Are my eyes really blue?

So after 42 years, I finally reached a point in jury duty that involved actually showing up to the courthouse.  I’ve gotten the summons twice before in the last five years, but both times my number never came up.  The way it works out here is that you get a notice about a month in advance, stating the week you will be on the hook and telling you to call in or check the website the Friday before.  If they say don’t come in, you check again on Monday morning and see if you have to come in that afternoon.  If you don’t, you check that afternoon to see if you come in the next morning.  And so on, and so on.  It’s actually a gargantuan pain in the ass and you’re better off just being called in, which is what happened to me this time out.

I got called in for 1 PM Monday, and the rest of Monday was spent in hardships – basically people begging off the case because they were the sole caregiver, or couldn’t speak English worth a lick, or would lose their job, or had prepaid vacation plans, or what have you.  Fair enough, start whittling down from there, and then on Tuesday get to the actual selection.  Which was interesting to me, because they go through a whole bunch of questions that are basically yes/no, and even if you’re not in the box, you have to make a note of any “yes” so you can rattle them off when you do get called up.  Only one or two people had this figured out and were able to promptly mention their nephew who’s a parole officer, or the time somebody broke into their car, or when they sat on a jury 20 years ago in San Diego and couldn’t reach a verdict in an embezzlement case.

We probably would have been done Tuesday except for the people who were plainly trying whatever shuck and jive they could to get out of it – not least the one woman who suddenly turned into Sammy Sosa testifying before Congress and forgot she spoke English.  And the judge, who I loved, was Not Having It and was on her best Judge Judy are-you-fucking-kidding-me-with-this-shit. “Why didn’t you bring this up when we asked about it yesterday? How long have you lived in this country?  Fourteen years.  Did you go to high school in this country?  Yes. Did you go to college in this country?  Yes.  Did you graduate?  Yes.  What was your main language in high school, what were you taught in?  How about college?  What do you do now?  Radiology technician?  What language is spoken at work?  I think your English will be sufficient for this case.” And a glare that added And sit your ass down. Gah. Fuck me with this no-habla-Inglais bullshit.  Priceless.

I never made it into the box, which is good, because my desperate need to do shtick in public is probably incompatible with my need not to catch a contempt case.  Not gonna lie, I did spend the better part of an hour trying to determine how close to the line I could get without a sudden non-working vacation in the gray bar bed and breakfast.  Never came up though.  We did have to go back in Wednesday because all the shenanigans people tried on Tuesday meant that we didn’t get alternates selected in a timely fashion, but for my trouble I wound up with the better part of a day off on Wednesday and time for a couple of movies, so that was nice.  In fact, the week went so well generally that it’s feeding my theory that at this point, I just need to not go to work and I’ll be mentally fine.  (Obviously the solution is retirement, but that doesn’t look all that financially feasible at present.  Working on it.)

There were a lot of reasons why Firefox’s CEO had to go.  The obvious one, of course, is that the guy created JavaScript, which has never worked right cross-platform and routinely makes my life tougher.  But that’s just on a personal level, and there are many more reasons.

One of Josh Marshall’s readers nailed it, though: this is simply an unacceptable look for a company in an industry that already has an image problem.  Silicon Valley 2014 is basically Wall Street 1986 with more Asians and Indians: still overwhelmingly young, male, white, and churning up tons of money for no visible product or benefit.  It’s turned into a shell game again, and the new Mike Judge series on HBO seems like it’s going to skewer this perfectly.

But there are other things, as I was discussing with a woman last Friday night who was uneasy about having this guy mau-mau’d in such a fashion, her happiness with her own marriage to her wife notwithstanding.  And while I do appreciate the need to take the high road and show some understanding and tolerance of those who disagree with us, there are a couple of things that make me say “…nah.”

1) Had the guy been a CEO in Boston or New Orleans and revealed as a major donor to anti-Catholic organizations, or a CEO in Miami or San Diego and a major donor to a nativist “English-only” organization, he would almost certainly have gotten hounded out of office with a quickness.  Even if your political beliefs are completely orthogonal to your business, it’s not a good idea to give offense to your local community.  And given the stance of Google on Prop 8, and the extent to which Firefox still relies on money from Google, that was going to be an issue at some point at a time when Google really doesn’t need negative press.

