On the Kickstarter's page the video has a segment with Peter Dickinson, the original Industrial Designer for the Spectrum, and so I assume that either he was just happy to see his work get a new life or is receiving money himself from the Kickstarter. Basically if he's happy for his work to be used like this so am I, although I do assume similar agreements have been made with other SInclair folks up to and including Sir Slive.

The people behind the Kickstarter seem to be defaulting on agreements to pay royalties to the developers of the games they're bundling, and not really responding well to questions asking them why, which isn't a great start.

The feeling you've never been here before actually exists, it's called 'Jamais Vu' and is a seriously weird experience.

USB tokens won't work at the moment, too many people accessing the internet using phones and tablets without USB ports.

I was thinking pixel shader too, likely a commonly-used part of one of the standard lighting models, or a part of a blend function used for desktop compositing. When a shader's running at a relatively sedate 1920x1200 60Hz we're talking 138,240,000 executions per minute per machine- and that's if it's only executed once per pixel per frame, if it's a per-light piece of code then it could well be executed many times as often.

This type of reuse of ex-military kit quite often happens, although not normally so long after it was originally used. I'm not sure if it's still running on the same engines but I know that the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank (UK), at one time the largest movable dish telescope, originally had a lot of parts cannibalised from engines taken from two battleships. Lovell, the maker of the telescope, had also previously been using quite a lot of reclaimed military kit for his astronomical observations before the actual radio telescope was built.

It could be worse, The Laundry could be becoming reality.

It's a video camera configured to send data to an advertising company who quite like the idea of ubiquitous surveillance of anyone who happens to be in range of any of their cameras.

Individuals? I don't see individuals. I just see a massive advertising business getting people to pay to wear their cameras on their heads and upload the results to their video site or social network, where they can then happily combine them with existing databases and (with a bit more work on facial recognition) use them to track the movement of anyone in the vicinity for the purposes of targeting them more accurately with advertisements.

If I'm sitting in a restaurant and there's someone on the next table pointing a camera phone at me then I am going to complain. Security cameras I'm not as bothered about as I know most of them aren't actually monitored by people, and the footage will only actually be looked at when someone does decide to ram the handle of a soup spoon into the ear of a Google Glass user to see if there's anything in there.

I doubt they'd accept people walking in continually filming with their mobiles either. Using your mobile them to grab a few quick videos of your friends, or even take pointless Instagrammed pictures of your food is one thing- filming everything you happen to glance at and upload it an advertising company with an interest in facial recognition is quite another.

With an Arduino kit you can build those same projects and use it as a USB-connected power supply, connect your project built using the components and breadboard provided and get power and ground pins on the board and ignore everything else. Then, when you want to add more control mechanisms start to use the GPIO pins to drive the electronics, providing a level of sophistication beyond that a classic kit would and moving the projects more towards digitally controlled electronics.

If you want to game on a monitor you'll have a computer attached to it and so the existing Steam client will work fine for that, and in any case given the ease of DVI/HDMI conversion the practical difference between a television and a monitor is getting very slim.

There are enough other games on Steam which do need a keyboard and mouse though, everything from other RTS games such as the C&C and RA series, to the more complex FPS games. Valve may be wanting developers to do things for their Big Screen/Controller setups but there are still plenty of games there where controllers are unusable.

SteamOS is Linux based but I doubt it's going to be anything even Stallman would call GNU/Linux.

Everything I've seen makes this sound like it's more aimed at being a 'Console which runs PC games' than a normal computer. I'd expect it to load into a 'Big Picture' mode Steam client, and allow the user to launch their games and specially-modified applications from that which could well run as overlays like the existing Steam browser. Whether this machine even needs a command line is debatable, it shouldn't need GCC (I'd expect a fully binary-based OS) or a full-featured window and compositing desktop like Gnome.