my education. If nothing else, I think I have a lot more interesting conversations than I would've if I'd fixated on just one subject.
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to publish a paper where the experiment failed--but they should.
Failures are useful; they're not wasted time. You've almost certainly learned something from a failed experiment. Maybe you learned that the setup wasn't rigorous enough, or maybe you just learned that a certain avenue of research wasn't viable for one reason or another. I get that journals are looking for breakthroughs, but it would be so useful to read a paper in your field and find out that someone already tried the thing you're attempting, and now you don't have to fail in exactly the same way.
But that requires a much more collaborative system, and one where the community is interested in finding answers, not glory.
Unfortunately, those wind turbines also kill bats (a friend of mine is just finishing her PhD on that work). The good news is that the folks that operate wind farms aren't in it to destroy wildlife, so they're amenable to doing things that help reduce the number of bat deaths.
(Bat deaths due to wind farms are especially painful, since they often kill bats that are migratory which wouldn't be affected by white nose syndrome.)
That's not really true. Rotating debt isn't the same as a giant monolithic debt. Paying a debt and then adding a new debt is still paying off a debt, even if you're borrowing from the same person.
But I understand what you're getting at and I definitely agree that we have (and should have) different expectations for debt when it comes to countries than when it comes to corporations, say. Debt isn't the same sort of liability for a country--I really hate it when politicians say that we should run countries 'more like companies'. It just speaks to how little they understand about countries (and probably companies).
It doesn't really matter what the tyres are inflated to, unless they're so large as to distribute the weight across an enormous surface area. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to get past a large truck--its wheels would take up the whole road.
Australia uses the neonics differently, as I recall. Something about the way they spread the pesticide makes it less likely to interfere with bees.
That said, it's an insecticide. It's meant to kill insects, and they're generally pretty indiscriminate. It's also fairly likely that even if it's a sub-lethal dose for bees, it's a lethal dose for different beneficial insects.
I think there are multiple causes--varroa mites have been around for decades without causing such widespread colony collapse. We've got a changing climate and agricultural monocultures, as well as stress from neonics (which it turns out honeybees may prefer over non-treated nectar).
Looking for single causes is usually hopeless. But we can control our use of pesticides, so it's one of the things on the chopping block. One way or another, we have to bring this problem under control.
This article is bad and the author should feel bad.
1) The conversion rate doesn't need to be even close to 1:1. Spotify makes 87-91% of its revenue from the customers that subscribe (depending on what report you read). This is despite the percentage of people paying is around or less than 25%. I've read that Spotify would be profitable if it could just get freemium users to pay $1/3 months.
2) Psy was rich before he was available in North America. The article makes it sound like exposure to the west MADE him. That's exceptional cultural egocentrism.
3) Consumers don't DESERVE free music.
A lot of people on here (rightly) say that nobody DESERVES to make a living being a musician, and that's fair enough. But nobody DESERVES free music, either. But it DOES take work and money and time to make music, so if you're going to listen to it, you should pay for it, one way or another. The thing I can't stand is people listening to music with no intention of giving back. If an artist makes music and nobody listens to it because the music isn't good, or they didn't do a good job spreading the word, well, fair enough. They don't deserve money for that. But I'd be pissed if my company decided to use my work without paying me, and it's understandable that artists (and to a more limited extent, labels) want to be paid for what you're consuming.
If you don't listen, you don't pay for it. Fine. But if you're streaming someone's music, *you should pay for it*. It's not free to make. If you don't want to pay, YOU DON'T GET TO LISTEN. That's the way it works for everything else in your life. Don't want to pay for an Apple Watch? You don't get an Apple Watch. Don't want to pay for a car? Walk. You're not entitled to music just because it's easy to obtain.
The common link in all your failed relationships is you. (This isn't a dig at the parent post, it's agreement.)
If you keep dating people that are bad for you, it's because you're picking the wrong people, or putting yourself in situations where you're only meeting the wrong people. And maybe if everyone you end up with--regardless of where you look--is toxic to you, you should sit down and figure out if it's you and not them.
The minimum requirement for being in a relationship with someone is being in good working order, emotionally. If you can't sit down and know that that's true, you should probably work that bit out first.
