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.

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

Better to not install it in the first place. The article mentions targeted attacks: "Once the sample is ready, the attacker delivers it to the mobile device of the victim. Some of the known infection vectors include spearphishing via social engineering – often coupled with exploits, including zero-days; and local infections via USB cables while synchronizing mobile devices". Sounds like stuff you can avoid with some care. They also mention that the trojan will not work on un-jailbroken iOS devices.

"Unlimited upward potential", right... There's only so much advertising budget to go around; companies will shift some of it from traditional media to social / online ads. The actual upward potential comes from serving the long tail: small firms that cannot afford to pay traditional media ads, or larger firms that are willing to spend more on advertising if it turns out to be more effective. Or an advertisment arms race. But even that only goes so far.

As the joke goes: Merkel was mad about her phone being tapped, then our prime minister Rutte (in NL) got mad about his phone not being tapped, as if he's not important enough...

What I find interesting is that she's mad about her phone being tapped (and others are mad about it too, I heard they're launching an official investigation now). So tapping phones of all other Germans, from fry cook to captain of industry, apparently doesn't merit any outrage. I'd argue that it's the other way around: if there's any phone that the US has any business listening in on, it's hers.

That's a fair point. However, to what extent do these issues exist because the iOS simulator is a simulator rather than an emulator? An emulator might have broken OpenGL support, same as the simulator. And for performance-related stuff I'd prefer a real device over either.

By the way, the author of that article does not IMHO make a strong point for simulators. He seems to have a lot of problems with the Android development environment, some related to performance and reliability but many related to usability, and the reason the emulator has these problems is not the fact that it's an emulator. An equally crappy simulator isn't going to solve those problems.