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.

If there's no climate change though then there's no extra damages to pay. If they believe firmly in climate change they weight it heavily in their predictive risk models, if they're certain that climate change is incorrect then they can ignore it in their predictions.

Either way it's going to hurt if you're wrong should other insurers have different predictions. If you think climate change will occur and it doesn't then those who predicted correctly will will been able to sell cheaper than you and you'll have needlessly lost market share, if you predict that it won't and it does then you've underestimated risk and will be paying out a lot more damages than you expected to when setting the price.

Blizzard's main priority with World of Warcraft is getting people to keep paying their subs, and to do this they make the game as engaging as possible. This goes against that by both managing to destroy the sense of immersion by dragging gamers out of their game world, and also by forming a link in the player's mind between Warcraft and real-world scenes of suffering. Not a connection that most players will want in their recreation time.

Where things may work better is where it's possible to both turn the work itself into a game, and also to wrap it in an appealing layer to stop it having too strong a connection in the player's mind with the reality behind it. An example of this would be the recent Facebook game developed to help identify some genetic factors in Ash tree dieback, as detailed in this BBC News story. Here the presentation is cute, and the focus is on making it a game. The only problem I could see here is that I can't see how it's cheaper/more efficient to develop and serve the entire content for even a simple game compared to just doing the pattern matching in a more traditional manner, but for other tasks I could see it working.

The basic idea is there though, make the work part of the game rather than making it a task which detracts from the game. Something which this story doesn't seem to recognise.

The Geonaute's for home/amateur use, the Omnicam is professional broadcast equipment- they're really not suitable replacements for one another. It's like comparing a GoPro Hero and a Red EPIC, both are digital video cameras, both are really nice pieces of kit, but there the similarities end.

Google have an interest in making money and if they happen to make the internet nicer at the same time then that's a nice side benefit. It it made things worse for internet users then they'd still want to do it but they wouldn't shout about it as much.

If you can only take so many years of being a running gag then can we look forward to Yahoo! pulling the plug on itself?

It's just following the new standard for punctuation.