If you show a very young child (less than a year old, I think) something 'impossible' happening, they will pay attention to it for longer and find it more interesting. So if you hold a ball in the air and let go, but it doesn't fall, or you throw a ball and it goes through a wall, a baby can recognise that those are weird events, and will stare at them for a long time.
If you then give the baby a choice of toys, amongst which is the ball that did an impossible thing, they will spend more time playing with it, rather than equally spreading their attention around. Moreover, they will conduct small experiments that are related to the impossible thing they saw. They will pick up the ball and drop it repeatedly to make sure gravity works. They will hold the ball and bang it on a surface to make sure that the ball does not arbitrarily pass through things.
The brain has a lot of stuff built into it. There are whole sections of the brain devoted to image processing, or understanding smells and taste. These are not inconsequential starting points.
You've been marked as a troll, but I don't really think that's fair. Not everyone wants a tattoo or understands the tattoos that other people get.
I know these things are going to be on my arms for the rest of my life. And when I wake up in the morning and look at them, I think, "these are the arms I should've been born with".
First of all, you have to understand that not all tattoos are created equal. I paid $150/hr for mine. I looked for a long time for an artist whose style I liked, and when we sat down and did them, it took a really long time. All tattoos fade and bleed a bit, but good artists will know how to handle that a little. But hey, when I'm 80, I'm gonna be a little faded and fuzzy around the edges too.
My sleeves are thematic--I was born in the year of the Snake, in a fire cycle. I already had the words for 'fire' and 'snake' tattooed each on one wrist. My right arm is a red and black snake wrapped around bamboo with clouds, and my left arm is a blue, slick snake on a backdrop of flames and smoke. (Their mouths are closed, and they look quite happy--I firmly believe you need to be able to talk or fight your way out of any tattoo you have, and I dislike aggressive snakes for myself, because I'm not going to want to fight my way out of anything.)
Anyway, my tattoos are just a way for me to feel closer to part of my culture. They're a pretty bit of art that I get to carry around with me. They look good with the clothes I wear, like any accessory. That's what I wanted out of them, and that's what I got.
Other people have other reasons, but those are mine.:)
My arms are worth...uh, about 7x what an Apple watch Sport costs (alternately, I could afford one steel Apple watch for each arm for what I paid for each of my sleeves). $200 isn't much tattoo. In fact, that was 1h20m at my artist's rates.
It's not about capacitance. The watch shines different coloured light through the skin and monitors colour changes to figure certain things out. Ink is going to absorb or reflect that light in a way that the watch isn't calibrated to handle. Ink isn't melanin, so darker skinned people won't have the same problems.
My sleeves look a lot better than an Apple watch ever could, but I may just barely have enough open skin to wear one if I wanted to.
That's problem with OS X, not your phone. Discoveryd has replaced a bunch of their other network daemons and it's notoriously unstable and buggy at the moment. It's forward-looking (in that it supports nice features like handoff and airdrop), but Apple basically snuck some first gen software into your desktop OS.:/
Re:Many small solutions through a day
on
Apple Watch Launches
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Separate money from wallets? Bring smiles to Apple fanbois faces? Usher in a new wave of corporate privacy invasion?
Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does. Your implication is that this watch is literally useless except for making people that buy Apple products feel good.
First of all, it actually has functions that people theoretically feel useful. There are certainly Android Wear and Pebble owners that have similar functionality that feel that those devices fill this need. So as long as the Apple Watch does at least as much as those watches do, there's utility to some people. Even if all it does for someone is tell the time, $300 is not even close to the high end of what watches cost.
But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons. Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices. But they look good, and there's a aesthetic value to knowing that what you're wearing is mechanical and hand crafted. It's over $5000 for a Rolex STEEL wrist band. But you're not here criticising the idea of all luxury watches in general, or even all Smartwatches, just the Apple Watch.
You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?
What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it. Just say that out loud and move on. Or don't comment at all. I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?
To me, every 'smartwatch' has to pass this test: would I wear it if all it did was display the time? Does it look and feel good enough? After that, the $300 is either easy or impossible to justify. I'd wear the Apple Watch. I'd wear one of the Withings Activite watches.
