The question is not if IT is customer facing or bringing in new business; the question is if technology needs to be discussed at board level. Those aren't discussions about buying iPhones vs. Androids for staff, nor is it about buying IT stuff at the right price or making the right purchasing deals; it is about technological developments or decisions that can have an impact on the company strategy or internal workings of the company. If you use IT for bookkeeping and handling orders, then your IT just needs to work, and there's probably no need for a CIO at the board level. But if you're a knowledge-intensive, innovative company, then your edge may depend on adopting new tech to do and manage your business differently. You may need a CIO for that, and a good one isn't a business person nor a techy, but a bit of both. If you're going to discuss the impact of technology on your business strategy, you need to know about business, your business, as well as have very strong knowledge of what is happening out there in tech land. I've seen strong performers in such roles from both technical and business backgrounds, but all the good ones have a very keen interest in technology, and the wherewithal to understand it at least at a high level.
Funny you should mention that front-mounted camera; I've seen it on the overhead video screens of other eastern airlines as well (Thai, JAL for example) during takeoff and landing but never on any of the western airlines. I wonder why...
Not *everyone* perhaps, but you might be surprised at the cost. "Real" furniture is more expensive than Ikea stuff, but it doesn't have to be that much more expensive. Recently I looked at getting book shelves for the living room; I budgeted for the high end Ikea bookcases (which look pretty good), but as it turns out I can get some "proper" ones for a bit more, and even quality custom-built bookshelves at twice the cost. Expensive, but certainly not out of reach.
Antiques are worth considering too; if you look around you can get some really good pieces for less than what you'd pay at Ikea (I just snapped up a nice 100yr old footstool for $20). If you know what to look for, you can pick up really cheap worn or damaged antiques and have them restored, so you end up with something nice at a decent price. Just be aware what sort of restoration work is expensive, and what is relatively cheap. I had 5 1860s chairs redone for about $2000; taking them apart and re-fitting them, replacing a few wooden parts and a light refinishing was less than half of the cost, the major part was just the upholstering (though they did that job using the original method and traditional materials rather than just stick in a foam seat cushion).
With that said, Ikea is a good place to get furniture as well, if you know what to buy. I got bookcases and kitchen cabinets from them, and 5 years on they show no signs of wear or wobbliness. I'd avoid their beds and sofas though.
You need to know where it is (difficult in case of a mobile launcher) and/or be able to penetrate a hardened shelter. Or a pre-emptive strike might not be politically feasible (clever dictators will build their launchers in the "nursery home and children's hospital" district) And if you wish to strike with when a launch is detected, you will need to have aircraft ready on CAP (continuous air presence). Dangerous and expensive with regular aircraft when your air superiority is iffy; but doable with drones.
A meritocracy? Software development isn't that, not even on a good day, not officially... I've seen my fair share of professions in action, and while there are few professions where there is such a large difference in performance between the good guys and the merely adequate, it's also one where that distinction is rarely made. Sure, the hot shot coders will rise to the top... but that amounts mostly to the top of the team pecking order. I've seen too many excellent coders go unrecognised and unrewarded by management, who fail to make the most of what excellence they have on hand. The waste of talent in the software industry is astounding.
The original idea of patents was to foster innovation by encouraging inventors to make their inventions public, receiving a temporary monopoly in return. Historically, patents were considered to be an artificial construct to benefit society, not a natural right of inventors. The idea is that society benefits from the disclosure of non-obvious ideas, and from inventions that are perhaps expensive to implement.
Now take a look at the patents claimed by Honeywell. It's all obvious crap and design gimmicks, simple intellectual land-grab. Society stands to benefit not one iota by the disclosure of these ideas, and would not have been worse off if Honeywell would have kept them secret. Someone else could have (and has) come up with these "ideas" in the course of designing their own product, without the benefit of knowledge of the details of these patents.
The granting [of] patents 'inflames cupidity', excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits...The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just."
This is from an issue of The Economist... published in 1851.
Bad advice. Nursing is one of those other fields where the rosy ideal is a far cry from the harsh reality. Quite a few nurses drop out disillusioned, or burn out.
Interestingly, if the company had decided to just pay all 290 claimants their $2000 and not pay the laywers anything, they would have had around $1.5 million to blow on executive bonuses.
