2-wire is a deeply unrenowned maker of painfully shitty integrated DSL modem/router arrangements of the sort that you get because your ISP hates you. So, a very odd thing to see on an actual corporate network; but a plausible thing to use if you are trying to duplicate a 'standard newb user'(or if your security testing environment, for security and verisimilitude does actually have a bunch of consumer DSL lines set up).
Any trace of Vmware, on the other hand, is something of a dead giveaway of "Not a clueless home user". Maybe the install base of their Windows-on-mac product is big enough these days; but VMware-related virtual hardware devices, MACs, guest addons, etc.(on a desktop OS) are a bit of a dead giveaway that you've just hit somebody's burner test machine(on server OSes, obviously, landing in a VM is perfectly plausible in production environments). I'm surprised that somebody doing security-related work wouldn't make a greater effort to conceal the fact that they are in a VM, to avoid the possibility of rousing the suspicion of a sophisticated attacker.
It smacks more of the boss saying "hell no you can't honeypot on our network" and the next best thing being to order a cheap DSL connection, have it delivered to the office, and then plug it into a set of otherwise isolated test boxes for the duration of the experiment. That, or someone working from a machine on their home lab. Its just not plausible that they reset the router MAC and not reset the host MAC.
Data in article was straight from packets, your conjecture is just an ass_umption you pulled out of your ass. People pirate VMWare, macs are randomly generated.
Pirate vmware? ESXi hypervisor can be had for *free* and a version of it (current or past, all are stable) can run on just about any hardware, even a cheap $300 homebuilt test box. The question is, was the XP pirated or was it showing a "your computer is at risk!!!" screen?
The machine was just pretending to be a Windows XP machine running as a VMWare guest, etc.
I thought it was strange that a (presumably) prominent researcher wouldn't at least come up with a mac address of a cheap embedded nic for the honeypot, i mean if i were a malware coder that would be one of the first things to clue me in that [ackbar]it's a trap![/ackbar]. Who would run a completely defenseless windows xp machine in a VM other than a white hat?
If it's a municipality? Document it and deliver a nice anonymous tip to the local news how the supervisors there are risking the public with their incompetence.. News LOVES that kind of story.
You have a lot of options, Public humiliation tends to get the fastest results.
Hello, channel 5? Yes, I want to report that the administrators in Washington Township decided to take a computer running Internet Explorer 8, and connect it to the PUBLIC INTERNET! Can you believe the incompe-- Yes, I will hold. Hello?
I would be very displeased if I bought a car that uses a mechanical drive that is going to get bumped around and severely damaged by a cars movement. I would expect that the car uses flash memory. 10GB of flash is still incredibly cheap (~$10) so I would expect more, but comparing desktop HDD capacity to that of a car's is asinine.
It probably is flash (even 4 years ago 10gb was cheap) but consumers understand "hard drive" more than the jumble of explanations like "Flash" or "memory" or heaven forbid "solid state storage"...
There is no reason to have all of this junk in a new car. The only thing one needs is a USB charging port and an aux in for the smartphone to play audio through the cars audio system. Anything else the car does will be done poorly and until more standardization ensues, shouldn't be done. Where there is standardization, there is prosperity (USB, 3.5mm audio, Bluetooth, 12V power plugs)
Dead on. The first thought I had was "why would I want a 1TB hard drive in my car? By the time the 3 months elapsed for the content to be fetched, it would all be out of date!" A smartphone (or other personal electronic device du jour) is in a much better position to be the downloading/processing/storing device in the car, just give it as many good options as possible for the content to be used, and maybe a few good ways for the device to fit (factory smartphone "nest" in the dash? please?)
Of course, selling a car with "just" a good bluetooth system and a decent sounding stereo doesn't really turn heads, so we can be sure to see all of this stuff proliferate on all mid-range and high-end cars.
You already can make assassination weapons from schematics from Internet - if you have skills and good understanding of physics involved.
This is why 3D printed guns are a game changer: the average Joe Blow can get himself a gun without needing any sort of gunsmithing skills.
What game does this change? The average Joe Blow (without any felony convictions) can get a gun without any gunsmithing skills AND without having to buy a 3d printer. This is not up for debate, and is not going away in any of our lifetimes. Even the recent attempt at better defining this transaction failed to gain enough support. Plus, there are 100 million guns already in the US, so even if Joe Blow is a felon, he can very very very easily acquire a gun without any chicanery or suspicion, by simply rustling up some cash and buying it from a private seller. If there is any "game" out there to be changed, it is certainly NOT in the US. Maybe in a few years, third world regimes will be overthrown with printed guns, but for now simply importing guns from the many available arms dealers seems to not be any sort of issue, for the likes of Syrian Rebels and others in similar situations.
