2) They exist, you can go out and buy one now. Might need a pilot license.

3) Gastric bypass surgery.

4) Not quite there yet, but once you get her name you can look her up on Facebook and Twitter.

5) Dunno about that one. Out here on the east coast, our stereos don't have any kind of remote control receivers to zap from your window.

6) Ask Applied Digital Solutions, they made implantable GPS's in 2003.

7) Look at the Darpa Urban Challenge. We have self driving cars, the only reason you can't buy it at your local car lot is that consumers don't trust computers to drive them yet. Toyota's said as much.

8) Look at the front page right now, we've got remote control robots that ride around the office with video of your head as their head.

http://videos.streetfire.net/video/Mercedes-Sclass_162443.ht...

My wife is going to get a car with this system next week - I'm looking forward to giving it a try.

2) I've got the license, I still don't see a street-legal flying plane .. preferably one that is 100% auto-pilot that can let me surf the web while I commute .. if I commuted further than a walk to bart.

3) Gastic Bypass surgery == starving yourself and throwing up if you eat more than 3oz of food in a sitting. No thank you. There should be a pill, or a suction hose. This would be a trillion dollar market.

4) I have hopes for augmented reality dating. It would just be awesome to have that much extra knowledge .. Imagine you're about to hit on some beautiful redhead in a "Science, it works bitches" shirt when you do a facial recognition and find out through OKCupid that she's a strong christian and a member of the jonesboro baptist church, whereas you're looking for a kinky atheist .. Crisis avoided!

5) I spoke with the TV-B-Gone guys about this a while back. They gave it some thought and found that the car-stereo options were just too varied to be feasible .. I guess every souped up car stereo with remotes uses a different tech, often proprietary. Still, it would be nice.. I'd also accept a directional EMP gun.

6) oooh!

7) Definitely neat .. That being said, as a pedestrian, I don't trust my local consumers to drive a car, maybe a computer could do a better job.

8) That's kind of neat.. I have a rather specific application for video chat. My daughter lives in Seattle, and we use Google Video to chat right now .. It's pretty sub-par. 900 miles as the bird flies should be enough for us to have at least 1024x768 chat with minimal latency .. This is actually a startup I'm thinking about pursuing, but one specifically towards making it so divorced dads can chat with their toddlers without their toddlers having the ability to accidentally close the window .. But I digress.

Well there you go, the technology you want! Should be relatively simple to build. They're not available off the shelf, for blindingly obvious reasons.

I really, really like cheese, seitan, and my Canon 5d MK2. The rest, however, is leaving a lot to be desired.

I spend far too much time online hoping that something is really going to WOW me and make me go "omgomgomg I'm going to go into debt to buy this/do this/see this/experience this" .. But that moment still hasn't happened .. So maybe I'm just looking in the wrong places?

-- George Bernard Shaw

EDIT: I don't have the time right now to make a list of really cool startups, but I could probably come up with a list of at least ten. Here's one that immediately comes to mind: http://www.directededge.com/

This is not to say that what you folks are doing isn't completely awesome. But the OP's requests seem very different.

Limit your intake, exercise and it will take care of itself.

It looked like you were looking for a mechanical solution to something that in the majority of overweight people is simply caused by consuming too much. If you are not part of that majority then my apologies.

Feel free to threaten me at your convenience while you're anonymous, but be aware that I immediately add the slashdot 'C' to that 'A'.

If you want to talk tough and have it mean something add your username to your profile, at least then it looks like you're not just another bully.

As for anonymous coward, if you're ever in San Francisco, or I'm ever in the netherlands, I will gladly put your dutch ass in a hospital, douchebag.

Also the fact that you are not prepared to accept an apology and simply clear up the misunderstanding but instead prefer a fight is quite unlike what is usual on HN.

I'm posting here under my own name, my email address is in my profile and all my domains are linked to my business addresses, I couldn't possibly be less anonymous than that.

You on the other hand are 'someone in San Francisco', last I checked there were quite a few people living there so I hope you don't mind my still calling you an AC.

This is not the 'ok corral' and we're not going to shoot it out at noon. Try to be a little bit more reasonable and put your question in to perspective if you want to be understood.

A good friend of mine killed himself after losing 250lbs when he realized he couldn't escape a lifetime of emotional damage from people ridiculing him about his weight. Hating people because of their appearance is just another type of bigotry, no different from racism, homophobia, or religious intolerance.

As a fat man I have NEVER hated anybody for any of these reasons, but as a thin man you somehow get a pass to do so against me because it's currently politically correct to blame fat people for the world's ills?

As for the rest of this rant, I think you are simply using this to pick a fight, and you are spoiling for one because of a lot of stuff in your life that bothers you.

If you want stuff to be invented or changed then go and invent stuff or change stuff.

But don't blame others for not inventing stuff that would be convenient for you to have and don't blame others for not liking your body, as far as that is the case.

It seems to be a very sensitive point with you, but you have to keep in mind that some part of your body comes under your control and some part of it you are simply born in to and you'll have to make do with that.

