Woah now, lets not get carried away. The Internet of Things is still a very cool concept, it's just gone a bit off the rails.

For an object to be on the internet, it doesn't need an internet connection.

Example: I'm looking at a pen right now. I'd love to be able to dive into this pen and see it's specifications, who made it, maybe even the history of pens of this design. But I don't need the pen to connect to the internet for that, I just need either an RFID(or similar) tag or a slick recognition algorithim. Then I can just point my phone or wearable or whatever at the pen and get all the information that I want.

So yes, lets put the connected toasters back in the closet, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water.

There are tests for that.

This is going to be a pain when I'm trying to convince the bosses that we should add a feature to an Android app. For example, right now it's easy to say we should add a feature that uses a camera, every phone has a camera. But if I want to add a feature that has, for example, a fingerprint reader attachment, only X% of users are going to have this attachment. It makes it a harder sell.

I know your being sarcastic, but maybe making enemies is part of the plan. The net result of attacks on Israel has been an over-all increase in territory for Israel. Seems like making enemies has been working out pretty well for them so far.

A quick search on Ebay shows used tablet screens going for around 20-30 bucks.

You really don't need to make this concept compulsory. A lot of the people you see out on the street are there because of over-crowding in homeless shelters.

Wouldn't this be rather dangerous to use outside of the lab? I would think that if a person tried to pull their hand off the generator while it's on, the arc would burn them quite badly.

Yes, please, you go first.

Well, Bigfoot does seem pretty unlikely at this point, but what about Yeti? Some form of undocumented mountain ape that lives in the Himalayas seems totally plausible to me. It's not like people are going through leisurely jaunts up the Himalayas with their camera phones.

My rule of thumb is, if it were a real source of free energy, I would be hearing about it on the news, not Kickstarter. It's just like with Viagra back in the day. For a thousand years people were advertising dick pills. But when a legit one was invented, it was all anybody on TV talked about for a year.

They addressed this in the video. Their approach is to greatly decrease the weight of the exoskeleton. That reduces power requirements. They show an elbow pad that's so light that the presenter can easily hold it in one hand (although I'm assuming the battery isn't attached).

I hate to disagree with Wharton (look up his work, the man is a champion) but the Android emulator has already been fixed with HAXM. It's been released into the SDK Manager and only requires copying a file to turn on. Once it's on, the emulator runs at totally acceptable speeds, and provides a much richer environment than a simulator would.

This is also a great way to get their application featured in college courses. And if people learn how to do 3d animation in RenderMan first, they are going to more inclined to use it on future projects.

I've never made the transition myself, but I've seen others do it. You need a new profession that works closely with your current one, so you can be "The guy who knows how to talk to the techies". There are quite a few roles that can act as the buffer between management/customers and IT. It depends on where you currently work, but I've seen people do this with both Project Management and Business Analysis. If your boss is open to the idea of you filling one of these roles on a few projects, you can get the experience you need while still performing your current job.

Specifically, they were measuring cynicism using the Cook-Medley scale, which defines cynical distrust as "A generally negative view of humankind, depicting others as unworthy, deceitful, and selfish"