2) In 1967, Loving v Virginia invalidated laws against interracial marriage.  In 2000, Alabama voted to remove those laws from the state constitution – by a vote of 60% to 40%.  And if you consider that a quarter of the electorate is black, and probably voted to throw it out, you’re left with a majority of white people thirty-three years later still voting to uphold unconstitutional statutes against miscegenation.  Having grown up in the South and still waiting for enough people to die off so that it can move forward, I can only say that if the supporters of equal marriage don’t want to be fighting a rearguard action for the next six decades, the time to make Eich’s opinions publicly unacceptable is now. People have to know that this is no longer OK – sure, it happened fast, and there are some sincerely held religious beliefs, but I had ancestors who sincerely believed that God sanctioned chattel slavery of black people too.  Believing doesn’t make it right.

Normally when something like this happens there’s an apology and a bunch of hemming and hawing.  But for whatever reason, Eich stuck to his guns.  And now he’s paid for it.  Far too often, these sorts of things end in a muddled haze of postmodern equivocation and nothing happens in the end – somebody gets a charitable donation, somebody reads out a prepared statement, and it goes away in a week. Actions have consequences. Too much of the last decade and a half has been about a class of people who reach a level in life that they no longer face consequences for their actions.  That needs to stop.  The CEO of a high-tech non-profit is a good warning shot for the return of accountability for all, but it won’t do much good unless there are a few more shots fired.

* I’m all about Desean Jackson to the Skins, largely because 1) we need a deep vertical threat, 2) I think DJax is actually an all right dude who wants you to think he’s a thug SOB, and 3) it makes old white NFL pundits pop their clogs. Which is among the best things in life.  The NFL is dreadful and so are the media who cover it.

 

* I’m looking at a new Washington Nationals hat to represent the DMV for just that reason – well, and the Redskins are highly problematic these days (for the record, I think they should keep the name and change the mascot to a potato.  SPUDS ON THE WARPATH, FIGHT FOR OLD DC). Torn between navy hat with red bill (looks too Braves) and red hat with navy bill (looks kinda Red Sox) – and so far, everyone I ask says navy hat. Wish they still had one with DC on it, but who knows.

 

* I do need an Oakland A’s hat b/c I intend to pay them at least as much mind as the Giants this year, not least because Sonny Gray was the ace of the Vandy staff and three years later is the ace of the A’s staff. That boy’s gooooood!* And to be perfectly honest, I’m probably a better fit psychologically for the Athletics, for much the same reason as the next item.

 

* I have baseball tickets this year – a ten-game package for…the San Jose Giants.  Why?  Because single-A ball in a park from the 40s that looks out on the flat of the valley with the mountains in the distance and palm trees beyond the outfield fence…I mean, what more do you want out of summer.  And I find that I enjoy the thought of going out in San Jose just as much as trucking up to the city, simply because San Jose has a lot more in common with the likes of Oakland or Pittsburgh or Birmingham.  It’s not flooded with tourists, it’s not a mecca for hipster techies, it’s an ideal spot for somebody with nothing to prove. And it’s home to one of my three favorite bars west of the Mississippi, so why wouldn’t you?

 

* I’m really interested in what the iPhone 6 will be.  I keep going back and testing the Moto X because of three things: slightly bigger screen (better for Kindle use), slightly better battery life (although tough to tell sometimes b/c I’m not able to hit it with music the same way) and the prospect of co-processor-assisted functions.  Basically I need to be down to just the one phone, if I’m honest…as long as I can go back and forth, the temptation will be strong to keep screwing around with both and not just dealing with it.  And after a long day’s work yesterday, while I can definitely *use* the Moto X long term…I mean, the iPhone experience is just so much more comfortable to me.  Call it polish, call it familiarity, call it a deficiency in my old willingness to tinker, but until something happens to take the work-provided iPhone out of my hands, the Moto X is the backup piece.

 

* That said, I think I may just want off Verizon.  I was at the dentist this morning, where there’s one (1) bar of Verizon signal, and the phone took about 3 minutes to get legit hot in my hand.  Verizon may have coverage everywhere, but it’s not strong coverage everywhere, and my device suffers by it in a way I don’t think the wife’s does (she’s got a 5S on AT&T).  The temptation to try out AIO for a month or so is strong, simply because I’d be willing to swap a cap of 8Mbps on LTE for a reliably sturdy signal.