I will probably get one once I feel like the first-gen problems are worked out.
Re:Solution looking for a problem?
on
Apple Watch Launches
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't think it can solve any problems for you--if you're overwhelmed by notifications, your watch will just be a new point of contact for your frustrations.
You need to consider what's actually worth being notified about. I have a personal email account and one that I use to sign up for forums and get shipping notifications sent to. Only my personal account displays notifications, and I have a few people on my email VIP list. I switched my other mail account to sound notifications only. That way I know something happened and I can check it when I care.
At first it really feels like I'm missing things, but it actually worked out really well. Start with the assumption that nothing is worth as much as your time, and turn off every notification. Then add them back in one by one if you think it saves you more time to know that information immediately rather than once every hour or so.
Joanna Stern of the Washington Post did a full EKG test with a bunch of fitness bands and a Polar heart rate strap. The fitness bands were all terrible, and the Polar Strap was pretty much spot on. Her testing of the Apple Watch seemed to indicate that it was within about 5 beats or so of her Polar-measured HR. It's by far the most accurate wrist-mounted HR monitor that she tested.
The highest level person that explicitly signed off on the strike should be fired. That's not the president--he authorises programs like this with the intention that they're carried out properly. (Whether or not this is an action the USA should be taking is a matter for elections.) If something goes wrong, someone should be punished for their incompetence. It can't be the lowest level person, because they're not the one calling the shots--it has to be someone high in the chain of command. Only explicit accountability can keep this sort of thing from happening again, assuming that this program must continue at all.
(I'm all for banning this sort of thing, but let's be real. Of course, if we're being real, we probably won't hear about this ever again.)
Since we already know it's an area for rich people, it's likely that the land costs drive the price of the project up. Besides, if they're meant as rental properties, the idea won't be to get the money back immediately; the rental income and the theoretical dividends that it will pay back to the community will cover the costs in the long haul. Normally, the city would front some of that cost because there's value in that sort of diversity, but perhaps Lucas is shouldering a bunch of the costs that the city/developer normally would.
So say I'm searching for something with really common words in it. I can't think of anything specifically right now, but this is my most common search failure.
I get back a bunch of results. They have all the words I'm looking for, but they're all about two or three more popular topics. I'd like to be able to select a search result and tell the engine that results like this are incorrect for some semantic reason. Maybe it's a band name and I'm looking for a book titleâI should be able to say I don't want anything related to music. No bands, albums or songs. I'd be willing to tag results with some context to provide hints to the algorithm.
Things like 'windows' tend to mess up results; Google assumes that I either mean the Microsoft kind or the house kind, but sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a particular application window. I run into this sort of thing surprisingly often.
Yeah, and Microsoft and Blackberry had phones YEARS before Apple did. Just because you've been doing it for a long time doesn't mean it's better than what Apple's done. Just because Apple's been working on it for a couple years doesn't mean it'll be perfect out of the box. This is a first generation product, and it suffers from everything a first gen does. Nobody escapes that.
Apple nailed a couple things with the watch, from all accounts. The watch looks good--which is critical if you want to sell it to non-nerds, the HR monitoring is good, you can use it with Apple Pay. Give it a couple years. All sorts of tech needs to advance and have something like this watch driving it to be good at exactly what they need.
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I went to University and concentrated on computing science classes. I've been a professional programmer for 15 years.
But while I was at University, I also took courses in comparative literature, invertebrate paleontology, geology, meteorology, atmospheric fluid- and thermo- dynamics, and philosophy. You know what? It turns out that I'm really interested in those 'useless' subjects that I didn't really need, but was forced to take. As I look into the future, I'm thinking of leaving the software industry and getting a degree in biology or ecology, and using all the things I know from all the subjects that I've taken.
Education isn't just about utility, it's also about opportunity. Teaching children how to code isn't about making sure they use that skill later in life, it's just so that they know how big the world is and that they can do a lot of different things. At the time I did my degree, I did more than my fair share of grumbling at those optional courses, but 15 years on, they feel like some of the most valuable parts of my education. If nothing else, I think I have a lot more interesting conversations than I would've if I'd fixated on just one subject.