I have pretty much ignored TV for the past 12 years, getting my shows and movies online. I do have a cable subscription again (it comes with my internet hookup, for a few euros extra), and recently I have started to watch some TV again; my new GF sometimes likes to veg out and channel surf a little. And I am appalled at how crap TV has become. Not because of the shows but the incessant, loud commercials. And those popups, yes. Dear god, how can anyone sit through that?
What pisses me off even more than the increased ad airtime, is the fact that shows are now designed around commercial breaks, especially the non-sitcom shows. They now show you what's to come after the break, and after the break there's a short recap of what has come before, eating into the amount of actual content even further. Then there's the timing of ads. For example, at the end of Community, Troy and Abed always do a funny little skit. You guessed it: between the show's end and the skit is a commercial break. Milking the audiences' interest in the show for all it's worth.
Funny thing about those popups: I had never seen them before until recently, but I remember sitting in at some conference where a company (I think it was Adobe) announced technology to insert them on the fly. I think I was the only real consumer at that talk, all the others were content producers or broadcast people. And I recall my horror at their enthusiasm. I asked the speaker if he really thought that people were waiting for this sort of disruption during their shows, and he assured me in no uncertain tones that yes, TV stations and advertisers would love it, and the rest of the room joined in an enthusiastic brainstorm on the possibilities. Of course I meant real people, not TV airheads and marketeers. In the whole presentation, Q&A, and subsequent discussion, the topic of us the viewers or our viewing pleasure did not come up once.
That enthusiasm leads me to believe that it's only a matter of time before Hulu and all other streaming services will start inserting ads and popups into their streams. Streaming media will simply replace cable broadcasts; what changes is the selection of content and the on-demand nature of the medium, but the ads will come back. Even if there will be a few premium channels offering ad-free content for a little extra, at some point even they might cave in to pressure or temptation. The once ad-free premium TV channels around here all have caved in long ago.
Re:Always thought I'd love Augmented reality
on
Google Glasses Announced
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
As far as AR goes, the demo looks a little meh. Good AR makes better use of positional awareness (location & attitude), and takes visual cues from a camera to figure out just what you are looking at. The result is AR that actually augments reality, rather than just displays a few amusing overlays on top of it.
For example, instead of the annoying popup that says "Turn left at XYZ street", this thing ought to give you directions by overlaying a subtle line over the sidewalk... then you just follow the Yellow Brick Road. The popups would even be more annoying (and perhaps dangerous) while driving, while displaying a line on the road would be ok (perhaps also highlighting exit signs you need to be aware of). Or imagine AR-enabled instructions (posted on Youtube perhaps), that don't just explain you how to replace your iPhone's battery for example, but highlights the actual parts as you work on them, showing you what goes where etc.
Such AR would also enable something Google might be interested in: overlaying billboards with their own ads. Of course you could use it as a RL adblock, and remove the ads altogether (someone called this "diminished reality").
[...] by seeking and enforcing injunctions against Apple's and Microsoft's flagship products such as iPhone, iPad, Windows and Xbox on the basis of patents it had declared essential to produce standard-compliant products, Motorola has failed to honour its irrevocable commitments made to standard setting organisations. In these commitments, Motorola engaged to license those standard-essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
Sounds like Motorola actually did commit to offer licenses for these patents on a FRAND basis, then reneged on that commitment. Or so Apple and Microsoft claim. That is what the Commission is investigating; there's no ruling as yet, and perhaps they will find that whatever terms Motorola offered were fair and non discriminatory.
There are many cases brought against European corporations. Most of those do not make the news across the pond, and many do not make the headlines here in the EU either. The same goes for antitrust cases brought against lesser-known US companies.
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
For this reason, it is not necessary for an election to be 100% accurate! It should be accurate enough to distribute power according to the will of the people, but it is equally important that those people can and will trust the outcome. Paper ballots and counts done by hand are prone to error, but only in extremely rare cases are the errors large enough to swing the result. Moreover, errors are generally random rather than biased, and they can be spotted and understood. That last point is important. People in well-functioning democracies trust paper ballots because everyone with half a brain can understand the process and even participate in it if called upon, and see with their own eyes that the tally of votes is more or less accurate. And if they can, "more or less" is good enough. Also note that in democracies that do not function very well, fraud with paper ballots is widespread, but this is known to everyone involved.. The fraudster does not stay in power because of vote rigging, but because they are in a position to simply ignore the accusations of fraud.
Interestingly, people also have a rather large faith in machine voting. People trust machines; they are convenient, and we already let them handle other stuff like our food and our money, so why not trust them with our votes? Sure... I think it will only take one electronic election being tampered with for the people to call for paper ballots again.
