This development was inevitable. Back in 1987, Douglas Adams described an "Electric Monk" in his novel, Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agancy. In the novel, the Electric Monk was a "labour-saving device" designed to believe things so that its owner didn't have to be bothered. Of course, the monk described by Adams was faulty "and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City."

" the product is significantly cheaper per item at the same quality"

In fact, the items are of better quality since the beef hasn't been treated with bovine growth hormone and the bread hasn't been made with genetically modified wheat. However, in the interests of full disclosure and transparency I should note that I still wouldn't eat it.

Next thing you know: they'll be saying that my weekly cup of ferret milk doesn't cure verrucas either!

You could just put the "very secure version of Linux" on all of the computers - problem solved or is it...

You used TTL? You had it easy! I remember when we had to get up at 3 a.m. and walk 4 miles, in our bare feet, to the shoe box that served as our workshop. Then we had to suck the air out of our homemade triodes and thread our own magnetic memory cores...

You could use the hardware to build a cloud service and sell it to gullible businesses that don't know any better than to store their corporate data on such a service. Just to be on the safe side, you could back it up to your new cloud storage, along with your own data. Hmmm...

This type of failure to employ basic SI prefixes really gets my goat! The metre is an SI unit so multiples should use the correct SI prefix. 1000 kilometres is a megametre and 1000 megametres (or 1 000 000 kilometres) is a gigametre. So the above stated distance of 655,000,000 kilometers from Earth should have been specified as 655 gigametres (or 655 Gm).

I know nothing of these "software upgrades" of which they speak.

"One of the fastest..." you say but in fact, I'll bet that it makes phone calls at exactly the same speed as every other phone on the market and no faster than every cell phone ever made

The professional music business existed long before the recording industry made recordings of "popular" music widely available. Once such recording became available, it became fashionable to have heard the recorded artistes despite the fact that you could hear the same music, without the loss of quality inherent in the recording and probably performed by better singers and musicians at your local music hall or tavern. Once people started to direct their disposable income towards the recording companies instead of the local performers, the professional music business was brought to its knees. The recent availability of "amateur" performances is merely serving to restore the balance by showing that the artistes being foisted upon the public by the recording companies are very ordinary performers with no special talent and not deserving of an elevated share of the money pot. Moreover, although the poor quality of the early recordings is consigned to history, it is increasingly common to hear the strange tonal warbling that is introduced when a digital sound recording system is used to correct the poor vocal quality of the singer(s). So let us hope that the trend towards listening to amateur and live performances will continue until the blight that is the recording industry has been eradicated forever.

AM (Ante-Meridian) meaning before midday and PM (Post-Meridian) meaning after midday, it is not possible for 12 to be either before or after midday because 12 is midday. Similarly, 12 midnight, being equally distant from the preceding and following midday cannot be labelled as either AM or PM. Thus, 12 may be referred to as midday, noon or midnight but never AM or PM.

Ridiculous physics didn't bother me too much until one recent film in which the "mad scientist" claimed that his particle accelerator had made neutrinos travel faster than the speed of flight. There is a limit (to what is credible not the speed of neutrinos, obviously).

"lack of physical security won't be an issue" - room thermostats on the other hand...

An (electronic) accelerometer can be constricted by attaching a resistive material to a vaguely flexible substrate such that the electrical resistance varies when the substrate is deformed (much the same as a strain gauge actually). In this case, the paper is merely the substrate and it is difficult to accept the claim that the accelerometer is made of paper.It seems rather akin to claiming to have made a paper-based computer - by sticking a laptop to a sheet of paper.

More importantly, precisely which medical tests require an accelerometer? Not being the sort of malingerer who spends a lot of time undergoing medical testing, I may have missed them but I'm pretty sure that no doctor has ever attempted to measure my acceleration. I know that older people often claim that time seems to pass more quickly. Perhaps time passing more quickly actually manifests as a measurable reduction in their acceleration and acceleration tests are a geriatric specialisation that I can look forward to as I get older. Perhaps the more senior SlashDot followers would care to comment on the efficacy of acceleration testing?

It is pretty impressive that Taiwan has police officers who even know what a spectrum analyser is!

However, it is surprising that the candidates didn't know that they could disguise their transmissions by matching their carrier modulation to the warp signature - surely everyone knows that.

On the other hand: if a job is worth doing then it will probably still be worth doing tomorrow.