This is the hypothetical if I had any talent and a lot of free time and money. (I assume the NSA does).

That's pretty easy to normalize using your favorite audio application...so that's an easy one to solve. If I’m just researching to see if this is possible, I would probably skip that problem.

Using a neural network, it might be able to learn how 'soft sounds' work...not sure...harder but not insurmountable. If you break the 0 threshold of the accelerometer (the point where you’re in the realm of error correction and just can’t get a useable signal any more), you’re broke. But, if you can get anything useful out of the accelerometer, I’m betting the normalization algorithm is going to work like the audio one above.

Probably not ideal...I'd install software to just send the audio / accelerometer data to a central location if you want to make this a real 'attack'.

See the previous...installing the neural network on the phone isn't ideal...if you can get the data back to a central server that has some real horse power, this is a non-issue.

I think you could isolate keyboard clicks and sync them with the accelerometer events. Not too bad to overcome. We have beat matching softwareI’m pretty sure someone can whip this up fairly quickly.

Again, just isolate the events you want...it'll take time and heavy processing to do so, but not too bad from an audio editing perspective.

Solved by doing your processing on a real machine instead of the phone...

What would be really interesting is if the researchers could build a small box with a better mic and accelerometers to see how far they can get from a target to make this work. Imagine something the size of a 6 sided die that you could glue to the bottom of a desk
Dunno Maybe it’s science fiction, but that’s where all the great ideas started.

"I just don't understand what their endgame is"

Does there have to be an endgame? As long as the 1% or whomever dies before the massive revolt I think they win. It's like the stock market, it's all about short term gains and who gives a damn about long term profits 10 years from now.

The other point (and sorry for the crazy conspiracy theory aside) there won't be an "endgame." The local authorities have already militarized to the point of being able to take out every single person in their local communities in case of massive uprising.

Maybe to phrase it another way is we've already been checkmated and the "Endgame" was back in the 90's.

"As much as I hate Microsoft - it's sad to say - that the [very, very] few people who I know who actually had a Surface had nothing but RAVE reviews about them."

As someone who had an RT...um...no...it did not deserve the rave reviews. I feel like the people who were really positive about the thing were giving it high marks to justify being duped out of 500-600 dollars.

At that price range it's really hard to come to grips with "I just made a bad bad purchase."

Gadolinium 64...

"Is the actions of EA hurting enlightened gamers, who chose to give their money to better companies?"

Yes...the NFL Exclusive contract destroyed the football genera of games. Their power and pile of cash can and does hurt the industry.

It's still cheaper than using a support deskin that case you get 30 minute wait for the keyboard that's going to cost you 50$ (1/2 original employee), 15$ (1/2 hour for IT Support, cheap), 15$ for keyboard. So you're out 50$ for the employee’s time, or 80$ for professional support.

Take that with a grain of salt, I work for a HUGE IT department for a Fortune 50 company. If I were still at a 50 person start up, then yea, talking to Bob the CTO to get my keyboard is much faster and cheaper.

I'm in a monstrous cube farm, and in reality, were I to break a piece of hardware on my station those dollar estimates are very low. For me to call into support, and have them send someone down to fix whatever is wrong with my station easily takes half a day and 12 people. I call in to support, they escalate through 3 levels, then they allocate the resources and prioritize my request, and finally, either a guy shows up or they interoffice mail me the part. That half-an-hour of my time in going to Wal-mart to get a keyboard just turned into a couple hundred dollars of man hours.

Cliff notes to stay on target: The vending machines are a slick idea. Fast and you get all the metrics the multi-headed support demon gives you.

Which is fine...until our corporate overlords want to make an example. The people jail breaking phones is a fringe group right now, but if it becomes common place and easy (say like, napster), there will be extreme examples of people being punished.

Thus, ignoring them is a solution, but it’s a skeleton in the closet to be pulled out when cost effective for the big tel-cos.

It's going to be interesting to watch how many people go to encrypted and VPN services. The (insert evil overlord) will then tout that as a success story as the successful ones will fall of these metrics.

IMHO where Nintendo dropped the ball this launch is not including Wii Sports with the package and going with Nintendo Land instead. Nintendo Land catered to the gamer demographic, but not the huge non-gamer crowd that Wii Sports collected.

It fails at getting the whole family involved. When Wii came out, literally the whole family, from grandma to my 5 year old cousins played bowling. They couldn’t get enough of it. With Nintendo Land, the younger kids play for 30 minutes then get bored, and the older crowd won’t go near it.

There’s some strange depth in trying to get a 300 in bowling. Chasing Mario around a maze is only engaging for so long. Trying to teach people who don’t game about Metroid and Zelda in a fast party environment doesn’t work so well, but saying hey, let’s bowl, is almost universal.

Cliff Notes: IMHO the article is wrongyou can move on now.

I think the article is good advice for future developments maybe, but the current state of the Xbox isn’t nearly as bad as what the author makes it out to be.

The boot time to game is solely dependent on how many splash screen individual developers put in their game. Otherwise from XBox logo to game load is like what 10 seconds? I personally don't think that's unreasonable.

As to advertisig...It's relevant and I don't think it's overly intrusive...Yet...I don't mind that one advertising tile in the bottom right of every other screen. It doesn't affect my experience one way or the other. When they make me start click through an ad to get to my game, I'm throwing the thing out to craig’s list or e-bay.

As to XBox Live...again, in the grand scheme of things I think 100 bucks a year (family account w/ 4 accounts) isn't ridiculous. The matchmaking / audio is a class above anything on PS3 or Wii (WiiU). I find it’s worth it for that alone. Also, if you’re thrifty throughout the year you can find subscriptions for cheap (30 bucks / yr per account). Compare that to any of the ‘free to play’ games or a WoW account and you’re immediately in the same price range for a year. Finally, if you don’t want to pay, get XBox silver. You don’t get online play, but you’ll get through all the single player games fine.

Actually, maybe not...A lot of the H1Bs I work with send a substantial portion of their checks back to families in other countries. While the tax revenue is great I guess, the loss of 1000-2000$ a month out of our local economy is not so good.
That’s a generalization, so your mileage may vary.

I just want to know how this will taste on coco-puffs.

"It is not a pure, mob rule democracy."

That is mostly untrue. The state of the union today is a pretty sad affair of ignorance and who can yell the loudest...IMHO that's a mob. Things like creationism and intelligent design are getting back in schools. Equal rights for same sex marriage is still opposed by the majority (in some places). American Idol is still on TV.

I think George Carlin said it best..."Think of how stupid the average American is, now realize that half the people are dumber than that." Those people vote unfortunately. They typically do so at the bidding of their pastor, local leaders, or whatever the popular guy on Fox News tells them to do.

I think that's mob rule. I just wish I could take torches and pitchforks to the voting booth.

Um...no...someone posted Apple's 3rd quarter statement on here in another thread and no, they aren't profitable without the iPhone / iPad. The iDevice market in combination with iTunes makes up 80% plus of Apple's sales right now. If you take away the iDevices, I think iTunes folds as IMHO there's much better music and content markets online (Amazon, Netflix, Russia, etc...).

Unless Apple can stay on top of the phone and tablet market, or create yet another market, their future isn't as bright as their immediate past.

IBM doesn't make money with quality products. They make money by selling shoddy products that come with consultants (or are generally also shoddy). Those consultants come with multi-million dollar multi-year contracts. By the time you realize IBM may not have been the best call, they own your infrastructure.