U.S. and Britain have been doing it wholesale since at least World War II so that would set the bar to at least 70 years.

Is it "mocking" to genuinely believe google glasses and shoe phones are gimmicks pioneered by Maxwell Smart?

Exactly

Which is why I don't buy games any more. If I wanted to jump through hoops, I'd join a real circus, not this Microsoft clown outfit.

And underwent surgery in order to get rid of glasses as they were the worst annoyance in my life - so there's no chance of me using this product.

People don't realise just how much these things are going to negatively affect you - you are going to be cleaning them all the time, they are going to cause irritation and issue with our hair and the side of your head, they are going to range from being unnoticeable to unignorable literally in minutes all throuout the day.

That's my take on it all. The wearable aspect is just a poor substitute for what we have been "promised" in fiction, so until it brings the positives without the negatives that I already went to great lengths to avoid, I'm not buying into it.

They detect when you're listening to music with your eyes shut, sneak in, and load it via a thumb drive.

Because that's what humans do... over and over and over again.

In Oz, the number plate is the "medallion", they are limited but privately traded and currently worth around $500k per cab, people who have them will never want to change the limit. Dispatch was a quasi-authority, the board was composed of govt reps and private operators, they basically set prices, etc, they don't specify the make of car but here in Melbourne it must be yellow. The flagfall fee was supposedly to pay for bookings via the dispatch center. Limo's work the same here, they must be pre-booked. All this was 25yrs ago, dispatch technology has changed a lot since then, good drivers (cab or limo) seem to rely more on their mobile phone than their radio these days.

I'm curious Jane, what's your job? - I only ask because on the subject of AGW your "grasp of math and physics" is just as far away from well established science as those of a YEC. I'm not trying to pick a fight here, I firmly believe nobody is immune to self delusion, 35yrs ago I was totally convinced Uri Geller was genuine, after all he "fixed my watch" by staring into the TV for 30 seconds. In 1980 I was interested enough in climate change to pick up a book (about tress) and start following the subject, due to a mixture of ignorance and deliberate misinformation campaigns I remained unconvinced CO2 was a serious problem for almost a decade after Hansen's now famous Senate testimony and the establishment of the IPCC.

Having been a victim of at least one case of severe self delusion, I can attest to the fact it is really easy to spot in others and really hard to see in yourself, this is especially true if you are a "smart person", most (honest) magicians will tell you "smart people" are counter-intuitively the easiest to fool, reason being they carry more prior assumptions than others as to how the universe ticks, it means the focus of their attention is more predictable and therefore more easily redirected.

As an independent observer who also feels obliged to pontificate on the social utility of the scientific method and the role of skepticism in it, I think that both yourself and the YEC cling to your contrarian views because you have neglected the most essential part of the art of skepticism, namely self-skepticism. The only scientific difference I see between a YEC's ideas on evolution and your ideas on AGW is the subject matter, but even that is similar since they are both heavily tilted towards geology and related Earth sciences.

Disclaimer: I offer this post as unwanted advice rather than an unwanted flame.

Exactly, and if a prospective employer decides it's appropriate to judge you on a soundbite you should make certain that the prying bastard is the one who ends up feeling embarrassed and awkward. Don't even bother trying to defend whatever past behavior they are accusing you of, turn it around and make them defend their current behavior. You probably won't get the job, but nobody ever said principles are cheap.

Having said that I can also see that if someone self-identifies as a YEC, it disqualifies them from certain tasks. If someone has preyed on children in the past, it disqualifies them from working with children. For many jobs background checks are in fact proper due diligence, unfortunately there are a lot of self-important people who turn that genuine need into a disingenuous and hypocritical witch hunt.

They have medications for your condition.

Some quick estimation (read: looking at online vendors but not shopping arround carefully for best prices nor carefullly checking compatibility) puts the cost of a basic system built round that board and with all slots filled with 16 core processors at the order of $5K.

I guess that may be cheap to you, it certainly isn't to me.

Sure you can find a few dev boards or industrial embedded computing boards where the vendor happened to use the mini-itx form factor rather than something custom which is handy if you want to slap one of them in an off the shelf case for whatever reason. Such boards have been arround for some time.

But they lack the features one takes for granted on atom mini-itx boards like multiple SATA ports, a regular PCI or PCIe slot*, support for more ram (most arm boards have 1GB with the occasional board with 2GB just coming onto the market while most atom boards support 4GB with newer boards supporting 8GB). I also noticed that none of your links mentioned price. Shaving even a few tens of watts is not worth it if the board is double the price of an equivilent atom soloution.

Interestingly the Marvell armada XP platform can in principle offer most of what you find on atom mini-itx boards but I haven't seen anyone build such a board arround it. The only armada XP hardware i've seen is the crazily overpriced and somewhat strangely set-up (lots of network ports, hardly any SATA) openblocks stuff, the even more overpriced baserock slab and the vapourware dell copper..

*one of them has miniPCIe but that has a far smaller selection of cards and while in theory you can use adaptors in practice you'll never get it into a standard case if you do which kinda defeats the object of standard form factors

Or maybe he's bought into the anti-nuclear hype. Sergei's a bright guy but smart people can have blinders like anyone else. Still, having more solutions is better, so if Google X can make this into a viable wind power approach, I think it's great. Though I hope someone does the research on next generation reactors and fuels, because we'll need that, too.

Or it could be that Google believes that everyone in the world should have access to information, with all of the benefits it brings, and is looking for ways to make that possible, in sustainable, self-funding ways.

Nah, couldn't be. We all know corporations are utterly incapable of doing anything beneficial for humanity.

Yeah, and it's a huge amount of work, and requires substantial skill. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHAO8oxwioU