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Mr. Potato Head! Mr. Potato Head! Back doors are not secrets!

It's a bad practice, but encyclopedias and dictionaries have been doing for years. See Lillian Virginia Mountweasel, the fountain designer/photographer who overcame non-existence to be featured in the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia as an anti-piracy measure.

Neither do the newspapers for the most part. When I read the paper, everything is mostly AP stories.

I don't know what it used to be like, but the fact of the matter is to 'make it' in science, getting a professorship at a tier one research university, you work like a dog. So you say, 'Teach at a college, you'll get summers off.' No, not true either. There is still pressure to publish (to get tenure), so you need to pull in grant money and research all summer. And possibly get paid shit.

One could always go into industry. The pay is better. The hours are long and the pressure is high. The fact of the matter is, many jobs in our society that are important have crap compensation. Teaching, science, etc. The payoff is in business.

And in my experience, it's not that hard to compete with (many of) the foreign born scientists. Some of them are quite good, and some end up staying in the US, but a lot are just so-so.

I'd like to add to your thoughts that nowadays nearly all "devices" are computers too. They have general purpose CPUs (nearly always ARM- or MIPS-based) and more or less powerful I/O. In most cases it's only the software that confines them to specific gadget-typical tasks.

The main reason why Amiga users rarely if ever had virus problems was because it was largely in the pre-Internet era. I used an Amiga for a long time and never actually saw a machine with so much as a network card. Sneaker net was the rule. So unless you were pirating software from nefarious sources, virus infections were rare, about as rare as on the Mac, which didn't have any protection either, apparently not any at all until Mac OS X was released.

Amiga viruses were rare? I've never experienced a platform with more viruses than the Amiga had due to the way floppy disks got shared around between teenage gamers and the rarity of virus scanners. Most infected Amiga users probably didn't even realise it. On the whole the Amiga viruses weren't actually very destructive though - one of the common symptoms was not being able to format floppies anymore.

Actually there are techniques which allows to get relatively high resolution image from low resolution video. Google for "super resolution".

Educational gaming machine go!

Let your kid browse the internet in the living room while you read - thus glancing up regularly and supervising to make sure nobody has goatse'd them.

Show your friends the latest stupid thing you found on Youtube.

Attached USB + Controller + Stella = Living room Atari 2600 which can be easily attached and put away when you're done (less easily accomplished in these days of LCD TVs without coax).

Cheap television + keyboard computer = information kiosk. Tired of your friends getting drunk and wanting to use Google on your computer to settle disputes on random shit? Stick one of those in your living room on a pedestal. Call it "The Last Word."

Have a little too much money? Do you like having whiteboards but you consider them lower-class? Buy a large format flat screen television, something cheap which can hack 720p clearance from some home theater "everything must go" sale, stick it on the wall and use this thing on a cheap pedestal table as an art easel. Encourage people to graffiti on your wall with the stylus on the attached screen.

Attach a webcam to one and stick it up in your windowsill and take time lapses of the seasons. Hell, if it's cheap enough, put one in each window.

Or just use one for the same thing you'd use an EEEpc other than reading on the bus to work.

As a trained biologist, I take exception to the failure to analogize properly. A genotype is the genetic description of an organism. This has nothing to do with a system that learns from experience.

Those who create software: Please, if you are going to use a word from a different field to name or describe your program, try to pick a word that creates some sort of sensible analogy rather than choosing one that sounds cool and is unused. Otherwise, you risk sounding like an idiot.

You should have a look at File::Random on CPAN.

As a practical matter, agree 100%. Google allows the cell phone networks to place all their usual restrictions on android. This is the same problem we've had for as long as cell phones have existed. The networks take a decent phone with good features, disable 90% of the features and functionality, load it up with their logo on everything and their own crappy software, and sell what amounts to a shiny turd to the consumers.

THat was for the movie launch. And it was actually a big hit for them, they made a lot of money on that Quik-E-Mart joke. Probably why they're jumping on this.