Because its felony child endangerment...

I hope this means that there will be fewer 12 year olds playing on XBL.

Attention crazy old people that don't play video games (i.e. no one on Slashdot), please read this and shut up.

While the demo was very cool and full of eye-candy-tastic animations, there is one thing that stands in the way of this idea. Tactile response. You have this mat in front of you that can track all 10 fingers when you place them on the surface, and then to click with a finger, you press it into the mat.

Well first off, you're going to need to feel that as a click, if this is to be the Next Big Thing. The other issue is how hard do you have to press to get it to register a click? If you think about your mouse, the "click" motion is very very tiny and light and yet there is a definite clicking sound and feel. On a trackpad, you're moving your finger around and then (assuming you don't use the button) you have to lift your finger, tap it, and lift it again to register a click. That won't do either. Its going to be a challenge to "tune" this to not be clicking all the time or take too much pressure before it "clicks." If its too sensitive, you'll have people unconsciously straining their arms slightly to reduce the weight of their hands on the mat.

Another thing thing I'm concerned about is how a mouse feels in your hand. I rather like the feel of griping a mouse in my hand, and I'm not sure I can get the same feeling from resting my hands on the desk all the time.

We shall see. I doubt Cindy from accounting will be very gung-ho about this, unfortunately.

A solution! I hate hate hate it when I'm listening to something and the earbuds get yanked out of my ears by a wayward finger or pen. Too bad its proprietary. And I'd like to echo sandymac's comment. Who needs to differentiate between stop and pause on MP3 players anymore? Oh and while we're at it, lets stop calling them MP3 players and come up with a better name than portable music player, please.

WHY?

Game companies, you have my word that if you made another Tachyon or FreeSpace game, I would never ever pirate it.

Free-to-play Pokemon MMORPG. You know you'd play that. Don't lie.

Oh an how many of you already carry around 1 or 2 RFID tags in your credit cards? That's already happened.

Most of us carry driver's licenses around 24/7 already. Its not too much of a stretch to imagine being required to carry your passport too, but even more likely is having RFIDs added to our driver's licenses. Not that I'm a conspiracy nut or anything, this just stinks of precedent.

That's actually a pretty quiet alarm clock, considering what its doing. Too bad for every new bed I buy, he'll have bought 7.

That'll be a hard one to weave into the canon.

Isn't this just a fancy version of a laser scanner used to more efficiently keep tabs on Joe Citizen?

Excellent point. The Valve Steam team has created a great system and I use it every day. Its my main source of PC games, right above the #2 spot, BitTorrent for all those publishers too stodgy or too stupid to put their titles on Steam (EA, anybody?).