I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to publish a paper where the experiment failed--but they should.
Failures are useful; they're not wasted time. You've almost certainly learned something from a failed experiment. Maybe you learned that the setup wasn't rigorous enough, or maybe you just learned that a certain avenue of research wasn't viable for one reason or another. I get that journals are looking for breakthroughs, but it would be so useful to read a paper in your field and find out that someone already tried the thing you're attempting, and now you don't have to fail in exactly the same way.
But that requires a much more collaborative system, and one where the community is interested in finding answers, not glory.
Unfortunately, those wind turbines also kill bats (a friend of mine is just finishing her PhD on that work). The good news is that the folks that operate wind farms aren't in it to destroy wildlife, so they're amenable to doing things that help reduce the number of bat deaths.
(Bat deaths due to wind farms are especially painful, since they often kill bats that are migratory which wouldn't be affected by white nose syndrome.)
That's not really true. Rotating debt isn't the same as a giant monolithic debt. Paying a debt and then adding a new debt is still paying off a debt, even if you're borrowing from the same person.
But I understand what you're getting at and I definitely agree that we have (and should have) different expectations for debt when it comes to countries than when it comes to corporations, say. Debt isn't the same sort of liability for a country--I really hate it when politicians say that we should run countries 'more like companies'. It just speaks to how little they understand about countries (and probably companies).
Yeah, no. Damage increases by the fourth power of axle weight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
It doesn't really matter what the tyres are inflated to, unless they're so large as to distribute the weight across an enormous surface area. But if that were the case, you wouldn't be able to get past a large truck--its wheels would take up the whole road.
Australia uses the neonics differently, as I recall. Something about the way they spread the pesticide makes it less likely to interfere with bees.
That said, it's an insecticide. It's meant to kill insects, and they're generally pretty indiscriminate. It's also fairly likely that even if it's a sub-lethal dose for bees, it's a lethal dose for different beneficial insects.
I think there are multiple causes--varroa mites have been around for decades without causing such widespread colony collapse. We've got a changing climate and agricultural monocultures, as well as stress from neonics (which it turns out honeybees may prefer over non-treated nectar).
Looking for single causes is usually hopeless. But we can control our use of pesticides, so it's one of the things on the chopping block. One way or another, we have to bring this problem under control.
This article is bad and the author should feel bad.
1) The conversion rate doesn't need to be even close to 1:1. Spotify makes 87-91% of its revenue from the customers that subscribe (depending on what report you read). This is despite the percentage of people paying is around or less than 25%. I've read that Spotify would be profitable if it could just get freemium users to pay $1/3 months.
2) Psy was rich before he was available in North America. The article makes it sound like exposure to the west MADE him. That's exceptional cultural egocentrism.
3) Consumers don't DESERVE free music.
A lot of people on here (rightly) say that nobody DESERVES to make a living being a musician, and that's fair enough. But nobody DESERVES free music, either. But it DOES take work and money and time to make music, so if you're going to listen to it, you should pay for it, one way or another. The thing I can't stand is people listening to music with no intention of giving back. If an artist makes music and nobody listens to it because the music isn't good, or they didn't do a good job spreading the word, well, fair enough. They don't deserve money for that. But I'd be pissed if my company decided to use my work without paying me, and it's understandable that artists (and to a more limited extent, labels) want to be paid for what you're consuming.
If you don't listen, you don't pay for it. Fine. But if you're streaming someone's music, *you should pay for it*. It's not free to make. If you don't want to pay, YOU DON'T GET TO LISTEN. That's the way it works for everything else in your life. Don't want to pay for an Apple Watch? You don't get an Apple Watch. Don't want to pay for a car? Walk. You're not entitled to music just because it's easy to obtain.
The common link in all your failed relationships is you. (This isn't a dig at the parent post, it's agreement.)
If you keep dating people that are bad for you, it's because you're picking the wrong people, or putting yourself in situations where you're only meeting the wrong people. And maybe if everyone you end up with--regardless of where you look--is toxic to you, you should sit down and figure out if it's you and not them.
