Through-the-body communication chips have been around a while; you can click-n-buy them right on Digikey.
http://www.microchip.com/pageh...

All this furor over Epic Scale bitcoin miner, and none over other crud like Wajam that uTorrent installs?

Have a look at the last image in this article. "...may change your local proxy settings...collect...URLs of the pages you visit...content of encrypted webpages...Wajam may protect itself from other software that tries to wrongfully interfere with it."

Yikes. Lenovo got spanked pretty hard for packaging advertising malware that MITMs your encrypted sessions, but at least theirs doesn't officially threaten a counterstrike against your antivirus too.
 

No arguments on the dick part, but if the vendor-supplied software has basically an "overclock" tickbox built right in (some videocard driver packages have this), he may not be 100% wrong to take them back under warranty. Under US law at least, there are implied warranties for "fitness for a particular purpose", which a company cannot always disclaim once that company has implied them (this varies by state to some extent). A good example is a pickup truck that comes with a ball hitch and is shown in the TV ads towing a camper. This creates an implied warranty that the truck is fit for towing something equivalent to the camper shown in the ad, and the vendor placing scary language otherwise in the warranty/manual may not necessarily dissolve that warranty. Likewise, nVidia might be worried that placing a user-accessible 'overclock button' right in the UI would create such a warranty and make them liable for implied warranty claims from OC'ed laptops.

(Whether OC'ing the GPU should be able to permanently damage the GPU or laptop in the first place is another issue, but being covered by some other threads in this discussion.)

I was running the Windows version (yeah yeah, here's my geek card), and starting around April of last year, it began to suffer some significant issues, starting with "molasses mode", which was fixed and replaced with frequent crashes and the Black/White Screen of Death (the window contents, or significant portions thereof, would fail to render once FF had been open for a couple days and/or many tabs were open, displaying either white or black rectangles). The latter seemed to come and go by release, but the crashing persisted long enough, and through enough releases (both home and work installations, Win7 and even XP, beh... cleaning out and reinstalling FF made no difference) that I threw in the towel on FF some months back. If they have truly fixed all of this for good, I might reconsider, except that a FF crash still takes down the entire browser (a Chrome crash, just reload the tab and it didn't happen), and FF just looks and acts like Chrome any, so why bother switching back?

Also, don't crash constantly. Especially, don't work and look exactly like Chrome and crash constantly, because Chrome works and looks exactly like Chrome but doesn't crash constantly.

And excellent 3rd-party hardware support.

Counter-predatory-pricing botnets: It's only a matter of time.

Advertising. Location service can now not only tell what store you're shopping in, but which floor.

The more user-friendly side-effect is for outdoor activities (tracking runs, hikes, etc.) - much more accurate elevation change info than GPS, whose vertical resolution is terrible.

"...people have been home-brewing their own content-driven lighting like this for a while, but this is the first I've seen that looks like a simple add-on."

There's a reason for this. What they are trying to sell is Ambilight, and Ambilight is patented.

Google "ambilight clone" and you'll find hundreds of open designs you can easily build yourself - patent holders generally don't (or can't) touch distribution of paper designs - but they're not legal to sell commercially.

(N)ation-(S)tate (A)ctors... I see what you did there.

For a totally unsolicited datapoint, I'm an American EE with about a decade in the industry and see this notation semi-regularly. Still can't explain US distributors' hatred of nanofarads as a unit, though.

Ah, those were the days. At my HS the teachers were wise and would personally clear the memory on your calculator themselves. A fake "Mem cleared" program circulated widely. It not just intercepted the keystrokes you would use to actually clear the memory, but even displayed the text dimly (probably by clearing and rewriting the string rapidly) to simulate the fact that clearing the memory on a TI-8x also reset the screen contrast to (extraordinarily dim) factory default.

People plinking a drone when it flies over their yard (or any public field) and getting a free Xbox or whatever it was carrying.

This has nothing to do with "banning municipal broadband" today, and everything to do with not granting a power at the Fed level that would let a future FCC in 1-2 election cycles do exactly that.

FTFA:

"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."

Arguing that municipal broadband networks could discourage investment by private companies, Berry said, "Itâ(TM)s not hard, then, to imagine a future FCC concluding that taxpayer-funded, municipal broadband projects themselves are barriers to infrastructure investment. So if the current FCC were successful in preempting state and local laws under Section 706, what would stop a future FCC from using Section 706 to forbid states and localities from constructing any future broadband projects? Nothing that I can see."