They may have obtained $2 million in pre-orders, but just last week they revealed that the shipping version will contain Sucralose, an artificial sweetener. If they can't figure out a way to manage the PR issues besides just saying "You people are ignorant, sucralose is fine," then Soylent may not last long. Regardless of the pros or cons of artificial sweeteners, you have to give the customer what they want and not what they don't.

In my previous position, I wasn't on the committee, per se, but gave an operational tour to each candidate and tried to explain what we did and our job functions. One candidate didn't seem to pay much attention and was eliminated because he wanted too much money. Another candidate thought he knew more than I did about our operations since he had glanced at our website and walked around the building before the interview. The third candidate was able to understand what I was saying to him and asked good questions about what we did. This casual back and forth was helpful in assessing his demeanor and grasp of technology. He was a manager, so he wasn't actively managing servers and such, but knew what I was talking about and not just buzzwords. I was able to recommend him to the committee and I left his department seven years later with a good reference. Things that stand out to me about people, especially managers: proper dress, profanity during the conversation, excessive sarcasm, and any hints of poor anger management. I may be old school, but I want a manager that doesn't yell or swear at me during our interactions and isn't sarcastic.

I work at a university and we've tried to set up the same things on our wifi network. The problem is that in order to use our wifi, you have to log in via a web browser first. Additionally, whenever the device sleeps, it releases the dhcp ip, so when it awakes, you have to redo this process unless you can get on a whitelist. Our departmental devices can, but I doubt they'd allow a student this convenience. You may wish to wait until you get to college and see how the network functions before buying something.

is probably a way to avoid liability if it ends up causing an accident. "Your honor, it wasn't our technology, it was the linux geeks who wrote the software that caused the crash."

I could throttle my outbound traffic, but I only want to throttle the outbound traffic of the video, not everything else. But its possible. Another thing is that the ip's that I saw flashing by on Little Snitch's activity monitor weren't local. I was getting connections from other .edu domains but 10 states away. Lots of people here were watching the inauguration, but I didn't see one connection to anyone here. All the connections were outside our lan.

I have Little Snitch on my mac and noticed all the OUTGOING bandwidth being used while watching their video stream. After I figured out what was going on, I went to MSNBC instead. The quality is great at CNN and the idea is decent, but unless I read the EULA (which I didn't beforehand), I wouldn't know my contribution to the cloud. My employer monitors outgoing bandwidth usage and I could have been in trouble for high flows if I would have watched the whole thing. Being at a university, we have a large pipe, but I think I needed to be asked first a little more explicitly if they could use it.

I think that the real meat of the issue got overshadowed by your commentary on your personal experience. What happens to our virtual identities? What happens when you can't have the name you've built? The same thing happens on AIM and other sites. When you are forced by circumstances to develop a new name, something changes. I'm hoping the discussion here will start to address issues like prospects for a global name registry or a solution to this issue.