Not expending 100% of funds and taking on as much risk as possible is not even close to the same thing as having a "slush fund". And government auditors do not care if you fail to expend 100% of funds and money goes back to the taxpayer.

Music exists. It is sound, which is a pressure wave that causes an ear drum to vibrate. Treating this effect on the human body as a possessible, physical object requires imagination.

Which is why a neutered legislature in gridlock is probably the best thing that this country can hope for. Personally, I am ready to vote for the candidate that runs on the platform "I promise not to do or touch anything".

Even if they are not in the majority, they still have a responsibility to negotiate on behalf of the people that elected them. They cannot just bow out of every vote because they are in the minority. The grid-lock that is happening right now is exactly the way this system is supposed to work. It is by far preferrable to what normally goes on. There is a significant percentage of the voting populace that would not mind the debt ceiling being frozen and obama-care being stopped. So if you want to get more votes from the right, you might have to concede something like spending cuts or a delay in portions of obamacare. I personally think that a government shutdown is a great thing for this country to help it get its head around what government services are actually necessary and essential. I don't want to continue paying my governement to spy on me and my family.

Every US Government agency reports personnel shortfalls across all fields in every branch of the organization. This despite the fact that we are experiencing ever higher levels of government spending, particularly in the DoD. I gaurantee that they are already experiencing shortfalls in secretaries. Is it because there are not enough qualified individuals to perform secretary jobs or because people with the right experience hate the idea of working for the Federal Government where they would get excellent benefits and very small chance of ever being fired?

I don't think this "requires" the cloud. It is offered as a service, but can be run locally. I do think that the cloud will eventually be necessary to really make home automation appealing to the masses. People will need a system where they by their blender, scan the nfc tag or qr code, and immediately get that registered in the cloud system. I do not think that the brains for the day to day automation needs to be in the cloud, but the clould definitely has a role in helping automate parts of peoples lives.

I do not really see WigWam as being a product built to compete with current off the shelf products. As evidenced by their release of the Arduino and RasPi Dev kits, It is really geared for tinkerers interested in the engineering of automation systems not just the building of a single automated home. They are providing a system with two completely open operating systems, hackable hardware, and the scalability and versatility of IP. This allows you to develop completely unique automated systems that would be impossible with existing systems. Not only can you the types of sensors and actuators in the system, but you can actually hack down to the level of changing things like radio duty cycling, routing protocols, and device sleep cycles. You cannot do this with devices like the Digi Xbee products and certainly not with systems like Z-wave or insteon.

I would like to point out that the assertion that the NSA collects metadata is a strawman. A fictitious scenario that was constructed by relabeling plain data as "metadata", because it is perceived to be not as awful as pilfering through personally identifiable information. In fact, phone numbers, Identifying numbers, account numbers, names, times, and dates are all just data. An example of metadata would be something describing the format of a displayed phone number, but the number itself is just pure data. I only bring it up it up because I see even people here on slashdot, who are normally smarter on these issues than the mainstream, are starting to take these falsehoods at face value.

Interesting article on the interpretation of expected bulb life:
http://www.gizmag.com/energy-star-led-light-bulbs/27027/

The description of the LIFX is a little off. Only a master bulb uses wifi to create the bridge to the home network. The other bulbs are connected via 802.15.4 physical layer and a 6LoWPAN adaptation layer. This is likely more power efficient than a whole network of wifi bulbs and definitely scales better for a large number of devices.

I think the description of the product is misleading. The system only uses wifi on a single master bulb which bridges the network of bulbs to the home network and allows things like smartphones to control the bulbs. Z-wave and insteon use similar bridging devices for connecting devices to IP networks. The network of bulbs are connected via 802.15.4 at the physical layer, an open standard. On top of this, Contiki implements 6LoWPAN, an IPv6 adaptation layer for low power devices. This is currently a draft IETF standard. If you are looking to install a system, these systems cannot currently compete with the likes of Z-wave, however, if you are into hobbyist embedded development, it is quite nice because you have a variety of hardware available from which to build custom systems and multiple open source frameworks to develop with (Contiki and TinyOS).

So you acknowledge that we all have biases in terms of the careers we pursue. Consider how similar biases can make a product development team more effective when a diverse group of individuals can look at a problem from different points of view. Etsy is an excellent example. I doubt that the majority of their customers are male engineers. Isn't it obvious that one of the best ways to develop products that their customers want is to find competent developers who are also likely to be users of the product? If I am a competent developer, but I loathe and despise video games and I never play them, would you want me working for your game development company?

I think you are right. I do believe that there are still many gender biases in our workforce and society as a whole, but the problem in the engineering fields with lack of females has been shown to be primarily a problem of supply. What is interesting is that universities first tried to fix this problem by soliciting femailes entering college but have now found that they need to intervene earlier than college in order to get women more interested in math and engineering. The engineering program that I am most familiar with now spends the majority of their outreach to female students on adolescent age ranges and all metrics seem to indicate that this is far more effective.

I don't think he is being obtuse. The law is not going to specifically ban Google glasses, but any potential head mounted display. There can be no doubt based on years research and real world experience in the military that see-through head mounted displays can significantly improve situation awareness. A ban on head mounted displays not only prevents the use of ones that are bad for driving but any that could also be good for driving.

Contiki is primarily aimed at 802.15.4 devices. As far as I am concerned, Bluetooth LE is a hackish attempt to make it compete in the same space as 802.15.4. I think that your average 802.15.4 radio consumes less power for the same range & throughput as a bluetooth LE. Also, you have the advantage being able to create more advanced sensor networks. Of course, BLE has the huge advantage of being able to piggyback along with existing bluetooth to get on all the phones and tablets.