+1 insightful (if I had the points). I suspect this actually is behind a lot of these excessive punishments for more or less innocent tweets. Only one thing worse than public profanity, and that's a parent complaining about said public profanity. If a parent had actually complained, the school would probably have filed criminal charges (for hacking, child porn or an equally scary, misunderstood and misused crime) against the student.
Advising people to postpone their purchase is equally silly, if they're after a TV that comes with features they want but don't currently have. Sure, in a few months, TV's will have become bigger, cheaper, and they will come with more features. This have pretty much always been the case, especially since flat panel displays became commonplace. Not everyone needs 3D, 4K, built-in full feature media players or digital tuners, or a TV larger than 55". If you're just looking to replace your clunky 720p "HD ready" tv (or glass tube monstrosity) with a basic, reasonably sized full HD model, then now is as good a time to buy as any. These TVs are already cheap as dirt anyway.
For that reason, paper maps are *far* more dangerous to use while driving. No use glancing at them, you need to look at them for a bit to orientate yourself and make sense of them. Yes, you could study the map before you leave, but most people are not really able to memorize the complete route, and it certainly isn't easy to re-route if you miss your turn.
Our former head of traffic police (in the Netherlands), who is notoriously averse of gadgetry in cars, quoted several studies that navigation systems are by far the safest option for navigating an area that you're not familiar with, winning over memorizing maps, having paper maps in the car, stopping to ask directions, or just winging it. The one thing that is safer is having a co-pilot with either a paper map or a GPS.
Is it taking care of itself? Suppose I install a Facebook app (fat chance, but just suppose). My iPhone asks me if I allow the app to access my contact list. Sure, I say... to check if any of my contacts are also my FB friends, or for any other reason that makes my life easier. But not to collect a list of my contacts on the FB server even if they are not my friends, or to sell this data to 3rd parties. There are many apps that have both legitimate and nefarious reasons for accessing your personal data, and Apple's solution does not take the distinction into account.
I recently heard a talk from a guy proposing a system where we can not only specify what data can be accessed by each vendor, but also specify what they can use it for. Of course, enforcing that is a whole different matter; you'll need a legal framework and even then you have no guarantee they'll misuse your data on the sly, but it's better than nothing (which is what we have now).
The fact that IBM even parted with this property means they sold them for more than what they were worth to IBM. And facebook is in way over their depth if they think they're getting the better of Big Blue.
The patents may be worth a hell of a lot more to Facebook than to IBM. If these things pertain to instant messaging, online gaming platforms, managing online user profiles, ranking through friends, virual currency, and all the other crap Facebook is doing or planning to do, then IBM's price will be well worth the fee. While they may be next to useless to IBM, Facebook could use such patents to defend against suits from competitors, or sue those competitors in turn.
Ok, forget comparison to used PCs then. What you say about the company lacking economies of scale may be true as well, but the real question remains: what market do they possibly hope to enter with this thing? Media PCs / Media players / DVRs? Gaming rigs? Small, quiet general purpose machines? Cool looking computers that are fit for a place in the living room? Machines that come with loads of geek cred? On any of these markets, this device will lose out to cheaper, better and better known alternatives. Hell, on that budget you can probably buy several machines to cover all of these categories, even if you throw Apple devices into the mix.
The only market demographic I can see for this device is the "affluent, insane Amiga fan" group. Not much of a market I would think.
IIRC, nothing much happens to Ender after the incident, but his superiors did not ignore it; there's some discussion about whether or not he should be punished. In the end there's not that much they can do to Ender if he is to continue his career as saviour of earth.
Sure, you can have a discussion about whether or not this book is suitable for kids. Different schools may arrive at different conclusions, and I'm ok with those who decide against it removing it from the school library. But firing the teacher for reading it in class? That should only be the case if there had been any actual (mental) damage to the kids, and if the teacher in question made a gross misjudgment in reading them this book. I don't think that this is the case, by any remotely reasonable standard.
Or any content at all. I hope Google will at some point figure out a way to promote sites with original content over ones that just repeat content of others. There are still way too many link farms, forum "aggregators" and faux search results pages ("Top results for how do I insert a server farm into a link farmer's rectum") on the first page of many types of Google queries.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't there be a particle for height, width, depth?
Well, we already have up & down quarks.
