Presumably it would eat our food rather than us. "Hey, who ate all the chocolate chip cookies?" "sorry-master-need-more-power"

The real question is: should the court order such an action, and under what conditions?

Analogy alert: GS mistakenly sends me a letter by physical mail, then asks the post office (or asks a judge to order the post office) to send a mailman round, break into my house, and retrieve the letter. That clearly won't happen; worst case is that the judge would order me to surrender the letter. In case of email, is Google (under their terms & conditions and the letter of the law) allowed to "break into" my mailbox and remove the offending letter? And should they be?

Seems easier to run mains or even a dedicated 12v line for the LEDs. PoE goes up to 25W I believe, good for 3/4 brightish LEDs, while a single mains cable will power hundreds.

In a lot of European countries, that is more or less the default. Most lights do not have a counter, but the green light (for pedestrians) will start to flash for about 15 seconds before the light will switch to red. Then there is a further delay of a few seconds, and only then will the lights for motor traffic go green. In general, there is always a few seconds delay before traffic lights move from one phase to the next, so drivers learn to always look at the traffic lights for their own lane. Hit the gas when the pedestrian light goes to red,and you'll be running a red light.

Gimme a break. Cell phone makers target most of the market, which ranges from 8 year old brats to serious business users. And now that we have decent touch screens, many people seem to prefer those over physical keyboards that take up a lot of space ("you're kidding me, where's the other half of my phone?"). The idea that serious people want a physical keyboard is something that even people in the Blackberry boardroom no longer believe in. At our firm, BBs disappeared almost overnight as soon as corporate mail was made available on iPhone and Android.

Most people manage typing on virtual keyboards just fine. Those who prefer physical keyboards just buy one of many available bluetooth ones and use that.

The weight idea might have some merit: overeat, and you'll be walking home (your increased weight fooling the car into thinking you are someone else).

Something like that, yes. Awesome project, thanks for that link.

Huh. Automated vehicles are likely to make things much, much safer in the long run. Fully automated vehicles, that is. This thing sounds more like a driver assist feature, and not something you want to trust when your attention is elsewhere; perhaps only when driving in the slow lane.

By the way, cabs are too expensive for everyday use, and public transport only takes me from a place I am not to a place I do not wish to go. I'd love to have a fully automatic vehicle so I can take a nap or read while it takes me to work. In fact, why even own a car if you could have a cheap rental or pool car rock up to your house by itself on the mornings you need it?

What they need to include is a "software skeleton", a framework with libraries for motor control, balancing, machine vision and sensor feedback. The basics of those already exist, and not having to code these or cobble them together from whatever FOSS libraries are floating around would save experimenters a vast amount of time spent on stuff that has been more or less solved.

Meh. Both Google and Apple are in a good position to improve standards, products and especially the usability of software related to Smart Homes. But both companies are a day late and a dollar short. They are still trying to get remote control right, which is merely the first step towards a smart home, and even in that space their efforts are anything but impressive. The real challenge is to come up with a good and simple to use control center, going from remote control to true home automation. Both companies thus far appear to have the wrong vision on that, if they have one at all (IFTTT, seriously...). There are already a lot of players in this space, and more than one newcomer currently gathering funds on Kickstarter.

Personally I tend to agree with the vision statement of the OpenHAB project. They aim to be a "hub of hubs", with the idea that there's no way in hell that anyone will come up with a hub or even a standard to serve everyone's needs, and keep up with all imaginable devices, of all brands, in all countries. So you'd use several hubs as a communications layer, tie them together with OpenHAB, and put the intelligence there.

That's because whenever you try something socialist-ish it's implemented as corporate welfare. Instead of taxing the corporations and helping the people you're bailing out the corporations and handing the bill to the people. Your version of Robin Hood would involve trying to get a trickle-down effect by handing the sheriff of Nottingham more money so he could hire more tax collectors and guards. Or to use a car analogy it's like stabbing the tires and pouring sugar in the gas tank, then comparing it to a horse.

The intersection between stuff I'd love to do and the stuff people would pay me to do = Ø, particularly if I got paid to do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy with my job (37.5 hour work week, decent pay with overtime, 5 weeks vacation, interesting and meaningful work) but I don't love it and it's not something I'd do without the paycheck. If you can't really think of anything else to do than work, you must have a very gimped imagination. I'm sorry.

The first part you got right, the second I don't think so. From what I gather the photon is really like an "on and off again" couple, every so often they split apart to an electron and positron but almost instantly realize being on their own doesn't work so they get back together again. But in those brief moments they're single they're pulled much stronger towards parties, curving the path they take between our house and their house - not zigzagging.

Apparently over a 168000 light year stretch this adds up to a 0.0005 light year detour, they've not traveled as straight a line as the neutrinos have. Of course we already knew gravity bends light, but these quantum effects means it bends a little more than expected from the photon's mass. It's no wonder quantum mechanics can drive you crazy, God isn't just playing dice on top of that the dice morphs between 1d6 and 1d20 during the throw.

Oh there's plenty of hellholes left, but the remaining ones are mostly plagued by civil war, crazy dictators, massive corruption, lack of basic education and infrastructure or some other form of ethnic, religious, economical, social or political instability that make them unsuitable for running a business no matter how low the wages get. The extremely poor but stable countries are quickly running out, India is still lagging quite a bit behind China but after that if gets tougher and tougher.

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old when we stop playing"