"3d printed" guns are a solution looking for a problem.
Reliability is another issue that will keep printed guns from being used by all but the most technophilliac gun nuts. In one of the tests there was a misfire when the firing pin failed to hit the cartridge's primer cap.
Real gun lovers want reliable guns that fire when needed. All 3d printed guns will do is cause more gun bans to come up in Congress, greatly increasing the statistical odds of one of them passing. If you enjoy your right to bear arms you should adamantly speak out against this reckless self-endangerment that is just begging to be criminalized, dragging the second amendment with it.
The real challenge to gun enthusiasts is steady supply of reliable ammunition. There are only so many primers and reusable casings out there, and good quality lead forging is pretty challenging. This is really the core of why 3d gun printing is so puzzling. there are already so many guns in the US that even if all manufacturers were forced out of existence (amazingly unlikely) and government-sponsored gun roundups were started (another layer of near-impossibility) there are still enough guns to arm tens of millions of "rebels" to support the inevitable uprising.
Then again, they say we are due for a meteor to hit, too.
Reminds me of the Onion article about the multiverse of possibilities from the US Election results. "What if your fighting machines break?"
Dont forget to ask "What if your battleships get trapped under a force field?"
And finish up with "What if you need to throw a ring away really bad, like *really* bad, but the ring itself doesn't want to be and can control YOU???"
So many irrelevant questions, so much time to waste...
The only way you should let someone continue developing an unmaintainable mess is when there is absolutely no chance it will ever need to be fixed or added to by you.
I grew up in western NY in the 70s/80s. I can't for the life of me remember any outages of the frequency and duration that seem to occur nationwide today.
Nationwide? There hasn't even been a multi-state outage since 2003, and you have to look pretty far before that to find another of similar size. Just so you know, when the lights go off at your house, the rest of us are fine.
Except that the law isn't supposed to work like that. The US constitution does not permit women to get special rights that are not available to men. Which is why things like title IX don't specify a sex, they specify that both sexes are required to get equal opportunity to resources covered under the title. And that can mean extra resources for men, even though it usually works out benefiting women.
What's more the bulk of the maternity leave has nothing to do with pregnancy, and everything to do with bonding with the newborn. It's questionable as to why we're granting women all that time off and then bitching about how men don't spend as much time with their children. Well, no shit, we don't give them the same sort of break in terms of availability to bond with their own children.
As many others pointed out, FMLA covers both equally and supersedes this law (with unpaid leave). You can think of it as them giving a bonus to women that isn't available to men. but based on decades of salary data, men were getting bonuses all along and no one bothered to cite the constitution in protest.
In a perfect world anyone with a newborn would get paid leave, but most companies give 0 weeks of leave to fathers and 6 to 8 weeks to mothers (often at a discount) so why are we getting on Yahoo's case for going above and beyond 99% of the employers in the US, with the same difference?
Anything less than equal treatment is discrimination.
Men are being discriminated against by not getting the same amount of leave to spend with their newborn children.
This has both physical and psychological effects on all parties involved.
Then don't think of it as man vs woman. Think of it this way: if a human being comes out of you, you get an extra 8 weeks off. You can be a man OR a woman; as long as a human being comes out of you, then you get the time. See how that works?
Your problem is you see it as a job, not a calling. It only works well when it's the latter. I've had plenty of teachers that just show up to do their jobs, and guess what I don't remember the name of a single of them.
You can be a math genius and not have one shred of aptitude when it comes to imparting knowledge on others. To be a good teacher, you need to be good at/interested in *teaching*, which is a discipline all its own. It's not 100% transferable between say math and English, but the better one is at teaching the better one can pick up an unfamiliar subject and teach it.
If you teach a math teacher history, which that teacher doesn't care for you're setting them up to fail and in turn the school is brought down with them.
If the teacher cares about "math" and not about, oh, *teaching*, then they have already failed. Get rid of them.
I remember doing this back in 1993. While I didn't use email phishing I chummed up to the network admin and came up for excuses for him to enter his password as I watched him type it in. Created my own administrator account to give myself access to all programs that were restricted to students. Mostly so I'd have free access to the few games they had on the network:) They never knew.
I still remember the password too: "ersm" - ever so secure.