The question is not if IT is customer facing or bringing in new business; the question is if technology needs to be discussed at board level. Those aren't discussions about buying iPhones vs. Androids for staff, nor is it about buying IT stuff at the right price or making the right purchasing deals; it is about technological developments or decisions that can have an impact on the company strategy or internal workings of the company. If you use IT for bookkeeping and handling orders, then your IT just needs to work, and there's probably no need for a CIO at the board level. But if you're a knowledge-intensive, innovative company, then your edge may depend on adopting new tech to do and manage your business differently. You may need a CIO for that, and a good one isn't a business person nor a techy, but a bit of both. If you're going to discuss the impact of technology on your business strategy, you need to know about business, your business, as well as have very strong knowledge of what is happening out there in tech land. I've seen strong performers in such roles from both technical and business backgrounds, but all the good ones have a very keen interest in technology, and the wherewithal to understand it at least at a high level.
Funny you should mention that front-mounted camera; I've seen it on the overhead video screens of other eastern airlines as well (Thai, JAL for example) during takeoff and landing but never on any of the western airlines. I wonder why...
Not *everyone* perhaps, but you might be surprised at the cost. "Real" furniture is more expensive than Ikea stuff, but it doesn't have to be that much more expensive. Recently I looked at getting book shelves for the living room; I budgeted for the high end Ikea bookcases (which look pretty good), but as it turns out I can get some "proper" ones for a bit more, and even quality custom-built bookshelves at twice the cost. Expensive, but certainly not out of reach.
Antiques are worth considering too; if you look around you can get some really good pieces for less than what you'd pay at Ikea (I just snapped up a nice 100yr old footstool for $20). If you know what to look for, you can pick up really cheap worn or damaged antiques and have them restored, so you end up with something nice at a decent price. Just be aware what sort of restoration work is expensive, and what is relatively cheap. I had 5 1860s chairs redone for about $2000; taking them apart and re-fitting them, replacing a few wooden parts and a light refinishing was less than half of the cost, the major part was just the upholstering (though they did that job using the original method and traditional materials rather than just stick in a foam seat cushion).
With that said, Ikea is a good place to get furniture as well, if you know what to buy. I got bookcases and kitchen cabinets from them, and 5 years on they show no signs of wear or wobbliness. I'd avoid their beds and sofas though.
You need to know where it is (difficult in case of a mobile launcher) and/or be able to penetrate a hardened shelter. Or a pre-emptive strike might not be politically feasible (clever dictators will build their launchers in the "nursery home and children's hospital" district) And if you wish to strike with when a launch is detected, you will need to have aircraft ready on CAP (continuous air presence). Dangerous and expensive with regular aircraft when your air superiority is iffy; but doable with drones.
A meritocracy? Software development isn't that, not even on a good day, not officially... I've seen my fair share of professions in action, and while there are few professions where there is such a large difference in performance between the good guys and the merely adequate, it's also one where that distinction is rarely made. Sure, the hot shot coders will rise to the top... but that amounts mostly to the top of the team pecking order. I've seen too many excellent coders go unrecognised and unrewarded by management, who fail to make the most of what excellence they have on hand. The waste of talent in the software industry is astounding.
Now take a look at the patents claimed by Honeywell. It's all obvious crap and design gimmicks, simple intellectual land-grab. Society stands to benefit not one iota by the disclosure of these ideas, and would not have been worse off if Honeywell would have kept them secret. Someone else could have (and has) come up with these "ideas" in the course of designing their own product, without the benefit of knowledge of the details of these patents.
This is from an issue of The Economist... published in 1851.
This doesn't seem like a serious problem.
Unless they are asking him to join Facebook...
Bad advice. Nursing is one of those other fields where the rosy ideal is a far cry from the harsh reality. Quite a few nurses drop out disillusioned, or burn out.
Interestingly, if the company had decided to just pay all 290 claimants their $2000 and not pay the laywers anything, they would have had around $1.5 million to blow on executive bonuses.
What P? My car, like most cars over here, has a shifter with settings labeled 1 through 5, and R. So yes, it's a parking brake.
I have pretty much ignored TV for the past 12 years, getting my shows and movies online. I do have a cable subscription again (it comes with my internet hookup, for a few euros extra), and recently I have started to watch some TV again; my new GF sometimes likes to veg out and channel surf a little. And I am appalled at how crap TV has become. Not because of the shows but the incessant, loud commercials. And those popups, yes. Dear god, how can anyone sit through that?