 

* Mainly, though, I just miss 2006 and being able to pull the Z520 out of my pocket anytime knowing it would be charged, because that thing literally went four days between charges. And had no protruding edges and fit in the change pocket of my jeans.  Good times. If you could make the iPhone battery half again as large, I wouldn’t ever have to sweat battery life during the day.

 

* Five craft beers on a school night and then help take down an entire pub to win trivia? Slight work. (dusts fingernails)

 

* I’m not sure how to react to the notion of a world without David Letterman on the TV.  He first appeared at a time when  I still identified his last name with a character on The Electric Company on PBS, but by the time high school and college came round, there was nothing cooler on TV.  I played Paul Shaffer in a skit for high school which was a parody segment called “Having Sex With A Member…Of The Audience.” (And damn near wound up with Paul’s hairline.) Everyone in late night is doing Letterman shtick now, while Letterman himself has evolved to truly be the spiritual heir of his idol Johnny Carson (who I watched retire 22 years ago).  It’s one more signpost that time marches on and the things you like aren’t forever, so enjoy them while you have them.

“California leads the nation every year in automobile deaths.  We’ve never lost.  Don’t think you’re going to come in from New York, Pennsylvania, Florida and take our championship.  We get most of them in the safety zones. ‘Come on, Martha! We’re in the safety zone!  They have to stop! See those white lines?’ Did you ever see a white line stop a truck?  Those lines are there so the police have some place to start measuring how far your body was thrown.”

Redd Foxx nailed it fifty years ago, though he probably wasn’t thinking about Google and Facebook and the NSA.  People blow through crosswalks and stop signs and cross against lights all the time.  Go down to the corner of Castro and Villa in downtown Googleburg on any given weekday at 5 PM and you can watch America’s stupidest intersection at work: cars blowing through red lights and red turn arrows, people walking across the street on a “don’t walk” just because the light turned green for cars, bicycles trundling down the sidewalk – you name it, and if it’s a traffic violation, somebody’s committing it.  So much for the law.  Why?  Because it’s not that big a deal to people – culturally, there is a sense that abiding by the letter of the law is less urgent than indulging our own convenience.

By contrast, there’s very little to prevent me going around in public with no shirt on.  Convenience stores notwithstanding – and God knows “No Shirt No Shoes No Service” held very little sway in the Jiffy Chek of my childhood memories – I could pretty much walk around downtown Googleburg with no shirt on all damn day and be wholly within the letter of the law.  But I don’t, and the people of Googleburg are probably happy I don’t, and you know why?  Because it’s not culturally appropriate.  Not here, anyway.

Similarly, last week Microsoft apparently went into its own email service to trail down a leak. And on paper, by the terms of their own service, they were completely within their rights and the letter of the law to do so. Yet the backlash was immediate and huge: how dare Microsoft investigate a leak of their own data by searching the contents of their own mail servers?  Put it that way and it starts to looks a little ridiculous – but there it is.  People are outraged, culturally, about something that is technologically and legally 100% legitimate.

That’s the thing about Google and Facebook and the NSA.  What they do to harvest your data is entirely within the letter of the law, most of the time.  And when it’s not, it’s too profitable – or just too simple – not to abide by the letter of the law.  If it takes less effort to scoop up an entire nation’s phone records and search for the target than to single out the target individual’s records, then the law be damned, that’s what the NSA is going to do.  You can opt out of this or that or delete information from your Facebook profile, but what are the odds that data is actually gone?  Nil, because I’ve deleted an item from my profile before and seen it crop back up years later as a recommended thing to favorite.  And not something obvious like “Johnny Cash,” I mean a made-up term of our own devising that I listed as an interest as a goof, which had no page associated with it.  Against the law?  Even if it is, how do you plan to hold them to it?

That’s why the fix isn’t technological, or even legal.  The technology is always running ahead of the law, the law can’t shift quickly enough, and the technology finds its own path.  The only fix is cultural.  We have to decide as a society that exploiting the ease of modern data-mining for commercial purposes without our control is somehow unacceptable, and act on the belief of that unacceptability.  We didn’t stop making jokes about women drivers or slandering “Chinamen” or dressing up in blackface for frat parties because there was a law against it – we stopped because the culture changed to make those things unacceptable.

Add that to the list, and call it the Foxx Caveat: don’t rely on the fact of a white line to stop a truck.