Ah, good times. Back in my day we did it by bootdisking one machine, swiping the password file and then running l0pthcrack against it; and lo and behold the local admin password on every machine was the same, and it matched the domain admin password too. We used it for everything from installing games to snooping on other user's work files. The password was only 6 chars, easy work for even a slow computer from 15 years ago. Its funny how those memories stand out, eh?
So either we start seeing stein-shaped koozies at our local dive bar... or nothing will really change from this "finding".
At least, just drink from a smaller glass. That way, you can finish it sooner and replenish it from the original low-temperature supply. How this works out from a price perspective is between you and the bartender.
...of course battery life on these is going to be low; they're designed to attach to one side of your glasses! Even if they had the space to put more battery in, they wouldn't, because then you'd have a device that was always pulling your glasses down one side of your face, to say nothing of the extra weight on your nose and ear.
Batteries are heavy. If you create a face-mounted computer, you're going to want to make it as light as humanly possible. This should not come as anything remotely close to a surprise or shock to geeks.
The current design *is* a pair of glasses, it doesn't attach to them. So, there is a bit of real estate but grow the batteries too much and you start to look ridiculous. Unless that was what you were going for...
This is what they were able to build. Rev 2. (probably when they get to mass producing it) will have better battery life
You have half of it right. Rev 1 has bad battery life because it was a prototype. Think outside the box about the need for better batteries, though; Rev 2 will simply plug into neural probes and power itself from your brain. What battery life problem?
Trillian was it's own worst enemy. If you all have to use the same app in order to span multiple messaging platforms, then what the fuck good are all the different messaging platforms. Everyone I know who used trillian eventually dropped it when they realized that all of their friends really just used X (where X was the social platform du jour.) What they need to "invent" is a messaging *platform* that does it all for you (i.e. collects the message data from different providers on a server and streams it together where it can be read by any number of compatible clients)...
Virgin Galactic is not saying they will get a human up and down to orbit safely for around 1/10th that price.
Apples to apples, please.
SpaceShipOne took humans to "space", but it seems to have been designed and developed in a fraction of the time it's taken them with SpaceShipTwo. Both had to deal with having a man-rated craft. Both had to deal with getting to "space", or 100km altitude. I'd imagine the bulk (if not all) of the design work was done before SpaceShipOne's launch, so I'm really having a tough time understanding why building the second iteration is taking so much longer.
I am not an expert in this field but some observations are apt: 'Two is a pilotable, larger craft whereas 'One was a smaller, shoot-up-parachue-down craft. The design differences are pretty big; they surely could have been working on the design for 'Two the whole time, but not much of the work on 'One carried over.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
They are approaching it from a cost-is-everything perspective, instead of an orbit-is-everything perspective. The SpaceX supply missions run at least $20,000 per orbited kilo. For a person to buy a ticket, even if they were treated as cargo, would cost in the $1.5M range. For Virgin Galactic to say that they will get a human up and down (safely) for around 1/10th that price, requires approaching the problem a lot differently (for example, a multi vehicle setup).
Earth has more than a bunch of rocks minerals and elements. there are surely unique organisms here not only that there is your culture and inventions. There's many ways to do things or to express ourselves, I don't think any advanced civilization has already thought of all those things. Most likely they are just as screwed up as we are and pick the first idea that works... not always the best.... so they would be in the market for different stuff, styles and ways of thinking that can be easily exported.
You are right. My prediction is, we *will* be visited by aliens. Aliens with the intent to serve man...
Why people still believe that desktop computers are good as a touch device? That makes no sense for me, specially because the ugly fingerprints hehe. I love to *work* on my dual head desktop because the speed of keyboard and big resolution. If I have to use a touch device, it's not for work and not on a desktop, really.
Anyway, nice research, I have to say.
The first thing that popped into my head was more effective TV controls. Standard IR remotes can only do so much (being low power, needing hard/durable buttons, etc) and are great for vol-up/dn or pause/play, but if there were a way to do some of the more complex interaction on screen it would make the experience overall a lot better (at least until the TV can just know what i am thinking about watching). I use a variety of media devices and being able to just tap on the content i want to see, or type out a simple search now and then, would be really nice.
Slashdot Mirror
2-wire is a deeply unrenowned maker of painfully shitty integrated DSL modem/router arrangements of the sort that you get because your ISP hates you. So, a very odd thing to see on an actual corporate network; but a plausible thing to use if you are trying to duplicate a 'standard newb user'(or if your security testing environment, for security and verisimilitude does actually have a bunch of consumer DSL lines set up).