What pisses me off even more than the increased ad airtime, is the fact that shows are now designed around commercial breaks, especially the non-sitcom shows. They now show you what's to come after the break, and after the break there's a short recap of what has come before, eating into the amount of actual content even further. Then there's the timing of ads. For example, at the end of Community, Troy and Abed always do a funny little skit. You guessed it: between the show's end and the skit is a commercial break. Milking the audiences' interest in the show for all it's worth.
Funny thing about those popups: I had never seen them before until recently, but I remember sitting in at some conference where a company (I think it was Adobe) announced technology to insert them on the fly. I think I was the only real consumer at that talk, all the others were content producers or broadcast people. And I recall my horror at their enthusiasm. I asked the speaker if he really thought that people were waiting for this sort of disruption during their shows, and he assured me in no uncertain tones that yes, TV stations and advertisers would love it, and the rest of the room joined in an enthusiastic brainstorm on the possibilities. Of course I meant real people, not TV airheads and marketeers. In the whole presentation, Q&A, and subsequent discussion, the topic of us the viewers or our viewing pleasure did not come up once.
That enthusiasm leads me to believe that it's only a matter of time before Hulu and all other streaming services will start inserting ads and popups into their streams. Streaming media will simply replace cable broadcasts; what changes is the selection of content and the on-demand nature of the medium, but the ads will come back. Even if there will be a few premium channels offering ad-free content for a little extra, at some point even they might cave in to pressure or temptation. The once ad-free premium TV channels around here all have caved in long ago.
As far as AR goes, the demo looks a little meh. Good AR makes better use of positional awareness (location & attitude), and takes visual cues from a camera to figure out just what you are looking at. The result is AR that actually augments reality, rather than just displays a few amusing overlays on top of it.
For example, instead of the annoying popup that says "Turn left at XYZ street", this thing ought to give you directions by overlaying a subtle line over the sidewalk... then you just follow the Yellow Brick Road. The popups would even be more annoying (and perhaps dangerous) while driving, while displaying a line on the road would be ok (perhaps also highlighting exit signs you need to be aware of). Or imagine AR-enabled instructions (posted on Youtube perhaps), that don't just explain you how to replace your iPhone's battery for example, but highlights the actual parts as you work on them, showing you what goes where etc.
Such AR would also enable something Google might be interested in: overlaying billboards with their own ads. Of course you could use it as a RL adblock, and remove the ads altogether (someone called this "diminished reality").
[...] by seeking and enforcing injunctions against Apple's and Microsoft's flagship products such as iPhone, iPad, Windows and Xbox on the basis of patents it had declared essential to produce standard-compliant products, Motorola has failed to honour its irrevocable commitments made to standard setting organisations. In these commitments, Motorola engaged to license those standard-essential patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.
Sounds like Motorola actually did commit to offer licenses for these patents on a FRAND basis, then reneged on that commitment. Or so Apple and Microsoft claim. That is what the Commission is investigating; there's no ruling as yet, and perhaps they will find that whatever terms Motorola offered were fair and non discriminatory.
There are many cases brought against European corporations. Most of those do not make the news across the pond, and many do not make the headlines here in the EU either. The same goes for antitrust cases brought against lesser-known US companies.
I am a poll worker, and my precinct uses electronic voting machines. The thing most people don't realize is that very, very few elections are close enough to trigger an automatic recount. In my state, the votes have to be within 1% of each other for a recount. Since the 1800s, for example, only 3 senatorial races in my state were close enough.
For this reason, it is not necessary for an election to be 100% accurate! It should be accurate enough to distribute power according to the will of the people, but it is equally important that those people can and will trust the outcome. Paper ballots and counts done by hand are prone to error, but only in extremely rare cases are the errors large enough to swing the result. Moreover, errors are generally random rather than biased, and they can be spotted and understood. That last point is important. People in well-functioning democracies trust paper ballots because everyone with half a brain can understand the process and even participate in it if called upon, and see with their own eyes that the tally of votes is more or less accurate. And if they can, "more or less" is good enough. Also note that in democracies that do not function very well, fraud with paper ballots is widespread, but this is known to everyone involved.. The fraudster does not stay in power because of vote rigging, but because they are in a position to simply ignore the accusations of fraud.
Interestingly, people also have a rather large faith in machine voting. People trust machines; they are convenient, and we already let them handle other stuff like our food and our money, so why not trust them with our votes? Sure... I think it will only take one electronic election being tampered with for the people to call for paper ballots again.
