Exactly why Amazon doesn't won't to release another media streaming box. Amazon is in the content selling business, what it wants to do is create the center of the living room version of the kindle, of course with so many cheap devices that can stream content it needs to do something else to differentiate itself in the saturated market.

Enter cheap gaming console. Hardware has gotten pretty cheap and unlike previous generation consoles neither the PS4 nor the Xbox 1 are heavily subsidized. Considering that the Amazon box won't be coming to the market for a while its quite likely that it can offer similar performance at the price point its looking to sell it at. If that's the case than I suspect there will be quite some interest from traditional console game developers looking to sell their products without having to pay the steep Sony/Microsoft licensing fees. It could quite literally kill their business model really. Very exciting, I hope its not just wishful thinking on my part

The ink is barely dry on the acquisition of IBM's x86 server business for about $2.3 billion and now the purchase of Motorola for $2.91 billion. These could be genius longsighted moves but to me it seems that Lenovo is in danger of trying to expand too quickly.

Everything will change when you can make anything.' said John Hornick, an IP attorney." I sure do hope so!

Cars are being fitted with an increasing number of crash avoidance technologies to compensate for varying degrees of driver abilities, sluggish or even incorrect response etc. I imagine an autonomous driving system would rely on these same technologies for emergency crash avoidance. In a production autonomous vehicle the driver would be required to operate the vehicle under certain conditions but most definitely, the driver would not be expected to stay alert in order to hit the brakes in a emergency.

I didn't think I had to specify "conventional weapons" since the topic we were discussing was armmament on "Autonomous weapons are robotic systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator". Weapons of mass distraction such as nuclear weapons by their very definition destroy indiscrimintatelly and would not be a very usefull on such systems.

We still rely on chemical energy to power our weapons and as such they all have the ultimate fail safe system. No matter how large the magazine, sooner or later they all run out of amunition.

The problem is that there is a large and growing number of people working full time and needing welfare assistance because they get paid less than the cost of living. This is really corporations gaming the welfare system and exploiting the employment condititions but it the poor bastards breaking their backs for little that also have to deal with being treeted as leeches by society.

Yes if the U.S outlaws gun ownership then I am sure they would disappear just like drugs have.

Yes the bankers were greedy but a large number of those taking the loans weren't unwitting victims either. A lot of people thought they could make a nice chunk of change by bying a house they couldn't afford and then sell it for a nice profit at the end of the 2 year grace period. Of course once prices got so out of controll that no one could afford to buy anymore than the whole thing crashed to the ground.

Most open source software have development roadmaps with very clear goals of what would constitute a major release milestone. The developers of open source software are truthfull and open with their version numbering system unfortunately closed source software companies are not and often stick a major release number to minor upgrades or beta or even alpha quality software. This is why many people will not install closed source software until a service pack or 2 later.

Fleeing the country might keep you safe from a government agency but there is nowhere in the world you can hide from a multi-national corporation.

Kinda hard to miss the battery and the wires going into ones chest!

Its rather amusing that you list the U.S. governments failure to properly regulate the banking sector as a reason why we should move to a currency that is completely unregulated.

It comes down to a fundamental problem with the representative democracy system itself. While ethanol from corn provides little benefits to the nation and it costs quite a bit, it has been quite a boon for the Midwest Corn Belt which encompasses a good chunk of the nation. The elected representatives have the very difficult job of trying to strike a balance between the best interests of the nation as a whole and the best interest of the people they were elected to represent. When a program grows to a size where it affects a great number of people, making changes to it becomes extremely difficult because it risks pissing off a great number of voters who could ultimately elect representatives they feel would weigh heavier on their side of the scale.

If you live in the lower 48, then there will be no need for heating for at least a few months out of the year and most likely you will be running the air conditioning during the summer. If your house happens to be somewhere in the arctic circle, then my apologies.