There's little reason to make an intelligent in the human sense of "intelligent" machine.

Little logical reason, perhaps. But humans have evolved an interesting thing called "intellectual curiosity". There are a million scientists and engineers out there who would gladly build it for no other reason than it's an interesting little puzzle to solve.

Actually, without joking, I'm not actually convinced that it's necessarily a bad thing if robots take over the world and destroy us. I know this probably won't be a popular viewpoint (for obvious reasons), but the fact is that humans are inferior, weak, deeply flawed creatures -- so logically, why is it a bad thing if we are supplanted by something that is far superior to us? Logically, it is a good thing if X is replaced by Y when Y is much better than X - it's only not a good thing if you happen to be X. But we aren't the ultimate end-point of the universe.

Robots will just effectively be like organisms, competing with us in the same evolutionary "space", so to speak. Darwinian evolution doesn't stop just because a creature is made of something other than weak blobs of billions of organic carbon-based cells. There will be many different robots, and evolution will kick in: The robots that happen to be best at propagating (which might include some amount of destroying other things) will survive and propagate the most.

A creature far more intelligent than us will be capable of taking the evolution of "life" (in loose terms, they will be "life") to new heights that we can scarcely imagine now ... far more intelligent, far more well-connected (borg-like intelligence), far more adaptable (more easily spread through space) - something far more profound and interesting will result. A similar analogy is how simple single-celled life forms gave rise to us. We now give rise to something else. There might still be humans around someday when robots take over, but we'll part of the cesspool (where we belong), i.e. we'll be about as interesting or useful to the creatures that really run the universe, as single-celled life forms are now to us.

Maybe the entire purpose of humans, our "meaning" and reason for existence, is just to create the much more advanced life forms that will replace us, and then step aside for the next step in the universe's evolution. And maybe the answer is not to fight it, but to bring it on in a carefully controlled way. We can't prevent it from happening - even if it's just for intellectual curiosity, someone will create advanced robots that we can't control sooner or later. At least if we control that process, we have a better chance of guiding it in a positive way. We always consider the destruction of humanity as a bad thing 'by default'. But let's face it - be brutally honest, people are crap things - I for one 'do' actually welcome our replacement by something far better.

The problem is a data glove is not a volume product; even if they could make them much cheaper, this will probably never be a mass consumer product. To make and sell an actual product involves a lot more than just the potential unit manufacturing cost of the tech (office space, marketing, software, distribution, HR, legal, accounting, engineers, managers, making drivers etc.) - unless you're talking about a home-made job, you have to add all that stuff into the price. Personally I doubt you can turn any kind of profit selling a five-sensor glove at $500 - the market's just too small - this company isn't going anywhere.

The primary reason for anti-biker hate is due to the simple fact that bicycles are much smaller than cars: this causes our primitive ape-brain's status/power-hierarchy analysis system to kick in. It's not based on rationality or logic, it's simply the fact that humans are just apes, and millions of years of evolution has hammered into our brains the primary importance of relative physical size in establishing and meting out dominance hierarchies. "Me big car, you little bicycle, oog oog".

It's simple, really, and once you realise it, it explains so much of the heated "debate" around what really ought to be a non-issue.

Bike riders don't pay for the roads

Wow, you're saying cyclists are exempt from paying taxes? Awesome, I'm going to become a cyclist.

For some reason the summary links to 5DT's MRI glove, which is specialized for use in MRI applications (no metal) and obviously costs more ... cheaper 'normal' glove is here.

You don't have to fully "re-engineer" it. It's a payroll system. You just implement a new one, check how much everyone's getting paid, and put that information in. Unless it has everyone on the planet it's not going to be that expensive.

that there's enough money to throw around for pie-in-the-sky socialized healthcare and bailouts of the corrupt and incompetent.

Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by corruption. This is not "stupid", it's corruption working exactly as it's intended to. What's perhaps stupid is those ultimately footing the bill being too naive to realise it, and not holding the corrupt to account.

Sorry, but I have a pretty good idea what corruption looks like, and this stinks to high hell of corruption, the odds are about zero that it's anything else. Computers and how 'complex' they are great premises for corrupt bureaucrats to launch 'projects' that become huge money holes.

For an aerospace company, you probably need something from a company with a better security track record - sorry, that's just due diligence.

Oh sorry, I was confused 50 milliwatts = Nokia's claim, 6 microwatts = Intel. Hmm .. that implies just 20 cellphones could draw 1W from a 1MW antenna? Still small, but I suppose if hundreds of thousands of users did this in a built-up area it might make a tiny dent. Densely populated areas though tend to be more flooded with multiple antennae transmissions; I still doubt it would make a big difference, considering that cellphones are tiny, and the maximum absorption is the size of a cellphone ... you don't usually have more than a few cellphones in a room. If you were right, it would imply that the majority of radio reception is from signals that have bounced hundreds of times already without being absorbed.

6 microwatts from a 1MW antenna - so a "mere" 166000 phones charging off just one transmitter would sink a massive 1W, or one millionth of that transmission power ... that sounds trivial to me.

In my experience, only bad software developers are incapable of managing their own machines. The kind you probably don't want working for you anyway.

Maybe, but this topic has by far the most comments out of any article on /.'s front page ... it is his job after all to attract commenters and generate lively discussion ... it's not his fault we're all so predictable as to fall for this every time.