I've yet to see the "killer app" for the Pebble smartwatch. Neither could they, which is probably why they open-sourced the SDK. If they had a killer app they would have been purchased (or emulated) by Apple/Microsoft/Google et all already.

Distributed drone delivery and refueling? Bit torrent for packages! Genius! Cut the US Postal service out of the snail mail business completely using technology in e-space and meat-space.

Have you looked at how much robotics parts cost? A cheap servo is $12, an acceptable servo costs $45, and good servos you might use with surgical precision start at $95. High torque high precision motors a human sized model start in the $450 range and go up from there.
 
Six range of motion arms (let alone three digits per finger) means 12 servos for just the arms. It's no wonder people are looking at pneumatics, hydraulics etc for high torque high precision "digitla muscles". Robotics is expensive. And when you wire a servo wrong at 4 in the morning because you've been working too long you end up replacing these things at a fast rate (Ask me how I know). Just getting in to a 5 degree of motion laser cut wood arm, starting the hobby from scratch, cost me about $600. And that's with the $12-20 level servos.

What does "traction" matter? A good platform is a good platform, and WP is one of, if not the best platform out there right now. I don't understand why they'd use Android on their own phones. That doesn't make any sense.

Social media works great for things I will talk my friends about movies, politics, and occasionally global sports like the world cup or Olympics. Since I don't watch TV I couldn't tell you what's playing right now, especially since most movies are reboots or sequels which really blend together unless you've seen the trailers a few times. I did end up buying a ticket to the Lego movie due to an ad on Facebook. After almost all of my friends had been talking about it for weeks. Ads for dishwashing soap, soda, pizza etc don't even register for me mentally online.

Citation needed on point 1; everything I've read says that football produces about $15 for every $1 invested in the program. This probably isn't true for other sports, but College Football is Big Business in the south for Universities.

New taxes are never the solution. Ever.

It's good to know that you have a system as complicated as a country of hundreds of million people figured out with a single sentence. You should consider running for President. Sounds like Sarah Palin would be a perfect running mate for you!

Good!

a. Gas is much too cheap in the US.
b. We need a lot of infrastructure work.

Of course, I'm sure we could afford to pave all of our roads with gold, have diamond-studded bike lanes, and solid titanium sidewalks if we didn't spend half our budget on wars, but hey, I'm not holding my breath. There's not as much room for corruption in building roads in this country as there is building roads in some 3rd world country that we bombed into oblivion.

If you're paying $$ for custom Intel processors, you probably already have a way to leverage a particular function in parallel on the CPU

Force of habit. Honestly I'm a little surprised that Slashdot doesn't parse BBcode these days.

I think the term you're looking for is [url=http://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942244/ikes-warning-of-military-expansion-50-years-later]Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex[/url], which he gave a stern and grave warning about as his last words before he left office.

Speak for yourself. You couldn't pay me to trade my Windows Phone for an iPhone.

Suspension on cars do this automatically, already. That's a big part of the reason we have suspensions on cars. I can't imagine there's that much of a benefit to counter the extra weight and complexity of the system.

Does blender have a greater, lesser or parity feature set compared to RenderMan? That's an important question for the casual user. I use blender quite a bit for 3D modeling for Kerbal Space Program, but if Render Man is better, and has the features I need, then I might look at their free edition. I use blender because it's free and do about 20 hours a year of 3D modeling a year for hobbyist purposes.

What happens to Blender? Will RenderMan have the ability to replace Blender as an all-in-one 3D modeling/sculpting/rigging/animation/rendering engine, or is RenderMan only an animation/rendering engine?