They're trying to help you think more creatively! All three of those products - combined with a motor or electromagnet of some type - could provide the functionality you're looking for with extra Rube Goldbergy style. :)

On topic: That video was pretty bad. What was the point of saying their projects don't involve "LED lights" and capacitors? And then the phrase "maker and DIY consumer" seemed really awkward/wrong. The request for feedback seemed like it was going in the right direction until they made us limit our request to three products. I don't know if I'll need germanium diodes or opto-isolators or tantalum capacitors ahead of time. The whole point of radio shack is that you can go there and overpay to grab that random part when you need it.

From the Aeyron website "Operational duration: up to 25 minutes."

In practice it's probably a lot less than that.

I'm not sure that their scenario of detecting a dork dressed up like a spy stealing my Hyundai has me sold on the concept.

In all fairness, Nintendo and MS never made any attempt to allow that type of thing.

There should be a regulation that any audio/video capture device integrated into a computer can be disabled with a foolproof manual interlock. I'm thinking maybe a little cover that slides in front of the camera; I'm not sure how to do the equivalent with the mic.

Maybe I'm a bit paranoid, but I live in constant fear that my laptop is watching me... trying to figure out how to sap and impurify my precious bodily fluids.

Does that only apply if you're destroying a village to save it? or maybe if you're in a war with Eastasia or Eurasia?

Always good to see Emacs getting some screen time.

I'm reminded of the line from The Social Network "It's definitely necessary to break out emacs and modify that perl script." Anyone who's done screen scraping could totally relate to that sequence (PHP and redirects ... I'll come back to that one) but I imagine even regular people can subconsciously detect the difference between realistic computer stuff and "I'm going to virtualize an inverse Java applet to localize the virus!"

That's clever introducing an error that will be identifiable when someone reposts your +4 comment on the next article about plagiarism.

Does anybody even use PERL anymore? It seems like kind of a scarecrow argument. I think /. used to use it back in the day, but it's much better since they switched to Javascript.

Assembly's used all the time for embedded systems.

No compiler's going to generate code as compact as a good programmer. That can be important when there's only a handful of KB for firmware. Performance is less of an issue these days, but if you're clever you can still shave off a few cycles. I don't think we've quite reached the 'John Henry' point yet in terms of optimization.

I even know a few weirdos who find it easier to write and/or read than C.

I understand that lawyers are expensive, but this one would require about 30 seconds of analysis. IANAL, but can't they also get compensated for that 30 laywer seconds for such an obviously retarded waste of time?

Maybe it will take him some time to lose that reputation, but his latest novel Anathem had an ending like an 80s John Hughes movie.

It's hard to imagine a new Alien movie being any good after all the crap since Aliens.

William Gibson wrote an interesting if flawed script for what could have been Alien 3, but it seems like they've missed a few obvious wins:

1.) The aliens get to earth and it's all out war. 2.) We find the alien home planet and it's all out war.

That could be good for the consumer too. If they use the data to target the ads intelligently, some would consider it a feature rather than an annoyance. I'd be happy to watch a 30 second spot that's entertaining/relevant, and Google's probably smart enough to figure that out after categorizing the ones I opt out of.

That chart hardly seems like damning evidence. You could list 11 safety tradeoffs as the cause of just about any conceivable accident.

Do you run diagnostic checks on the braking system every time you drive a car? Does not doing so save time and increase risk?

It's likely that the XBox update is working properly, but the production servers aren't set up to communicate with the new firmware yet. Unless the affected systems don't start working properly on the release date, this is just dumb antimicrosoftism.