Ah. A vacation that leaves you with a nice healthy glow! What could be better!
But seriously, sign me up. The research possibilities are endless. All the sci-fi mutant stuff of "S.t.a.l.k.e.r" aside, seeing how life responds and adapts to that type of environment is fascinating.

We, in the electronics industry, solved the problem decades ago by two simple solutions. Color coding and making connectors unique so you cant plug the wrong plug into the wrong connector. You might have to stock more tubing and catheters - but when human life is involved the argument falls flat.

And yet, with human life on the line, the medical industry cant seem to grasp such a simple concept. Very sad, and it makes me worry as I have a daughter that is expecting soon.

Let's see. On another recent article it was stated that the average car has several million lines of code running in it. I haven't come across a sentient Prius yet.

And there's that pesky parallel processing the brain does. I don't think that a rack full of Nvidia Tesla cards can approach the average two year old's parallel processing capability.

I agree, Kurzweil is smoking something and not sharing.

On my Nexus One (or substitute your favorite Android phone running Froyo 2.2) and keep on surfing. Ho hum.

Personally, I don't abuse the privilege. I will take my notebook with me when I go to a Coffee Shop, buy coffee and a snack and enjoy reading Slashdot (and others) while I sip my cup. I suppose they could ban anyone bringing in a notebook computer, but then they would lose me as a customer.
 

As an engineer I work to make hardware robust and failure resistant. But to make hardware that actually will destroy itself is insane.

We all know software is never absolutely perfect. There are always bugs no matter how comprehensive the testing. Somewhere, sometime there's an application that does something to throw an exception. We've all seen kernels crash. It happens.

So Motorola has put into their device a mechanism that can at any time there is a crash kill the hardware permanently??? That can only lead to one result. A massive recall and/or class action suit to replace thousands of bricked phones.

I'll go one step further - they have planted the most perfect exploit ever. Just write an app that causes the fuse to trip. You cant, you say? It's too protected? Bull! Go ahead and live in la-la land where everything is perfect, software never fails, and no one writes malicious software.

Ok, how about the fact that Android is open source. As always, the open source community is willing and able to help with bugfixes, features, and patches to make what is a great mobile operating system even better. That is the point, Motorola! Get it through your tiny, pointy head! It's not *YOUR* O.S. And it's *MY* hardware. After I buy it, I can use it, smash it, drown it in water, and run over it with a truck. I paid for it, I didn't "rent" it, and I don't need your blessings to upgrade it.

I'll stick with my HTC. At least until they decide to follow suit...