The Amiga 1000 also had signatures on the inside of the case, along with a paw print for Mitchy.

Does the Guru Meditation Error count as an Easter Egg, though?

Only a decade? So the 18 year warming hiatus (which may or may not extend even further into the future as the current El Nino comes to a close and a La Nina probably takes over) while CO2 climbed to historic (modern history, not prehistoric) heights IS enough to demonstrate the non-validity of AGW for you? Good to know.

Nori-wrapped bacon could be interesting, but bacon-wrapped bacon can't be beat. Now, to improve on pigs in space.

Epic fail of flamebaiting even by AC standards:

There was prior art even before the first republicans- the Romans.

The first statement is true, the second statement is absolutely false. In fact, even flying from Hong Kong or Macau, both recognized by all world governments as PRC owned, requires going through customs and immigration, so why would you think that traveling from Taiwan would not? I have personally experienced this multiple times, have you?

As an added bonus, and causing much cognitive dissonance upon the PRC individuals I have queried: Why, in every supermarket I have visited in every city I have visited (which is more than most Chinese), are Taiwanese foodstuffs always found in the imported food section? Hong Kong and Macau products may or may not be, but Taiwanese goods always are.

During my tenure at Motorola SPS, it was a written rule that all employees get 40 hours of training every year. In the late '80s my management spent quite a bit of money to send me to UNIX administration courses of questionable value (I was a CPU geek using mostly MVME systems with rarely more than a bootloader, much less a full System V installation) to get me my hours. A change in management found that training was the easiest budget to reallocate for other purposes, however, and so it always was. By the mid-90's, when I asked my boss if I could go attend a training session that was exactly in my area of responsibility and I needed to extend my knowledge, I was told that since I spent what he believed to be an hour a week reading EETimes and IEEE Spectrum (at home, on my own time), he had already credited me with 50 hours of training and since I was beyond the 40 hour requirement I should ask him again next year. I wouldn't be surprised if the managers today are tracking IP addresses to form a way of crediting training with no cost at Freescale, if the 40 hour requirement survived the spin-off.

LOL, you don't happen to work at a NAS (Naval Air Station, not Network Attached Storage) in New Jersey, do you? Great group doing computer archaeology there, bringing truly ancient code from ancient hardware to more up-to-date and merely antiquated languages and hardware. I helped them do some porting of code from some bankrupt micro-controller company from the '70s to a 683XX micro-controller. Had a blast (particularly after a successful test :P).

That meme was a meme long before South Park and long before the word meme was coined. We joked about it in managerial accounting classes in the mid-'80s (software engineering major, business minor). A personal favorite variation from a cartoon that I remember from the cartoonist Sidney Harris "And then a miracle occurs..." which was first published in American Scientist in 1977.

Poutine is what Quebecois eat to put on a layer of fat before winter... one is really all you need, but more than a few Quebec City residents seem to go back for seconds and thirds just to be sure, 'cause it is so damned cold.

By Dennis Ritchie. Does anyone else matter?

I miss Dennis, but I think he would tell you that while you are on the right path, you are wrong in the end. To be a real high level language would have meant surrendering direct-to-the-metal access, and he never considered that as even a possibility. His intention was to create an all-level language for the PDP/11 to improve on B (which was missing byte addressability), and even portability wasn't considered until after he achieved that goal; hand-holding was more to avoid breaking the compiler than to avoid breaking user code. He believed that if you wanted to access array[-16], you should be allowed to do that, even if it cost you your own foot (intentionally or unintentionally). His desire was to make a language that could easily map constructs to the existing hardware's assembly/machine code, which is pretty much the inverse of what high-level languages are today (or were, even then).

C was what Dennis wanted it to be. RIP, dmr.

You can "cue" a song up, or you can put a song into the "queue", but the word you used doesn't mean what you think it does.

Yes, that is my fault. I read the Po-motion page first and came to the wrong conclusion that your Lumo system was based on Po-motion. I realized my mistake after hitting send, of course. But, as I understand it, you have reduced the hardware of Mandala, an Amiga, a projector, and a camera down to one thing to plug into the wall that provides all of those features and probably a similar level of performance to what was available in 1988 (depending on CPU choice, ARM has come a long way since the 68030 was released). I would love it if one of the Mandala creators were around to pipe up (last I left them they were following the Grateful Dead around the world and living out of Hare Krishna temple/hostels). IIRC, they were also from Canada, though I don't remember which city.

BTW, you should probably update your Lumo page to indicate that you are using an ARM CPU, or perhaps "an Android-compatible CPU", rather than an "Android CPU". As for cost, running Android on an Intel NUC would certainly increase your cost, but could also increase your performance by enough to allow orders of magnitude more challenging applications, maybe for the Hammacher Schlemmer version :P.

The statement that the projector "plays" motion reactive games seems misleading, but for a typical consumer audience I can understand the simplification.

Meg, out of curiousity, other than not needing a stand-alone computer and video input, how does your product differ from Mandala, which was introduced by Very Vivid back in 1988, for the Amiga? It could use any video source (usually a projector aimed at a wall, but most any video output device would suffice) along with a video input from a camera to allow interacting with on screen content, and was quite popular with museums and other entities for setting up interactive displays in the early '90s, prior to Commodore's demise. Do you have anyone working on your team that has ever dealt with a Mandala, or even old enough to remember one?

At a hardware engineering level, has more been done than reducing part count, in effect? The Mandala was purely 2D, for example, having only the ability to determine motion on an X/Y basis parallel to the video display. Have you added another axis since you are supporting the 360 Kinect, perhaps, or could you consider that for your next generation? Additionally, would the use of 1080p or higher resolution video cameras make supporting resolutions higher than 1024x768 feasible in the future, or give more precise movement tracking? What is the granularity of movement tracking currently?

On a software level, how easy is it describe interactive objects and the interactions that can be performed along with the results? What would it take for Minecraft, for example, to be ported so that no controller was needed, just a lot of movement (my nephew REALLY needs some exercise!)? Or is it only really suited for new applications built from the ground up using your Po-Motion tools?

On a ship, the captain and the pilot are two different roles and never the same person. It is the captain who has ultimate authority, the pilot is a person brought in on a case by case basis to help the captain navigate through local waters. Captains might travel the world, pilots stick to a particular stretch of water and have the local knowledge to advise the captain, usually as a requirement of maintaining insurance in case of accident. My grandfather was a ship's captain away from home almost 9 months a year, my uncle was a pilot on the Panama Canal and slept at home almost every night.