Any trace of Vmware, on the other hand, is something of a dead giveaway of "Not a clueless home user". Maybe the install base of their Windows-on-mac product is big enough these days; but VMware-related virtual hardware devices, MACs, guest addons, etc.(on a desktop OS) are a bit of a dead giveaway that you've just hit somebody's burner test machine(on server OSes, obviously, landing in a VM is perfectly plausible in production environments). I'm surprised that somebody doing security-related work wouldn't make a greater effort to conceal the fact that they are in a VM, to avoid the possibility of rousing the suspicion of a sophisticated attacker.
It smacks more of the boss saying "hell no you can't honeypot on our network" and the next best thing being to order a cheap DSL connection, have it delivered to the office, and then plug it into a set of otherwise isolated test boxes for the duration of the experiment. That, or someone working from a machine on their home lab. Its just not plausible that they reset the router MAC and not reset the host MAC.
Data in article was straight from packets, your conjecture is just an ass_umption you pulled out of your ass.
People pirate VMWare, macs are randomly generated.
Pirate vmware? ESXi hypervisor can be had for *free* and a version of it (current or past, all are stable) can run on just about any hardware, even a cheap $300 homebuilt test box. The question is, was the XP pirated or was it showing a "your computer is at risk!!!" screen?
The machine was just pretending to be a Windows XP machine running as a VMWare guest, etc.
I thought it was strange that a (presumably) prominent researcher wouldn't at least come up with a mac address of a cheap embedded nic for the honeypot, i mean if i were a malware coder that would be one of the first things to clue me in that [ackbar]it's a trap![/ackbar]. Who would run a completely defenseless windows xp machine in a VM other than a white hat?
If it's a municipality? Document it and deliver a nice anonymous tip to the local news how the supervisors there are risking the public with their incompetence.. News LOVES that kind of story.
You have a lot of options, Public humiliation tends to get the fastest results.
Hello, channel 5? Yes, I want to report that the administrators in Washington Township decided to take a computer running Internet Explorer 8, and connect it to the PUBLIC INTERNET! Can you believe the incompe-- Yes, I will hold. Hello?
I would be very displeased if I bought a car that uses a mechanical drive that is going to get bumped around and severely damaged by a cars movement. I would expect that the car uses flash memory. 10GB of flash is still incredibly cheap (~$10) so I would expect more, but comparing desktop HDD capacity to that of a car's is asinine.
It probably is flash (even 4 years ago 10gb was cheap) but consumers understand "hard drive" more than the jumble of explanations like "Flash" or "memory" or heaven forbid "solid state storage"...
There is no reason to have all of this junk in a new car. The only thing one needs is a USB charging port and an aux in for the smartphone to play audio through the cars audio system. Anything else the car does will be done poorly and until more standardization ensues, shouldn't be done. Where there is standardization, there is prosperity (USB, 3.5mm audio, Bluetooth, 12V power plugs)
Dead on. The first thought I had was "why would I want a 1TB hard drive in my car? By the time the 3 months elapsed for the content to be fetched, it would all be out of date!" A smartphone (or other personal electronic device du jour) is in a much better position to be the downloading/processing/storing device in the car, just give it as many good options as possible for the content to be used, and maybe a few good ways for the device to fit (factory smartphone "nest" in the dash? please?)
Of course, selling a car with "just" a good bluetooth system and a decent sounding stereo doesn't really turn heads, so we can be sure to see all of this stuff proliferate on all mid-range and high-end cars.
You already can make assassination weapons from schematics from Internet - if you have skills and good understanding of physics involved.
This is why 3D printed guns are a game changer: the average Joe Blow can get himself a gun without needing any sort of gunsmithing skills.
What game does this change? The average Joe Blow (without any felony convictions) can get a gun without any gunsmithing skills AND without having to buy a 3d printer. This is not up for debate, and is not going away in any of our lifetimes. Even the recent attempt at better defining this transaction failed to gain enough support. Plus, there are 100 million guns already in the US, so even if Joe Blow is a felon, he can very very very easily acquire a gun without any chicanery or suspicion, by simply rustling up some cash and buying it from a private seller. If there is any "game" out there to be changed, it is certainly NOT in the US. Maybe in a few years, third world regimes will be overthrown with printed guns, but for now simply importing guns from the many available arms dealers seems to not be any sort of issue, for the likes of Syrian Rebels and others in similar situations.