The minimum requirement for being in a relationship with someone is being in good working order, emotionally. If you can't sit down and know that that's true, you should probably work that bit out first.
If you show a very young child (less than a year old, I think) something 'impossible' happening, they will pay attention to it for longer and find it more interesting. So if you hold a ball in the air and let go, but it doesn't fall, or you throw a ball and it goes through a wall, a baby can recognise that those are weird events, and will stare at them for a long time.
If you then give the baby a choice of toys, amongst which is the ball that did an impossible thing, they will spend more time playing with it, rather than equally spreading their attention around. Moreover, they will conduct small experiments that are related to the impossible thing they saw. They will pick up the ball and drop it repeatedly to make sure gravity works. They will hold the ball and bang it on a surface to make sure that the ball does not arbitrarily pass through things.
The brain has a lot of stuff built into it. There are whole sections of the brain devoted to image processing, or understanding smells and taste. These are not inconsequential starting points.
It's a half-sleeve on each arm, which is distinguished from having a single full-sleeve. :)
You've been marked as a troll, but I don't really think that's fair. Not everyone wants a tattoo or understands the tattoos that other people get.
I know these things are going to be on my arms for the rest of my life. And when I wake up in the morning and look at them, I think, "these are the arms I should've been born with".
First of all, you have to understand that not all tattoos are created equal. I paid $150/hr for mine. I looked for a long time for an artist whose style I liked, and when we sat down and did them, it took a really long time. All tattoos fade and bleed a bit, but good artists will know how to handle that a little. But hey, when I'm 80, I'm gonna be a little faded and fuzzy around the edges too.
My sleeves are thematic--I was born in the year of the Snake, in a fire cycle. I already had the words for 'fire' and 'snake' tattooed each on one wrist. My right arm is a red and black snake wrapped around bamboo with clouds, and my left arm is a blue, slick snake on a backdrop of flames and smoke. (Their mouths are closed, and they look quite happy--I firmly believe you need to be able to talk or fight your way out of any tattoo you have, and I dislike aggressive snakes for myself, because I'm not going to want to fight my way out of anything.)
Anyway, my tattoos are just a way for me to feel closer to part of my culture. They're a pretty bit of art that I get to carry around with me. They look good with the clothes I wear, like any accessory. That's what I wanted out of them, and that's what I got.
Other people have other reasons, but those are mine. :)
4-digit UID, just under 40, two half-sleeves. :)
My arms are worth...uh, about 7x what an Apple watch Sport costs (alternately, I could afford one steel Apple watch for each arm for what I paid for each of my sleeves). $200 isn't much tattoo. In fact, that was 1h20m at my artist's rates.
It's not about capacitance. The watch shines different coloured light through the skin and monitors colour changes to figure certain things out. Ink is going to absorb or reflect that light in a way that the watch isn't calibrated to handle. Ink isn't melanin, so darker skinned people won't have the same problems.
My sleeves look a lot better than an Apple watch ever could, but I may just barely have enough open skin to wear one if I wanted to.
That's problem with OS X, not your phone. Discoveryd has replaced a bunch of their other network daemons and it's notoriously unstable and buggy at the moment. It's forward-looking (in that it supports nice features like handoff and airdrop), but Apple basically snuck some first gen software into your desktop OS. :/
Separate money from wallets? Bring smiles to Apple fanbois faces? Usher in a new wave of corporate privacy invasion?
Christ, this is so obnoxious. Look, just because you don't have a use for this watch, it doesn't mean NOBODY does. Your implication is that this watch is literally useless except for making people that buy Apple products feel good.
First of all, it actually has functions that people theoretically feel useful. There are certainly Android Wear and Pebble owners that have similar functionality that feel that those devices fill this need. So as long as the Apple Watch does at least as much as those watches do, there's utility to some people. Even if all it does for someone is tell the time, $300 is not even close to the high end of what watches cost.
But it's also jewellery. People wear that stuff for lots of reasons. Do you understand how insanely dumb it is to buy a mechanical watch except as jewellery? They're not terribly accurate timekeeping devices. But they look good, and there's a aesthetic value to knowing that what you're wearing is mechanical and hand crafted. It's over $5000 for a Rolex STEEL wrist band. But you're not here criticising the idea of all luxury watches in general, or even all Smartwatches, just the Apple Watch.