Last week, I attended a bachelorette party (long story) that was largely organized using my rarely-used Google email address.  Sure enough, a week later, I happened to go to the page for Google+ and there was this person being offered up as a new friend for my circles.  Didn’t take much – just two or three emails back and forth.  There’s no other contact I have with this person via Google and there’s no other resource using her real name; in a social life mediated largely through Twitter, you are your call sign and that’s about it.

Here’s the thing that I don’t think I’d really grasped: my non-work email goes through either iCloud or my family’s mail server, pretty much across the board.  The Gmail account which I got ten years ago is largely a spam-stopper and a throwaway address, but there are a few folks still using it.  And for my own edification, I went down the line of my cellphone directory, and through my personal mail in recent days…

Eighty percent of my friends and personal correspondents are on Gmail.

Not an exaggeration.  Google has your email, and as a result, Google pretty much has your life, unless you’re one of these super-Millenial types who’s never used anything for communication but SnapChat and WhatsApp.  Nowadays it’s entirely reasonable that your phone would be the primary source of your personal communications, whether they be text or chat or email or what have you, but in the days of the dot-com boom and the first decade of the 21st century, go-anywhere email meant it was web-based, and from April 1, 2004 on, that meant Google’s offering, with its clean UI and absurd 1 GB of free storage (now somewhere north of 7 GB last I looked).

Back then, there was no Beast of Mountain View.  There wasn’t any iPhone vs Android, there wasn’t any Facebook vs Google+, the great menace of the technology world was still Microsoft and Google was our friend and ally in building a life that didn’t depend on the Beast of Redmond.  I mean, my God – Google’s guys were up there at the iPhone launch talking about what a great implementation of Google Maps they had on this new device.  Then again, the Yahoo! guys were up there talking up their push email for the iPhone too.

How things change.

Here’s the fundamental problem: I’m paying Feedbin for my RSS feed, Apple Maps is now good enough to use routinely, the default search engine on the iOS devices is Yahoo and there are plugins on the browser for DuckDuckGo and disconnect.me – as it stands right now, I’m detached from Google’s goods and services in everything except for the Moto X experiment (which has its own separate Google account from the one I’ve had these last 10 years).  I don’t need to use Google for anything.  But if 80% of the people I correspond with are using Gmail, that means that 80% of my mail is going through Google anyway. At that point, why bother?

Flash back to September 7, 2008, when I predicted the future:

The “heavy hand of government tyranny” is coming back, too. Nothing will actually be different, but the “essential tools to fight terrorism”, the surveillance and monitoring and put-your-shoes-on-the-belt horseshit that’s vitally important to the War on Terror, and if you’re not guilty you don’t have anything to hide? All that will be replaced on January 20th with a sudden outrage at the prying of government’s jackbooted thugs, the wailing at how Obama’s trashing the Bill of Rights, how a bunch of federal stormtroopers are out to violate your home and castle in the name of some evil regime that hates your liberty…Most of all, though, Obama inherits everything. All of it. Think back to 1992-93, when Bush the Elder took it upon himself to deploy troops into Somalia after he’d already lost the election. Does anybody remember that? No, all anybody remembered is how “Clinton screwed the military in Mogadishu”…

There you have it.  If you want the big reason why the tech sector is shitting nickels over the NSA, it’s because anything that leads people to have greater concern for privacy – and that makes them want better control over their own data – is quite literally taking money out of the pocket of Google and Facebook.  And yet, as long as Google and Facebook collect this data, they can be subpoena’d for it or otherwise compelled to hand it over by whatever legal instrument exists.  Therefore, Google and Facebook have to kneecap the NSA as quickly as possible – not because the NSA is a flagrant violator of the rights of citizens, but because they’re ultimately the competition.

The surveillance society arrived five or six years ago, and we all signed up for it without thinking too hard about what it meant.  Now you get to spend the rest of your life either deciding you don’t care and it probably won’t affect you, or otherwise looking over your shoulder…forever.

The New Republic has picked up on the youth complex of Silicon Valley.  On the one hand, I am quietly delighted that there are guys out there who feel they have to get Botox to succeed in business, and I’m sure more than a few second-wave feminists are chortling into their Tab this morning.  But on the other hand…here I am, forty-two years old, and while I don’t have any kids, I also have seventeen years in desktop support and a hairline that’s stopped receding and started retreating.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the entirety of the perfect resume these days seems to be “dropped out of a prestigious university.”  That’s the Facebook meme now, once removed from the Bill Gates idea, with the caveat that Microsoft was 11 years from Harvard dropout to IPO.  If you were in the Valley in 2003, you’re a fossil now.  Just our luck as GenXers – stuck on the one side with a bunk of Stanford brats who think thirty-two is ancient and on the other with parents who are still forwarding chain emails about Obama’s sinister Muslim takeover.  Great time to be in technology, huh?