"3d printed" guns are a solution looking for a problem.
Reliability is another issue that will keep printed guns from being used by all but the most technophilliac gun nuts. In one of the tests there was a misfire when the firing pin failed to hit the cartridge's primer cap.
Real gun lovers want reliable guns that fire when needed. All 3d printed guns will do is cause more gun bans to come up in Congress, greatly increasing the statistical odds of one of them passing. If you enjoy your right to bear arms you should adamantly speak out against this reckless self-endangerment that is just begging to be criminalized, dragging the second amendment with it.
The real challenge to gun enthusiasts is steady supply of reliable ammunition. There are only so many primers and reusable casings out there, and good quality lead forging is pretty challenging. This is really the core of why 3d gun printing is so puzzling. there are already so many guns in the US that even if all manufacturers were forced out of existence (amazingly unlikely) and government-sponsored gun roundups were started (another layer of near-impossibility) there are still enough guns to arm tens of millions of "rebels" to support the inevitable uprising.
Then again, they say we are due for a meteor to hit, too.
Reminds me of the Onion article about the multiverse of possibilities from the US Election results. "What if your fighting machines break?"
Dont forget to ask "What if your battleships get trapped under a force field?"
And finish up with "What if you need to throw a ring away really bad, like *really* bad, but the ring itself doesn't want to be and can control YOU???"
So many irrelevant questions, so much time to waste...
The only way you should let someone continue developing an unmaintainable mess is when there is absolutely no chance it will ever need to be fixed or added to by you.
FTFY
I grew up in western NY in the 70s/80s. I can't for the life of me remember any outages of the frequency and duration that seem to occur nationwide today.
Nationwide? There hasn't even been a multi-state outage since 2003, and you have to look pretty far before that to find another of similar size. Just so you know, when the lights go off at your house, the rest of us are fine.
Except that the law isn't supposed to work like that. The US constitution does not permit women to get special rights that are not available to men. Which is why things like title IX don't specify a sex, they specify that both sexes are required to get equal opportunity to resources covered under the title. And that can mean extra resources for men, even though it usually works out benefiting women.
What's more the bulk of the maternity leave has nothing to do with pregnancy, and everything to do with bonding with the newborn. It's questionable as to why we're granting women all that time off and then bitching about how men don't spend as much time with their children. Well, no shit, we don't give them the same sort of break in terms of availability to bond with their own children.
As many others pointed out, FMLA covers both equally and supersedes this law (with unpaid leave). You can think of it as them giving a bonus to women that isn't available to men. but based on decades of salary data, men were getting bonuses all along and no one bothered to cite the constitution in protest.
In a perfect world anyone with a newborn would get paid leave, but most companies give 0 weeks of leave to fathers and 6 to 8 weeks to mothers (often at a discount) so why are we getting on Yahoo's case for going above and beyond 99% of the employers in the US, with the same difference?
Anything less than equal treatment is discrimination.
Men are being discriminated against by not getting the same amount of leave to spend with their newborn children.
This has both physical and psychological effects on all parties involved.
Then don't think of it as man vs woman. Think of it this way: if a human being comes out of you, you get an extra 8 weeks off. You can be a man OR a woman; as long as a human being comes out of you, then you get the time. See how that works?
Your problem is you see it as a job, not a calling. It only works well when it's the latter. I've had plenty of teachers that just show up to do their jobs, and guess what I don't remember the name of a single of them.
You can be a math genius and not have one shred of aptitude when it comes to imparting knowledge on others. To be a good teacher, you need to be good at/interested in *teaching*, which is a discipline all its own. It's not 100% transferable between say math and English, but the better one is at teaching the better one can pick up an unfamiliar subject and teach it.
If you teach a math teacher history, which that teacher doesn't care for you're setting them up to fail and in turn the school is brought down with them.
If the teacher cares about "math" and not about, oh, *teaching*, then they have already failed. Get rid of them.
I remember doing this back in 1993. While I didn't use email phishing I chummed up to the network admin and came up for excuses for him to enter his password as I watched him type it in. Created my own administrator account to give myself access to all programs that were restricted to students. Mostly so I'd have free access to the few games they had on the network :) They never knew.
I still remember the password too: "ersm" - ever so secure.
Ah, good times. Back in my day we did it by bootdisking one machine, swiping the password file and then running l0pthcrack against it; and lo and behold the local admin password on every machine was the same, and it matched the domain admin password too. We used it for everything from installing games to snooping on other user's work files. The password was only 6 chars, easy work for even a slow computer from 15 years ago. Its funny how those memories stand out, eh?
