The problem is that basically all software is connected to the Internet in some way these days and a lot of the makers of software do not qualify as part of the "security industry" and really have no clue and no interest in making things secure.

Indeed. All this is really just an elaborate intelligence test. Seems to me that most people fail and that includes the particle-physicists...

I don't think there is a risk. Unless all those black holes are what explains the Fermi-Paradox...

LHC live-cam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

At least what they are doing is better than, you know, developing the atomic bomb or something even more horrible.

A) That is for the company as a whole.
B) That is not net profit.

Nothing you said actually contradicts my statement.

And you pulled this numbers for CPUs (!) from where? Right out of your ass? Because Intel does not publish these numbers and their net profit overall is far lower.

I certainly do hope so. They have been screwing their customers over long enough.

People are dumb. Little details like these are wayyy beyond them. Or that Intel actually makes their profits somewhere else.

And Intel sells a lot more than CPUs and they do not tell anybody how they make their profits. Your argument is uninformed and worthless.

Not NearFC and not RFID. These actually work but do not harvest energy. RFID also needs a specialized, pretty powerful sender and you do not have anything suitable in a smartphone.

The problem is that their tech is in theory feasible (and used in some very low-energy swarm sensors), but that the numbers do not work out for their application at all. One problem is that bluetooth requires way too much power for this and a smartphone does not have a low-energy receiver. And doing anything audible with harvested energy? There are several orders of magnitude missing in what you can harvest and store.

They do not have the antenna and storage for what they claim they can do. There are limits what you can capture in something this small and they are rather low. and way below what Bluetooth needs.

Indeed. The business case for these locator tokens is completely clear and seems to be working: Take the money and run.

And no, they cannot do what they claim. It is possible to build locators like they describe, but they would need to be passive. There is just no way to harvest and store enough in something this small. RFID tags derive all their energy from the sender that queries them, and with good antennas you can go up to, say 30m with them. But that is the limit these days and it is for a passive device that has its energy specifically and targeted beamed to it by the sender. For a harvesting device, you get very low power radio, almost no computing power and a few meters in reach and that is with a specialized receiver, not a general-purpose cell-phone.

Actually, this one has been cropping up every few years for a long time. It has never delivered anything so far and there is no reason to think that it will do so this time.

It is time to get real: What we have in computing power in a "normal" chip these days is pretty much what we are going to get for the foreseeable future. That is not a problem. Software these days is so bloated and slow that there is a lot of optimization potential. And even afterwards, what do you want? Most things will work fine with current computing power levels. Cars, trains and airplanes have stopped getting faster at some time, if the same happens to CPUs, so what?