You finish by saying that it's about the lock-in, but that's a ridiculous complaint. You think someone buying the first-gen Apple watch is the kind of person that is normally so capricious about their tech decisions?
What you don't like is that Apple made it and that other people like it. Just say that out loud and move on. Or don't comment at all. I think we can all safely assume by now that when Apple makes something there are a bunch of people that don't like it, so let's all pretend that you've said your piece and not use up the space from now on, hmm?
To me, every 'smartwatch' has to pass this test: would I wear it if all it did was display the time? Does it look and feel good enough? After that, the $300 is either easy or impossible to justify. I'd wear the Apple Watch. I'd wear one of the Withings Activite watches.
I will probably get one once I feel like the first-gen problems are worked out.
I don't think it can solve any problems for you--if you're overwhelmed by notifications, your watch will just be a new point of contact for your frustrations.
You need to consider what's actually worth being notified about. I have a personal email account and one that I use to sign up for forums and get shipping notifications sent to. Only my personal account displays notifications, and I have a few people on my email VIP list. I switched my other mail account to sound notifications only. That way I know something happened and I can check it when I care.
At first it really feels like I'm missing things, but it actually worked out really well. Start with the assumption that nothing is worth as much as your time, and turn off every notification. Then add them back in one by one if you think it saves you more time to know that information immediately rather than once every hour or so.
Joanna Stern of the Washington Post did a full EKG test with a bunch of fitness bands and a Polar heart rate strap. The fitness bands were all terrible, and the Polar Strap was pretty much spot on. Her testing of the Apple Watch seemed to indicate that it was within about 5 beats or so of her Polar-measured HR. It's by far the most accurate wrist-mounted HR monitor that she tested.
The highest level person that explicitly signed off on the strike should be fired. That's not the president--he authorises programs like this with the intention that they're carried out properly. (Whether or not this is an action the USA should be taking is a matter for elections.) If something goes wrong, someone should be punished for their incompetence. It can't be the lowest level person, because they're not the one calling the shots--it has to be someone high in the chain of command. Only explicit accountability can keep this sort of thing from happening again, assuming that this program must continue at all.
(I'm all for banning this sort of thing, but let's be real. Of course, if we're being real, we probably won't hear about this ever again.)
They don't hate jews, they hate zionists. They're not the same thing.
Since we already know it's an area for rich people, it's likely that the land costs drive the price of the project up. Besides, if they're meant as rental properties, the idea won't be to get the money back immediately; the rental income and the theoretical dividends that it will pay back to the community will cover the costs in the long haul. Normally, the city would front some of that cost because there's value in that sort of diversity, but perhaps Lucas is shouldering a bunch of the costs that the city/developer normally would.
So say I'm searching for something with really common words in it. I can't think of anything specifically right now, but this is my most common search failure.
I get back a bunch of results. They have all the words I'm looking for, but they're all about two or three more popular topics. I'd like to be able to select a search result and tell the engine that results like this are incorrect for some semantic reason. Maybe it's a band name and I'm looking for a book titleâI should be able to say I don't want anything related to music. No bands, albums or songs. I'd be willing to tag results with some context to provide hints to the algorithm.
Things like 'windows' tend to mess up results; Google assumes that I either mean the Microsoft kind or the house kind, but sometimes I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a particular application window. I run into this sort of thing surprisingly often.
Yeah, and Microsoft and Blackberry had phones YEARS before Apple did. Just because you've been doing it for a long time doesn't mean it's better than what Apple's done. Just because Apple's been working on it for a couple years doesn't mean it'll be perfect out of the box. This is a first generation product, and it suffers from everything a first gen does. Nobody escapes that.
Apple nailed a couple things with the watch, from all accounts. The watch looks good--which is critical if you want to sell it to non-nerds, the HR monitoring is good, you can use it with Apple Pay. Give it a couple years. All sorts of tech needs to advance and have something like this watch driving it to be good at exactly what they need.
You think he'd have a soapbox in prison? I rather think not. He'd be in solitary and that would be that.