A lot of this isn’t new, of course.  Silicon Valley’s always relied on the absence of work-life balance to drive things (flashback to thirty years ago and the “80 hours a week and loving it” shirts at Apple that were marked up to read 90 instead).  And now you can get free food at work, run around shooting each other with Nerf guns at work, get somebody else to do your laundry, take the bus back and forth…it’s been years since I clubbed the whole “re-juvenile” phenomenon in this space, but damned if they didn’t win.  It doesn’t help matters at all that this time out, the nerds have been enhanced and supplanted by the kind of Wall Street-seeking douchebros who will almost certainly be the focus of “The Wolf of Market Street” twenty years from now.

And make no mistake, it’s a bubble.  $2 billion for Oculus Rift…from Facebook?  Hot on the heels of spending a billion on Instagram?  $19 billion on WhatsApp?   Snapchat is out there turning down billions from Facebook and Google, and meanwhile, only Apple and Amazon are left in the business of selling goods and/or services for cash on the freakin’ barrelhead rather than relying on advertisers as the monopsony buyer of your personal data.  The lunacy around Bitcoin should be enough to clench it – not to deny the potential of digital currency for some uses, but when Bitcoin knockoffs are raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for NASCAR sponsorships?

To paraphrase PJ O’Rourke, the Internet now allows more people to make bigger and stupider decisions than anything in human history, with the exception of car keys and Irish whiskey.  Now we just have to wait around for the dumb to shake itself out and hope we don’t get wrecked along the way.

The SEC was a dumpster fire in men’s basketball this year. Just godawful in almost every respect. Florida’s 18-0 conference run was considered suspect (but not enough to deny them the #1 overall seed). It just wasn’t pretty, and a whopping 3 SEC teams got into the big dance. Only thing is, all three of them made it to the Sweet Sixteen, including the Gators, 8-seeded Kentucky, and the 11th-seeded Tennessee Volunteers, who were stuck in a First Four play-in game on Wednesday and were by definition one of the last teams added to the tournament.

And in the past five days, Cuonzo Martin has led the Vols to as many wins in the NCAA tournament as Kevin Stallings has coached for Vandy in the last decade combined.

In 2007, Vanderbilt got to the Sweet Sixteen as a 6 seed behind Derrick Byers and Shan Foster, among others. Since then…

2008: 4 seed, lost in the first round to Siena.
2010: 4 seed, lost in the first round to Murray State.
2011: 5 seed, lost in the first round to Richmond.
2012: 5 seed, beat Harvard in the first round but lost to Wisconsin after.

10 years. 5 tournament appearances. Three total victories, and three consecutive first-round eliminations by a double-digit seed.

This is why Kevin Stallings should only find his seat slightly cooler next year. The circumstances of this year, leading to a conference schedule played out by seven scholarship players, two walk-ons and a student manager with a uniform, were ridiculous – any success of any kind meant extra credit. We still finished 11th, right where we were picked when we looked like having nine scholarship players instead. So I guess we overcame the adversity of losing McClellan and Hendo, for what that’s worth.

Next year? Dai-Jon Parker and Shelby Moats are our seniors. We have no juniors, because they all flew the coop after their freshman season, but Siakam is a redshirt junior and Kedren Johnson (assuming he comes back) would be a junior for eligibility purposes. I don’t know where Hendo fits in, depending on whether he gets some kind of NCAA waiver for medical hardship, but given the track record I’m not banking on getting a whole season out of him. Luke Kornet and Damian Jones, our twin towers of terror, are true sophs, and we supposedly have three freshman guards on the way. So for the next two seasons, we never lose more than two seniors per season and we should be well-tuned to the point that the 2015-2016 season should absolutely feature an NCAA tournament run. A run, mind you, not another one-out.

Because at that point, assuming we don’t sneak into the dance next year, we’ll be looking at one tournament win in the last nine trips. The SEC tournament title in 2012 was an unmitigated triumph, make no mistake, but it also camouflaged a squad that absolutely underachieved in the postseason. Stallings can recruit talent, and he can make the best of a bad situation, but unless he learns how to make the best out of a good one, it’s going to be time to look elsewhere.

