I want such a device, but not for my person. I'd want it on my car with 360-degree coverage, but no audio. I'd like to have a record of all of my interactions with traffic police. If there's no audio, then it doesn't fall afoul of recorder laws. It would also be dandy for catching people who dent your car in parking lots. Also, I've been in the occasional traffic accident and I know that people lie in that situation.

Of course, have it encrypt its content using RSA and randomly generated session keys, so that only I would be able to decrypt the recordings. (Even if an attacker hacks the hardware! You'd have to be able to read the RAM while the session keys were resident. You could even get around this with some judicious White Box encryption. )

What if the doctors decide to treat her by installing a switch to let her turn herself off? (and on?)

That's the plot of Click by Milo Manara

http://amzn.com/1561630845

Hey, you'd better stop unquestioningly taking the advice of computer company founders. People might think you're a fanboy!

On a more serious note: please stop trying to apply Woz's straw man to other people. Buyers of Apple products do not think only Apple-approved thoughts. That's only coming when iTunes adds the Thought Store.

Thanks for asking, but I don't think my collaborators would appreciate it if I spilled the beans.

That's just the beginning, but even that is enough justification for the device. Durability issues could be addressed with the right case.

Not walking through the Mall, but using the Amazon App in front of the shelves at MicroCenter is something I've done. I've also looked up reviews of books while going through the shelves at Half Price Books. And yes, it's very useful. I have a Cradlepoint hotspot, so I have 3G through WiFi on my tc1100 tablet as well as my iPad.

Note that I said "push" a new category, not create it. I wrote a text scrolling skiing game on my roomate's TRS-80. He used Bank Street Writer on my Apple II+.

The dirty secret of the computer industry and gaming in the 1990's -- by sheer person-hours Solitaire was actually the best game ever! (With Tetris a close second.) It was also the real "Killer App" for Windows.

Of course he likes the iPad. The iPad is actually a lot like the original Apple computers in terms of what it's trying to do. Steve Jobs is actually trying to push a whole new category. (Not wholly new, but one that's only been obscure so far.) He's pushed things so far, that there is no current killer app for this device. It's just like the advent of the original Apple, when everyone was saying that it was very cool, but what the heck is it good for? It wasn't until later that VisiCalc became the killer app.

Steve Jobs and company have gone out so far on a limb, we don't quite know what to do with this thing. I've coined a new unit: the milliTaco. It's 1000th of the innovation required to make a game changer and confuse a Slashdot editor. With the iPod, it wasn't the features and stats, the killer was the legal music download ecosystem they created. With the iPad, it's the ability to interact with a networked computer in ways and situations that we haven't before, without looking like a total dork:

http://amzn.com/B001G713NO

The killer apps are yet to come, for those of us who see the potential in this thing to implement.

Well, duh! That's not what it's for!

In the late 1800's, the US was a hotbed of innovation, in part because US companies were a little cavalier about Intellectual Property law, especially when it came to ripping off foreign IP. Sounds a lot like China and the far east today. Right now, the products I find on sites like brando.com are both cooler and cheaper than what I find on Amazon and Thinkgeek, unless they are the same ones. But there are a lot of items I can find from asian based sites that I can't find on western retail sites. The innovation center of gravity is shifting across the Pacific. Where Japan failed with force of arms, China is bringing about the Asian Co-prosperity sphere through commerce.

Example? More like "everybody's doing it." Iran hacks US. US hacks Wikileaks. China hacks Google. /b/ gets mad/decides to join the fun and social engineers everyone else.

Even M$ in its heyday couldn't buy up every App Store gold rusher. But targeting a tactical weak-point, like email, that's something possible. I recall some quip about M$ disrupting the supply of 3.5" floppies to spoil the OS/2 launch.

You should be asking for forgiveness for being totally clueless. You can't reuse a one-time pad. The whole point of a one-time pad is that the Unicity Distance is the same as the length of your whole freaking message. If your OTP is truly random, trying to decrypt a message n-characters long is basically the same as taking a wild guess at what n-character message got sent. How do we know that the OTP contained the random numbers to XOR the cyphertext back to "Hello" versus "LuvYu"? Unless we recover the OTP, there's no way to know!

But as soon as you reuse a OTP, you open it up to all sorts of analysis, which I'm not going to try to clue you in about. Look up Vigenère cipher and start reading there.

DARPA funded research on haptics and "Waldoes" (nickname for remotely operated manipulators from Heinlein) starting in the 80s. A lot of this know-how ended up in Sarcos corporation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhj3Z9o6t0g

http://www.sarcos.com/teleop_videos.html

The problem with haptics technology is that mechanisms complicated enough to mimic parts of the human body, like the arms and hands, will tend to be more expensive and less robust than simpler manipulators. Much of the DARPA research from the 80s was motivated by the need to work underwater at great depths. Most current underwaters RPVs don't use advanced haptics, because the work can be done with simpler and more robust manipulators.

Prosthesis can change this, however. A mass produced prosthetic arm could drive down the cost of such mechanisms. This could lead to further advances and cost reduction in haptics technology.

We are actually at the point where we could build a Gundam style mecha. (Has to be large enough to contain a whole-body haptic harness with complete freedom of motion.) But there is no practical reason to do so. (Other than to provide an even cooler spectacle at "monster truck" rallies.)

(Also it would probably have an Evangelion-like extension cord coming out the back for power and possibly hydraulics.)

Lots of good SF as well. In Larry Niven's "Known Space" continuity those things were called "Thrusters."