Yawn. Won't work. It's a complicated solution to a simple problem. If I want to turn the light on in a room, why make it more complicated than flipping a switch on the wall? I suppose they could allow you to program all sorts of schedules and such... which can be done far easier with simple on/off/dim/brighten sensors.

So the question is: What does this tech bring to the table that makes my life better or easier? Sounds to me like more tech for tech's sake, which is only good if you're selling the tech.

Good work, Slashdot. Maybe you'll be a tad more cautious before reported bogus news, eh?

As for individual posters: How many of the people who screamed vitriol at Samsung will now apologize? How many of those who vowed to boycott Samsung in yesterday's thread will admit they were wrong?

I'll bet very few.

We live in a society where people treat indignation like a drug, always ready to believe the negative, always looking to be a victim. Sad times for the species indeed. Will people learn from this, and stop believing everything they read? One can only hope (a fool's hope, but hope nonetheless.)

You're wasting your breath. The amateur pundits and doomsayers have already pronounced Samsung guilty, and are declaring in mighty tones their determination to boycott a company over a single report. No thought, no investigation, no waiting for the truth. Just charge ahead, demand a head on a bloody pike, and scream indignation... that's the Internet way. Should this prove to be a false positive, will Slashdot print a retraction? As for me, I was looking at an Acer model for my daughter; I think I'll buy her Samsung instead.

I purchased a Samsung RF710 a month ago, and am running the default OS install with zero problems. Sure, I scanned the machine, but it had almost NO crapware (as compared to HP and Gateway), and it has performed flawlessly. No key loggers or other problems. If anything, this has been the cleanest laptop I've every purchased. I wonder why Samsung did this? Has anyone other than the original author seen the same thing? It seems a strange move on Samsung's part.

I've switched to other search engines; from my experience, Google provides too many tangential and corporate references when I do research.

Also, how does Google "know" that their search results were valid? I'll often do a Google search, click a couple of links, and after being disappointed, I'll go to another search engine where I get more useful results.

What bugs me the most are searches on technical or medical topics, where Google give me a dozen "harvester" results -- e.g., I get sites that have stolen conversations from other message boards, and reported them along with tons of ads. Yuck! There must be dozens of hundreds of sites, all with broken answers to questions about JavaScript and/or medicines.

Just because evidence is anecdotal doesn't mean it should be blithely discounted. If I say "Ouch" at being cut, that means the injury hurt me; the pain is quite real even if no one else has felt it.

'This is gonna be a mess for both users and developers,' Jobs said. 'Contrast this with Apple's integrated App Store, which offers users the easiest-to-use, largest app store in the world, preloaded on every iPhone.'"

I have five different grocery stores near my house -- I don't have any problem buying groceries. They all sell slightly different "stuff", which gives me more choice than if I have just one store. CHOICE IS GOOD.

The Android marketplace is competitive capitalism; Apple is one-size-fits-all, buy-what-we-say communism.

I'll take the chaos, thank you.

I never have mod points when I read soemthign excellent. :) Well said, sir.

Why is Chrome OS considered "cutting edge"?

I'd love to believe it, but I don't. Yes, there may be vast numbers of solar systems containing rocky planets in approximately the right orbits. But "habitable?" That's a big stretch. I suspect what we'll find is more like Niven's "Known Space" series, where the "habitable" planets out there are weird, marginal, and possibly inhabited by hostile things.

Isn't this "study" a waste of energy?

I am a C/C++ programmer by trade; I'm not fond of PHP. Yet this "C++ saves energy over PHP" argument smells like more selfish politics to me. And selfish politics is what is bringing doom down on humanity's head -- the use of PHP vs. C++ is a sideline, a distraction, and only truly valuable for people who have a philosophical axe to grind.

You want to save a lot of energy? Shut down all the computers running MMOs. And stop wasting cycles looking for alien signals in cosmic radio waves. And get rid of banal YouTube videos... and... the list is endless. The science behind Global Warming is being used to further political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with adapting our species from a potential environment change.

In the end, selfish politics will kill us all. We will become a footnote in history is we do not discover enlightened self-interest.

I have. For some time in the early 90s, I lived in the middle of Nevada, 50 miles form the nearest working gas station, no plumbing (other than a hole in the ground.) I also spent more than twenty years living in some of the more remote communities of Colorado, where you could by completely cut off from civilization for a week at a time by snow.

The reason those places are still wilderness is that it isn't possible to do much in those places. You can't grow enough crops for survival, for starters, and water can be a concern. Not being able to get FedX packages can be just as limiting as stoplight cameras at times...

The problem isn't being around other people -- it's people failing to live by the golden rule.

You seem to have a lot of stored up anger. Care to talk about it?

You're damned right -- I'm pissed off. A lot of people should be pissed off. Fundamental freedoms erode as people focus on symptoms, not causes. It's easier to slap a law on a symptom than it is to directly address the real problem.

Addressing causes isn't easy -- I've been fighting battles for quite some time now, doing the best I can with what I have. This is not the world I wanted to grow up in, and it sure as hell isn't what I want to leave my kids as a legacy.

"Quit trying to save me! You're killing me!"

Such was the comment from my 18yo daughter, directed at the psychiatrist in the original article. And she hasn't played WoW in 6 months!

Daughter like father -- I, too, am sick and damned tied of people telling me what I can do with my own body and life.

Until a hundred years ago, a person could simply pick up and go somewhere to get away from meddlesome, prying, and officious egotists who assume they have the only "right" answers. You could go to the "frontier", and be free of such stupidity and arrogance. But now the frontier is gone, there is nowhere to escape, and society is eating itself to death as more "do-gooders" try to "save" us.

YUCK!