There are plenty of toys for adults, and you don't even need an Xbox for that. Just pick up a FPGA development board, and start coding stuff in VHDL or Verilog or something. Throw in a microcontroller, buy an oscilloscope and logic analyser, and you're good to go!

I hope the North Koreans love their children, too.

A ship could use an impeller instead of a regular propeller to make the cables / nets option a lot more difficult.

Towing the ship in circles wouldn't be very difficult, until the ships computers start compensating, raise the alarm and throttle up a bit. As far as I know, the Somali pirates mostly use small boats, not impressively powerful towing boats.

Maybe they should just start using some flags on autonomous ships indicating they are equipped with automatic defense systems.

she's kinda cute...

I guess the perpetrators might be found by correlating the buyer/seller data from a number of cases where fraud is reported.

The perpetrators could try to make this more difficult by making the data harder to correlate; pump some stocks that they don't buy or sell, pump some stocks, but intentionally sell outside the obvious window of opportunity, possible at a (small) loss, using multiple, unrelated accounts to buy and sell the stock, etc.

That way, the detectives have to try to find multiple unrelated perpetrators (from their point of view, because of the separate accounts), that have made a significant profit in some of these cases.

I think it's going to take a whole lot of very interesting data mining to find them, based on the stock data only.

This device seems almost completely useless to me for on-the-go anything, unless you also bring along a seperate LCD, which ofcourse needs power, because of the placement of the touchscreen.

I can only imagine the neck strain from looking at the far right of the keyboard to see what I'm typing. If the screen was in the center, or detachable (and re-attachable at the top) it just might be useful.

And aside from that, I've just spend several months doing CAD/CAM work, and my hands routinely hurt from using the mouse and navigator for many hours a day. I don't want to think about how my hands would feel if I had to hold a pen all day long.

Indeed, imagine doing 3D CAD/CAM without a mouse. Do I have to surrender my space navigator, too?

Touch screens royally suck for anything other than clicking really big buttons.

While I do agree that computers play an increasingly important role in research and development, it's not the computer doing the design work. The human is doing the design work, and using the computer to verify the design, or optimize it within very specific boundaries.

When the computer calculates that a certain structure is stronger than it needs to be, the designer can adjust it. The computer won't design a completely different structure for you.

If you were to use a computer to generate a design (say, circuit board or application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) layout and trace routing) it's really just running a semi-brute force algorithm, optimized by the programmer to produce suitable but possibly sub-optimal solutions quickly.

Without the engineer staring at the screen, the thing would just sit there. Saying the computer designed the bridge is like saying the space shuttle was designed by the pocket calculators. The computer is a tool, and it requires and intelligent and knowledgeable engineer to produce anything meaningful.

You mean on 3 of the 4 tests they did?

I'm rather impressed they managed to perform even worse than Vista on the Cinebench test. If they keep this up, by the time Windows 7 comes out of beta, it won't run at all!

So, if two corporations, one of which is less than 18 years old (or whatever the local legal age is) merge, and later create a daughter company, that should be considered statutory rape?

I wonder how the Simpsons could be considered "human"? The Ducks are always half naked, but because they are apparently ducks instead of humans, that makes it alright? Those stories are even meant for children! The horror!

What if Huey, Dewey and Louie Duck would be having a wild party with April, May and June Duck?

And here we were joking about how retarded the idea of filtering all traffic in Australia was.

Not only do they intent to capture every packet, but they also intent to store them and analyze them off-line.

Especially considering the growth of bandwidth usage the past couple of years, this is nothing short of an absurd idea.