Google may be able to get around the social acceptance problem of Glass. Last I heard, when Glass gets a public release it will be built into a normal looking pair of glasses. The idea being that people around you won't be able to tell that you're wearing it. Then nobody has to be asked "What is that on your face?" 400 times a day, and nobody gets punched by McDonald's employees.

Same thing with the driverless cars! This article pointed out two products that haven't even been released yet and complains that nobody is buying them.

A headline that would be both accurate and informative would be "Scientist Discover That Exercise Causes Change to Epigenetic Tags".

I can't believe I'm about to defend the development of a fad product, but here goes:

Sometimes there are benefits to a fad that we don't really see as developers. In my industry we call them "press release features". They may feel useless or even degrading to be developing, but they can have actual monetary value. For example a bank in the US just made a big splash by announcing that they will "support iBeacons". How will they be supporting iBeacons? I have no idea. I'm not sure that even they know. It's not important. What's important is that they got a lot of media attention, and give themselves a veneer of progressiveness.

That's a bit scary. You could literally program the masses with this tech. Somebody on screen drinks a Pepsi and the viewer gets a pleasant sensation. Or somebody drinks a Coke and the view feels slightly nauseated.

Seeming how Wikipedia has already been accused of bias in the past, I see this as a very relevant example.

Think of it less as a way to avoid ads, more of a way for your favourite sites to stay in business.

Article doesn't list a price, but it seems to me like it would be a heck of a lot cheaper to just install a bunch of HD cameras and microphones around the campus. You could still run the fancy behaviour analysis software on the feed, but you wouldn't need the big lidar driven robot.

To me the most interesting part of the article is the creation of the PRO-ACT database. It's an incredible chunk of data, and I hope it inspires similar projects.

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.