Oh snap! The eater becomes the eaten.

I read through all these comments naysaying technology. This is /. after all so _something_ should be possible so it occurred to me you could do something like the following: First setup a collection of Bluetooth beacons, one in the center of each room. Next make a room map of these with appropriate connections in the style of say, the Zork game. The lounge connects to hallway connects to dining room. Next hack together a small computer which talks. The _only_ thing that has any hope of helping is a voice guided system which requires zero user input. At dinner time the system would determine a route, beacon by beacon, to get to the dining room, etc, and would keep hassling the user until in they arrive. Its hard to say how well it would work and like everyone else said you probably need that 24/7 support but the development would be a heap of fun! I intentionally did not Google around too much; perhaps something(s) already exist which implement pieces of this.

Reality check! You, like me, are in the extreme minority.

Where is this statistically significant group of people who are not using webmail today? BTW - That is from someone who has used Thunderbird for the past 10 years. If you are going to post questions then at least raise the postulation above troll-bait levels.

The answer, as you might imagine, is complicated and depends on how these gates are implemented. Think for instance you could design a chip to do this, you could write RTL to do this in an FPGA, or you could even write the algorithm into more software on an embedded processor of some kind. Is this electronics manufacturer one that makes chips or one that makes systems (boards, cases, etc). If it is the former they should have people who can work with your people to figure this out. If it is the latter then why do they care? Are they really asking you to provide a chip which implements your algorithm? Ask some more questions...

People people.... This has nothing to do with McAfee's charges. Did anyone notice that a new book will soon be up for sale? What could help more but some publicity to generate interest in an otherwise worn out subject?

How serious about this are you? My jawbone headset works pretty well in noisy environments on one ear but you just can't beat an aviation bluetooth headset for active noise cancellation and two ear sound. See the ones from Lightspeed. I have not tried them but have used other ANR aviation headsets in small airplanes which are so noisy you can't hear yourself shout and they are amazing. I looked around at their website and the Zulu seems to be the bomb for the low low low price of $850. See it at http://www.lightspeedaviation.com/content.cfm/Products/Zulu They have others. Who knows the others might be cheaper. There are also other brands of aviation ANR headsets which support bluetooth. It seems the latest generation of bluetooth chips are quite a bit better for this kind of thing than even a year or so ago. I ride a motorcycle and just tried the Sena SMH10 which integrates into a helmet and it's also impressive how clear and noise free it is + the interface design is very natural and the controls just work.

I also have a degree in Computer Engineering with some support (while at university) background. Ironically enough 95% of the people I have worked with in the chip development industry over the past 12 years know NOTHING about tech support, computer maintenance, etc. Overlap between the two fields is almost a null set. There have been a few notable exceptions but this rule seems hard to bend. This may go the other way too as I have some excellent tech support (3rd level & higher sort of stuff) who couldn't wrap their minds around how hardware design works to save their skins.

$0.02