Yeah well that is just 1 state. This is nationwide, so likely a billion dollar boondoggle...

I think the battery life is a deal breaker. Suppose you fall asleep with the watch on and forget to recharge it- you get on the subway the next morning and notice it is dead. Now what? It's kind of embarrassing to be walking around with a dead watch so you take it off and put it in your pocket and it falls out or you forget where it is or you sit on it and its bands are mashed up. After this happens a few times the watch will be sitting in your desk drawer.

A lot of wealthy people don't even carry a phone

Thanks for the anecdote but in my last 15+ years in IT at half a dozen companies I never used personal email for business.

Millions of US citizens have work emails and the sense not to use their private email for business unless they have no other choice. This is an issue that even non-technical people should be able to understand.

A similar system was developed for about 40 million

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

So the answer is ~.04 'billions'

Similar system for 40 million dollars.
http://www.industrytap.com/40-...

Is it just me or are /. passive aggressively feigning stupidity today?

Actually phasers leave a trail so moviegoers can follow the action in battles.

Hardly billions. The technology that goes into fibre lasers is very cheap and efficient. My guess is that this was made form mostly off the shelf components.

A burst from an A-10 main machine gun costs hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Nothing important should go on facebook!

Licenses and license plates originated as a form of tax, although I agree they offer various forms of social control.

I will take well written procedural code over poorly implemented OO any day... not to mention that I can't remember a single time where I refactored and the LOC wasn't significantly reduced.

It's an IQ test, and they failed!

The important thing to consider though is what the size of the therapeutic dose compared to a hazardous dose.