"In order to ensure continued access to scarce skillsets that are key to our ability to innovate, we need to be able to draw flexibly from a global pool of professionals."

(Oh, and we also resent having to pay those scarce and valuable individuals more than $15 / hour. So we'll still need some foreign worker visas, thanks).

One flaw is the lack of standards on the device level: how do light switches, dimmers, thermostats, locks, etc work together? Z-Wave defines a high level protocol for this and has a certification programme to ensure that devices work nicely together, but even so, interoperability is still hit and miss, especially for anything that goes beyond basic on/off stuff. ZigBee is starting to address this shortcoming, with the LightLink standard for instance, but there's still a long way to go.

One thing I am extremely suspicious about is the remark about the need for a central hub being a weakness. For one, you need a hub in order to add any sort of intelligence to your home automation setup. Without a hub you are not building a smart home, you're just doing remote control. Then, they mention the fact that existing technologies such as Zigbee and Z-wave are not easily married to the Internet. Well, with a hub you do not really need them to; for remote access, you tunnel into the hub or you use a gateway service that you can more or less trust.
Having/needing a hub is not a weakness, it ensures that you retain control over your local network. My fear is that for Thread there somehow will not be a local hub; it'll be in the Cloud, and subject to being raped for data 6 ways from Sunday.

The question is: does it matter if causality is violated? The models do not preclude such a violation IIRC. And the fact that we haven't yet observed such a thing happening certainly doesn't mean that it can't.

These days it's all about BYOD in the enterprise. Blackberry was (and still is?) a leader when it comes to devices and a secure infrastructure geared for corporate use, but it's been ages since I have come across anyone still willing to carry 2 devices for personal and business use, now that we've given people access to their corporate email, calendar and address lists on their personal devices. A phone maker who wants to sell phones to businessmen needs to appeal to two markets: business use (including the infrastructure) and the consumer stuff, since people will want to use their one phone for both.

Blackberry is strong in the area of business use, security, and the tools and infrastructure needed to manage these phones. But they fail to appeal to the consumer market, and they are fast losing the fight for the ecosystem (app store / developers) in that space. I don't see the deal maker in the Passport, or any other BB phone, unless it is the physical keyboard which some people prefer, or situations where the need for security is paramount.

Those un-rounded corners are going to be murder on the inner lining of pockets of any size. That thing looks decidedly sharp, and I don't mean in a fashionable sense.

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.