Is there a meaningful/relevant difference between "memory" and "cell fatigue"? If the battery stops working because "chemistry", does the label matter? (I accept that the underlying chemistry is different.)

I got curious and did the math. (Now that I said that, I probably did it wrong). Obviously there's too few electrons to chemically supply the energy, but what about mass->energy? The mass of an AAA battery averages about 12 g (some types more, some less). Mass-energy equivalence (E=mc^2) gives an energy of 1E15 joules. The sun's power is 4E24 joules/second (Wikipedia)...so it's not even that there are too few electrons, there's not enough matter in general, by many orders of magnitude.

My office has exposed cable trays. Some of the length has a toy model train running through it. Perhaps you can leave the exposed cable runs but spice it up with toy trains and hamster tubes?

By gravity?

I was really curious about the need to "disguise" the chargers as manhole covers - it's not like they'd be an eyesore, and they'll be "public enough" that they won't be secret, either. Unfortunately it was poetic licence in TFS, not in TFA...

I had the same thought...but the problem is, you're off by many orders of magnitude. From TFS, the comet was 28 million years ago; Wikipedia was discussing climate on the order of tens of thousands of years. No dice.

It seems like /. runs Schneier's blog posts all the time...and I'm ok with that! They're usually great reads.

I Kent tell where s/he meant either.

I was intrigued until I noticed that where I put the quote marks, and where the quote marks actually were, were not the same place. So much for the "Mr. Perl Extreme-Fluxing Agile Capacitor."

I also misread anorexia. Anorexia is, of course, what led to mass extinction...although I guess there's a difference between "no food is available to eat" (starvation/malnutrition) and "I won't eat food" (anorexia).

Because a lot of us do not want Kinect, or go further and hate or fear Kinect. First, because Kinect games are widely regarded as having poorer control systems than controller-based games, and second paranoia over webcams/microphones watching you in your living room. (I'm in the former camp).

Steam has huge regular sales. Microsoft keeps the digital versions of games in sync with the retail versions as much as possible. People don't build huge libraries of 60$ Steam games, they build libraries of 5$ Humble Bundle games, and they don't care about resale because they paid so little going in. Microsoft's digitial-instead-of-disc games that GP suggests are going to be 60$ digital. Not that I have any concrete evidence of what they'll do half a year from now...buy certainly on Xbox 360 the downloadable AAA games are the same price as retail MSRP.

The iMac in the cubicle next to me is that way. Admittedly it's the only one nearby like that.

Yes, the tape solution has occurred to me...I've so far avoided buying a computer with a built-in webcam, but that's the solution I'd use. I fully expect there to be DIY microphone disconnection demos online within a week of the console releasing (who knows what functionality it would gimp, though).

How awesome would it be if there was a line-in instead of an actual microphone? You could hook it up to something that would play pre-recorded taunts over Live (like that great robot-voiced "I am the alpha and the omega" from Unreal Tournament). Actually...maybe that would be a bad idea...

If you've followed the Xbox One conversation at all (there, I used the real word, now I can call it Xbone), you know that there's only one thing Microsoft could possibly do as damage control at this point, and they just did it. Everyone has expected them to tone down the phoning home and used games policies. The "halfway" is, as many commenters below have pointed out, that they've yet to remove the built-in Kinect.