+1 insightful (if I had the points). I suspect this actually is behind a lot of these excessive punishments for more or less innocent tweets. Only one thing worse than public profanity, and that's a parent complaining about said public profanity. If a parent had actually complained, the school would probably have filed criminal charges (for hacking, child porn or an equally scary, misunderstood and misused crime) against the student.
Not just that, such plans will be (and have been) detrimental to local farmers. Same problem as with a lot of the other free shit we've shipped there.
Advising people to postpone their purchase is equally silly, if they're after a TV that comes with features they want but don't currently have. Sure, in a few months, TV's will have become bigger, cheaper, and they will come with more features. This have pretty much always been the case, especially since flat panel displays became commonplace. Not everyone needs 3D, 4K, built-in full feature media players or digital tuners, or a TV larger than 55". If you're just looking to replace your clunky 720p "HD ready" tv (or glass tube monstrosity) with a basic, reasonably sized full HD model, then now is as good a time to buy as any. These TVs are already cheap as dirt anyway.
For that reason, paper maps are *far* more dangerous to use while driving. No use glancing at them, you need to look at them for a bit to orientate yourself and make sense of them. Yes, you could study the map before you leave, but most people are not really able to memorize the complete route, and it certainly isn't easy to re-route if you miss your turn.
Our former head of traffic police (in the Netherlands), who is notoriously averse of gadgetry in cars, quoted several studies that navigation systems are by far the safest option for navigating an area that you're not familiar with, winning over memorizing maps, having paper maps in the car, stopping to ask directions, or just winging it. The one thing that is safer is having a co-pilot with either a paper map or a GPS.
Is it taking care of itself? Suppose I install a Facebook app (fat chance, but just suppose). My iPhone asks me if I allow the app to access my contact list. Sure, I say... to check if any of my contacts are also my FB friends, or for any other reason that makes my life easier. But not to collect a list of my contacts on the FB server even if they are not my friends, or to sell this data to 3rd parties. There are many apps that have both legitimate and nefarious reasons for accessing your personal data, and Apple's solution does not take the distinction into account.
I recently heard a talk from a guy proposing a system where we can not only specify what data can be accessed by each vendor, but also specify what they can use it for. Of course, enforcing that is a whole different matter; you'll need a legal framework and even then you have no guarantee they'll misuse your data on the sly, but it's better than nothing (which is what we have now).
The fact that IBM even parted with this property means they sold them for more than what they were worth to IBM. And facebook is in way over their depth if they think they're getting the better of Big Blue.
The patents may be worth a hell of a lot more to Facebook than to IBM. If these things pertain to instant messaging, online gaming platforms, managing online user profiles, ranking through friends, virual currency, and all the other crap Facebook is doing or planning to do, then IBM's price will be well worth the fee. While they may be next to useless to IBM, Facebook could use such patents to defend against suits from competitors, or sue those competitors in turn.
Ok, forget comparison to used PCs then. What you say about the company lacking economies of scale may be true as well, but the real question remains: what market do they possibly hope to enter with this thing? Media PCs / Media players / DVRs? Gaming rigs? Small, quiet general purpose machines? Cool looking computers that are fit for a place in the living room? Machines that come with loads of geek cred? On any of these markets, this device will lose out to cheaper, better and better known alternatives. Hell, on that budget you can probably buy several machines to cover all of these categories, even if you throw Apple devices into the mix.
The only market demographic I can see for this device is the "affluent, insane Amiga fan" group. Not much of a market I would think.
IIRC, nothing much happens to Ender after the incident, but his superiors did not ignore it; there's some discussion about whether or not he should be punished. In the end there's not that much they can do to Ender if he is to continue his career as saviour of earth.
Sure, you can have a discussion about whether or not this book is suitable for kids. Different schools may arrive at different conclusions, and I'm ok with those who decide against it removing it from the school library. But firing the teacher for reading it in class? That should only be the case if there had been any actual (mental) damage to the kids, and if the teacher in question made a gross misjudgment in reading them this book. I don't think that this is the case, by any remotely reasonable standard.
Or any content at all. I hope Google will at some point figure out a way to promote sites with original content over ones that just repeat content of others. There are still way too many link farms, forum "aggregators" and faux search results pages ("Top results for how do I insert a server farm into a link farmer's rectum") on the first page of many types of Google queries.