If you'll read my other comment you'll see that I basically agree with your assessment. However, for a consumer product, this amount of markup is probably reasonable. You'll never get a raspberry pi, wifi adapter, bluetooth adapter, battery and video screen to fit into that form factor. That's where engineering design and packaging, and custom circuit design come into play. And the software has a price too. Even if you or I could cobble up the basics of this product on our own, it still might be useful for the average consumer.

All that said, I do wonder whether the market can bear a $200 price for this device.

Almost everything (maybe everything?) this does could be done with a Raspberry Pi, but the result would obviously be a bit larger to carry around. It does seem like they've added some nice polish to the software in the form of the automatic data gathering (from a USB connected device), and they obviously need a back end system to give each Egg a subdomain under eggcyte.com.

http://www.collegehumor.com/vi...

I'm sitting right now in a room with about a dozen 'obvious' computers. Let's see: 3 PCs, one laptop, one Mac Mini, 2 Raspberry Pis, 3 Android tablets, one iPhone, one iPad. Yep that's 12. And of course there's also the wireless router and cable modem. And I'll go ahead and count my LCD TV since it's clearly a computer as well (especially when it locks up). Oh, and I shouldn't forget the Wii and PS2 even though I don't use those very often.

Clearly computers -are- my toys.

In both Asimov's story and this experiment, the real moral seems to be that somebody failed to specify the proper requirements, or run a reasonable design review. "If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.

Totally depends on who's providing the news coverage. Fox news, yes. CNN, maybe. Space.com, not so much.
BREAKING NEWS: Media outlets are biased.

I agree. I am a big fan of Musk and SpaceX but there is no chance in hell that SpaceX would be developing these systems without self-destruct capability. Might as well praise Google for ensuring their self-driving cars have brakes.

THIS IS AN EX-PLATFORM!!

Obviously not the same, but heartwarming nonetheless, Hobbes and Bacon: http://imgur.com/gallery/tUzAL

I went to his Facebook page and it looks the like comments on this issue are about 30:1 against his position. He's really being hammered there as a sellout. Yeah, I know, he really doesn't give a damn, but I'm glad people are speaking up.

As Mr. Miyagi might have said, X On, X Off.

"Which Perverse Hemihelical Chirality are you? Take this quiz to find out!"

My personal definition would be "if you can stand on it, it's a world". If you the best you can do is float next to it and even the slightest touch bounces you away, it's not a world. Hardly scientific, but it gets the point across.

Edit: Thinking about it, an inverter on CS (Chip Select) might be more likely.

I have a memory card from an original IBM PC from 1982, which has stacked memory chips. In fact, each pair of chips has ALL of their pins wired to the same contacts on the PCB. Although I have been unwilling to take apart the board to verify, this leads me to believe that the chip on top and the chip underneath are different. I'm guessing one of them has an inverter on an address line, so it will respond to even addresses, while the other responds to odd addresses.