From what little attention I pay to ads, the current model seems to be one of two approaches:

"Our products are for mentally retarded halfwits, so if you're stupid you should buy it."

or

"Give us money or you'll die, your children will die, and someone will kick your dog."

The former seems to be more prevalent among non-staple consumer goods. The latter is nearly universal for TV news programs and web sites.

Both are insulting to the intelligence, but not nearly as insulting as the fact that they work.

How sensitive is Glass to IR light? I'm beginning to think there's a market for jewelry or clothing that is studded with high intensity IR LEDs that are invisible to the human eye. Certainly, movie theaters should be putting them all over the place.

There's nothing new about recording devices that are disguised as something ordinary, like a pen, or a watch, or whatever. They've been around for decades, and are a hell of a lot cheaper than Glass.

The disincentive to using such devices is, and has always been, that they are often illegal, even criminal, as Glassholes are finding out.

Generally speaking, there is an attempt made (as there should be) for all the guys in a lineup to look similar, which means your argument is again all lineups, despite that being proven the best way to do such things.

If they're willing to commit those very serious felonies, then the addition of facial recognition software makes no difference whatsoever. Without it (or, rather, before it), they'd just falsify other evidence instead.

If you believe that all cops are like the ones you see on TV, you should - seriously - move to some place where the nearest other human being is at least 500 miles away. This would be to your benefit, and to everyone else's, as well.

That isn't how lineups are done in real life. Real police work bears no resemblance whatsoever to the routine felonies committed by character of cop shows.

Rental cars don't come with drivers. Rental cars with drivers are called . . . taxis.

For a good account of the Tulip Panic, and other examples of how easily the public at large can be sucked in to stupid financial (and other) fads, try http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24518 by Mackay.

So it'll be like any other virtual world computer game (and with its currency being of similar value, which is to say, not all that much).

It is to the benefit of the card holder in that you're less likely (assuming it works the way they say it does) that your card will be frozen while you are travelling in another country (or another state).

And once they've got millions of people signed up, then they change the privacy policy to "we will sell anything we feel like to the highest bidder, because those millions were the entire point anyway."

Do you really want to be behind the guy in line at the cash register waiting for that kind of confirmation?

They eyes don't see it as a rectangle. But we don't with our eyes, we see with our brains.

In a theater, the screen covers a much larger percentage of your field of vision, and the difference in distance to the center vs the edges can easily be several feet if the screen is flat. This is enough to be noticeable. In the living room, the difference will be millimeters, and you'd need a ruler to detect it.

As has been noted, this is snake oil intended to generate patent revenue.

Charlie's a smart guy who knows the publishing trade inside and out, and I generally agree with him. But to keep this entirely in perspective, let's keep in mind Amazon's dispute is with Hachette, which is Charlie's publisher, with whom he has a very friendly relationship. He's not an impartial observer, even as an author.

The differences between sentencing for crack users (who are predominantly black) and regular cocaine users (who are predominantly white) is well documented, and enshrined in law.