Here's a secret: anyone with a tuner card and the ability to feed the captured transport stream (IIRC encapsulated MPEG2 for you ATSC guys in the US) into x264 can do the exactly same as these 'scene groups'. Probably a better job too, if you use CRF rather than constant-bitrate or target filesize.

But people who will be quite happy to exploit your deregulated society will be right there with you!

Complain all you want about 'big banks' unethical behavior (really, keep complaining, write to your local MP/senator/whathaveyou, make sure the issue doesn't get dropped) but government regulation of banking means that if you put your money in a bank, you can be sure (at least up to £85,000 per Bank in the UK) that you will always have access to that money. Without regulation, then you have situations like with Paypal where the holder of you money can just up and decide "Nope, you can't have it anymore. It's ours for at least the next 9 months. Oh, you want an explanation? Too bad!".
Or how about enforcing standards, like power supply? You want a situation where not only does every device have it's own plug, but your house may not even supply the same voltage or frequency as the neighbourhood a mile away? 'No government at all' works fantastically when all your actors are rational and honest. That is also true to Communism. Finding this mythical group of rational and honest actors (and keeping out even a single bad egg) is the hard part.

Not original at all. If you want to see the what's likely the entire program before it airs on Smithsonian, it's almost certainly a dubbed over and slightly recut version of the Channel 4 documentary How to Build a Bionic Man. Same presenter, same robot, aired back in February. UK viewers (or those with a UK proxy) can watch it on 4od, those outside the UK can likely fine a torrent with ease.

With the scattering from the air blast, I propose "laser boomstick".

What you are thinking of is Swarm Robotics. And you misrepresent the field quite insultingly: it was far from a case of plonking down some simple robots and noting "wow, they do all sorts of things we didn't expect!". The entire point was to confirm that the emergent behaviour that had previous been simulated with virtual swarm agents, and prior to that theorised as the cause of insect behaviour, was possible to replicate, and to codify if the physical medium of interaction added any notable additional factors to the swarm behaviour (it does mainly due to computational imitations of the simulation, and computational robotics is now a big and mostly biomimetic field, e.g. using mobile driven whiskers for impact sensing).

What does this have to do with autonomous vehicles? For a start, while autonomous cars are in the minority they will be interacting almost entirely with human drivers. This is the WORST CASE scenario for autonomous vehicles. Once you have a large proportion of vehicles being autonomous, you can begin to have communication between vehicles, and produce behaviour like convoying that is impossible for human-operated or human/autonomous mixes to perform. There are plenty of simulations of large numbers of autonomous vehicles around, mostly to see how to optimise behaviour to produce superior traffic flow; for example removing junction signalling and allowing autonomous vehicles to freely and continuously merge and cross each other is far more efficient than turn-by-turn streamed releases. Papers and reports on this sort of modelling abound. Here's one that turned up after about 5 seconds of googling, with a few hundred thousand of its cohorts available.

There's nothing stopping you from putting Linux on the x86 Surfaces. The ,a href="http://www.geek.com/microsoft/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-the-surface-pro-1539262/">first guide that turned up on googling 'Linux surface' had this to say on how to enable Linux on the Surface:

From there on, it;s a typical installation from USB.

It was later clarified by Penello that the latency of the HMDI input would be too high for gaming, and using it to pass the PS4's (or any other console, e.g. 360) output is not recommended, presumably because of the overlay. Odd, as my AV receiver can overlay it's UI with no more than 1 frame of delay, but if it was only intended for overlaying of TV, then MS may never have bothered to optimise it.

That'd be the Z-001 model, right?

Of course, you can also activate programs in the taskbar by pressing win+[number] (e.g. win+1 for the program in position 1).

The 'minimum effort' way to access programs, control panel snap-ins, etc hasn't changed since Vista: press the start key on your keyboard, type the first, occasionally second (and possibly third, for lesser-used programs) characters of the name, then hit enter. If you using the hunt-around-some-menus technique you might experience a slight speed-up or slow-down when going from start menu to start screen, depending on how organised you are (or how resistant to change you are), but for anyone using windows in a sane manner the difference is nonexistant.

So... what? Do you just chug it? Massage it into the affected areas? Inject it? Process it to extract the relevant chemical? Place it in a small shrine to Yog-Sothoth?

Great in theory. How do you deal with bathroom breaks, and any sort of sensitive information (e.g. viewing case records, either on a computer or physical documents) that whoever may be viewing the video should not have access to, talking with at-risk witnesses (who may feel threatened and not give information at all if they feel their identities may become known), or even just talking to the general public in the comfort of their own homes (i.e. 'neighbourhood policing')?
I'm all for issuing every police officer with a camera, and the technology is easily there to do so with an almost cast-iron signing chain to ensure the footage is demonstrably tamper-free, but the logistics of doing so is not quite as easy as "hand 'em out, never turn 'em off".

Back and forewards.

Yes. And additionally, he's looking to use a paltry 10-channel EEG to do it. That may be enough for someone with good (and conscious) concentration to move one axis back and wards, and maybe even switch between axes. But moving the arm unconsciously and naturally? No way. Not even close. For that, you need some sort of nerve reinnervation, direct patch-clamping of the motor neurons, or an intercranial BMI (Brain Machine Interface) right in the motor cortex. Or you could sit inside a noninvasive MEG (Magnetoenchphalogram) machine, but those aren't exactly portable.

An straight-up Space Elevator is still way beyond us, even if we could pump out molecularly perfect nanotubes of indefinite length. But smaller tether systems are totally possible; 'stationary' and hypersonic Bolos and Skyhooks, depending on the orbital velocity and tip velocity (itself depending on tether length and rotation rate). You don't need a massive anchor site, you could fly some of the smaller ones in a single launch, and we could make some of the smaller ones with materials we already manufacture in bulk (e.g. Spectra and other tensile Aramids).

Then there are just fun things you can do, like conductive tether generators and propulsion inside a magnetosphere, or linear tether launchers.