There is a very good reason that people in high passion jobs have shit compensation. They're easily replaceable.

We could use an "All of the above" option on this poll. What a list of great books! Apparently people tend to ban things that are awesome.

I believe the use case for the smart thermostats is to save energy. You can set a profile so that it lets your house get hotter/cooler while you're at work and, and balance around the 'peak-hours' for people who are charged more for energy at certain times.

AT&T : "I'm going to shoot you"
Us : "Can you please just shoot me in the foot?"
AT&T : "OK"
Us : "Yay! Compromise!"

This is correct. Take a look at what these guys are doing with biometrics:

getnymi.com

They aren't sending your biometric data all over the internet. They verify your identity on device and then send a token around.

It's really hard to say how many of artificial neurons we would need to make a human-like intelligence, but it's certainly going to be less than the number of neurons in a human head. Computers already do a heck of a lot of tasks better than a human. Heck, using traditional computing methods with just a couple of these chips for image recognition and the like would already make a beast of a machine.

If the 40% are confirmed false positives, then what are they still doing on the list?

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.