First, read this.

No, all of it.

Done?  Good.

It’s real, and it’s discouraging.  I noted online today that when you factor in the bus that picks you up in the morning, the free snacks, the open-plan space with everyone around their shared table – the major Millenial contribution to Silicon Valley is turning it into kindergarten. But it’s not like it was in the late 1990s – when Po Bronson could strike up a conversation on the sideline of a rec-league soccer game and almost instantly be asked “do you want a job?” Employers are still being picky about who they hire, and employees are being picky about where they want to go, and in the meantime, Zuckface takes time out from bitching about the NSA usurping his exclusive right to violate privacy and lobbies both sides for more H1-B visas so cheaper foreign talent can alleviate runaway salaries…

There is a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” that is the observation in Western Christianity of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.  There is also a holiday on December 25 called “Christmas” which is a heavily-Americanized secular celebration of the end of the year and the coming of winter, heavily leavened with consumerism and a general sense that we should take a couple of minutes to pay lip-service to the idea of being nice to people.  A lot of confusion and conflict comes from people who conflate these two holidays and think they are the same thing.

By the same token, there is a Silicon Valley tech sector that dates back to the aerospace/microprocessor days of the Wagon Wheel era and has gone from military-industrial electronics to personal computing to the Internet to a revolution in digital media and communication.  There is also a “Silicon Valley tech sector” whereby the dream is to drop out of Stanford at 20, Tinkertoy together some APIs with a kicky interface and a whimsical name, host the whole thing on a cheap AWS instance, collect $20 million in VC funding and ultimately sell out to Google or Facebook within a year.  And too many people have come to conflate the latest get-rich-quick scheme for arrested adolescents with an industry that still has a lot of problems to solve more complex than a better way to get that co-ed to send you topless pics.

And most of all, the tide isn’t rising. The money isn’t getting spread around.  Unless you do a huge deal while you’re still small, the big acqui-hire dollars are going to the engineers and the CxO-level staff and the VCs who funded you.  If you’re a secretary or a QA guy or the IT support, don’t count on the massive upfront equity position – in fact, the only time you’re going to get equity up front is if they don’t have cash on the barrelhead to pay you.  And there are people out there complaining about it, but in classic Valley fashion, they’re doing it in the most tone-deaf ignorant-ass way possible.  Sigh.

Basically, the “Silicon Valley tech sector” is the latest version of the Wall Street of the 80s.  It’s a double-bubble economy; the economic bubble grows on the back of lucky guesses, personal connections and VCs and investment banks with more money than sense hoping one of the darts strikes gold, while the participants exist in their own bubble away from, you know, reality.  Live in the Mission or Marina, take the sealed bus to work without ever dropping off the Wi-Fi, get your dry cleaning done on campus, borrow an electric car to drive home if you like, enjoy the free food everywhere, never grow up, never grow old, and don’t think about how the ride can’t last because obviously Candy Crush will be popular forever and a $7 billion IPO is only sensible.

Meanwhile, the startup mentality goes haywire everywhere in the Valley.  So now we all get to sit in the big open-plan offices, we all get to answer our work email 24/7, and we all get our projects managed in the style of ready-fire-aim, and never mind that an organization of thousands of employees doesn’t work like your eight-man social-app company upstairs at Red Rock.  Everyone is chasing the “tech sector.” In the meantime, the actual tech sector suffers by it.

Android Wear has landed.  One of the worst-kept secrets in the Valley is now out there – Google Now is coming to your wrist, this summer, voice-driven and paired to your phone.  Pretty much what I and a million other people predicted.

This is actually potentially interesting.  For one, it lets Google leverage a lot of what they’ve learned from Google Glass in a less obnoxious package.  For another, it gets you away from the biggest cause of battery drain: the screen.  The modern smartphone uses more power on its display than anything else, which is why the constant make-the-phone-bigger race is a false economy in Android and why phones like the Moto X, with its emphasis on dialing down the specs race in the name of battery preservation, are pointing the way forward.

I’m still holding out until the notional iOS device, but wearables are going to happen – at this point, it’s just a question of who gets it right first.  On the face of it, Google appears to be closer than Samsung…

Actually never mind, this guy nails it.