So either we start seeing stein-shaped koozies at our local dive bar... or nothing will really change from this "finding".
At least, just drink from a smaller glass. That way, you can finish it sooner and replenish it from the original low-temperature supply. How this works out from a price perspective is between you and the bartender.
ORLY? Who made that rule?
Google did, through design choices.
Look at it.
Clearly the idea is that when it's not at eye level being put to use, you can stash it in your scraggly billionaire-beard.
...of course battery life on these is going to be low; they're designed to attach to one side of your glasses! Even if they had the space to put more battery in, they wouldn't, because then you'd have a device that was always pulling your glasses down one side of your face, to say nothing of the extra weight on your nose and ear.
Batteries are heavy. If you create a face-mounted computer, you're going to want to make it as light as humanly possible. This should not come as anything remotely close to a surprise or shock to geeks.
The current design *is* a pair of glasses, it doesn't attach to them. So, there is a bit of real estate but grow the batteries too much and you start to look ridiculous. Unless that was what you were going for...
This is what they were able to build. Rev 2. (probably when they get to mass producing it) will have better battery life
You have half of it right. Rev 1 has bad battery life because it was a prototype. Think outside the box about the need for better batteries, though; Rev 2 will simply plug into neural probes and power itself from your brain. What battery life problem?
Trillian was it's own worst enemy. If you all have to use the same app in order to span multiple messaging platforms, then what the fuck good are all the different messaging platforms. Everyone I know who used trillian eventually dropped it when they realized that all of their friends really just used X (where X was the social platform du jour.) What they need to "invent" is a messaging *platform* that does it all for you (i.e. collects the message data from different providers on a server and streams it together where it can be read by any number of compatible clients)...
Virgin Galactic is not saying they will get a human up and down to orbit safely for around 1/10th that price.
Apples to apples, please.
SpaceShipOne took humans to "space", but it seems to have been designed and developed in a fraction of the time it's taken them with SpaceShipTwo. Both had to deal with having a man-rated craft. Both had to deal with getting to "space", or 100km altitude. I'd imagine the bulk (if not all) of the design work was done before SpaceShipOne's launch, so I'm really having a tough time understanding why building the second iteration is taking so much longer.
I am not an expert in this field but some observations are apt: 'Two is a pilotable, larger craft whereas 'One was a smaller, shoot-up-parachue-down craft. The design differences are pretty big; they surely could have been working on the design for 'Two the whole time, but not much of the work on 'One carried over.
Why is it taking Virgin Galactic so long for development? Is it a financing or technical issue?
SpaceX was founded in 2002 and is already making re-supply missions to the ISS. Granted that's not quite the same as human spaceflight but it seems like there's a lot faster advancement occurring at SpaceX than at Virgin Galactic.
They are approaching it from a cost-is-everything perspective, instead of an orbit-is-everything perspective. The SpaceX supply missions run at least $20,000 per orbited kilo. For a person to buy a ticket, even if they were treated as cargo, would cost in the $1.5M range. For Virgin Galactic to say that they will get a human up and down (safely) for around 1/10th that price, requires approaching the problem a lot differently (for example, a multi vehicle setup).
Earth has more than a bunch of rocks minerals and elements. there are surely unique organisms here not only that there is your culture and inventions. There's many ways to do things or to express ourselves, I don't think any advanced civilization has already thought of all those things. Most likely they are just as screwed up as we are and pick the first idea that works... not always the best.... so they would be in the market for different stuff, styles and ways of thinking that can be easily exported.
You are right. My prediction is, we *will* be visited by aliens. Aliens with the intent to serve man...
Gorilla Arm ...
Well, more ...
Why people still believe that desktop computers are good as a touch device? That makes no sense for me, specially because the ugly fingerprints hehe. I love to *work* on my dual head desktop because the speed of keyboard and big resolution. If I have to use a touch device, it's not for work and not on a desktop, really.
Anyway, nice research, I have to say.
The first thing that popped into my head was more effective TV controls. Standard IR remotes can only do so much (being low power, needing hard/durable buttons, etc) and are great for vol-up/dn or pause/play, but if there were a way to do some of the more complex interaction on screen it would make the experience overall a lot better (at least until the TV can just know what i am thinking about watching). I use a variety of media devices and being able to just tap on the content i want to see, or type out a simple search now and then, would be really nice.