For the record, I've had an extremely disfiguring skin condition, it used to make me feel so uncomfortable that I wouldn't leave the house. I literally used to scratch myself to little bits. It took me a good 15 years to get it under control, careful experimenting with diet and trying to avoid situations that were stressful is what finally did it.

Just because I'm 'thin' doesn't mean I didn't get my own taste of that sort of thing. And even now I have to be careful. But I'm more than ever convinced that we really can make a difference in our own lives and in the ones of people around us by working hard at it.

If your problems are glandular, hormonal or some weird combination of things then there might be something you can do, there might not be. But I've seen one guy kick the issue with an iron fist and go from well over 280 pounds to a regular weight, and his problem was definitely medical.

If he could do it, you may be able to do it too.

As for your friend, that's a really really sad thing that that happened.

If I made a post that asks the questions that you ask and left as much unclear as you did then I would be the last to start using that and a bunch of strawmen to pick fights, HN is not a place to vent your frustration in general, much less one where you get to threaten people with bodily harm.

Doing so makes you look juvenile and unbalanced.

Why don't you hear more about this? Simple, the companies that can afford to spend money on this sort of thing like to keep a lot of the work quiet until they determine whether or not they can commercialize it.

https://squareup.com/

http://www.onlive.com/

http://www.hyperionpowergeneration.com/

http://www.firstsolar.com/en/index.php

That is a quick list off the top of my head of companies that are doing new and innovative things that have the potential to seriously disrupt some existing industries.

About getting it in the dryer and folding it... I'm not sure, but surely you can come up with something to do part of the work for you.

I think the immersive VR bit is being worked on, but its slow going. I see Avatar as a step in the right direction. One necessary condition for this will be to get proper 3D. Once we can speed up that process, we'll be almost there.

Other stuff... I dunno.

An awesome "laundry bot" would:

- Retrieve items from a laundry bin - Scan the fabric to determine color and type for sorting (knowing to have a dry-clean bin, a woolens bin, a whites bin, a color cottons bin, etc) - Transport the dirty garments to the cleaning facility - Perform proper cleaning operations (washing, folding drying) - Return the laundered garment

The act itself might be triggered by scales or pressure sensors in laundry bins.

It just doesn't seem like it should be that hard. I'm surprised that industrious tinkerers haven't already automated the repetitive, thankless tasks in our lives that we tend to hate like laundry, vacuuming, window washing, (lawn maintenance for you suburbanites, etc.

and that's just off the top of my head. I remember being prett impressed by the last 'what are you working on' thread as well. - combinatorial genomics -

http://github.com/haseman/Android-AR-Kit/

and here

http://github.com/zac/iphonearkit/

As for calling the police? If they wouldn't do anything when I gave them tapes of my neighbor selling heroin out her window at my old apartment, they're probably going to say "shut the fuck up and stop calling us, you entitled upper middle class white nerd" .. in fact .. I think they said that the last time I called.

Fail.

Search for Vera Birkenbihl. She has an audio course which is really amazing. I improved my memory and creativity and helped my kid memorizing foreign language words in school. He really enjoys the playful way we do it and aces at school.

The only real problem is getting all the profile pics out of facebook.

Not a technology, but I have lost several dress sizes as a side effect of working on my health issues, which are supposed to be unresolvable. And, yes, I feel I am solving Cool Problems`(or, more accurately, I think I am coming up with Cool Solutions). I have slimmed down without starving myself or even counting calories. Initially, exercise per se wasn't really a part of it either (though I was more active with having a job than I was when I was bedridden -- I used to joke about my 'get out of bed more often fitness plan' -- still, I didn't "work out"). These days, I do a lot of walking because I live without a car but I do not have a gym membership or otherwise workout. Yes, I did slim down more with getting rid of my car, but the primary mover is still diet chemistry, supplements and generally working on getting well.

Some things I have worked on: 1) Body chemistry. The typical American diet is too acid. Excess acidity has a number of negative consequences, including promoting infection. There is (supposedly) research that indicates that the type of microbes you harbor impacts whether or not you end up obese. Which brings me to point 2:

2) I have actively worked on fostering more good flora in the body and extinguishing bad bugs. We are all crawling with millions of microbes and cannot even digest our food without them. But I was, at one time, overrun with multiple antibiotic-resistant infections which were killing me.

3) Lifestyle changes that fit with my attempts to control what types of flora inhabit my body and my attempts to keep my body chemistry in a healthy balance.

Some nifty things I have found out about using chemistry to heal the body better than modern medicine can:

A)I can stop a nosebleed by taking calcium supplements. Calcium is necessary to start the cascade of chemical processes which leads to clotting. I used to suffer routine nosebleeds/blood seepage from my sinuses. I rarely do anymore. If I find I am having an issue with this, I just take some calcium and it goes away.

B) Copper is has antimicrobial properties. Buying a few copper pieces for my home and finding an affordable source for plain old sheet copper in sizes that work for an individual household (as opposed to the quantities that get ordered for industrial purposes) has revolutionized my life in ways I don't know how to begin to explain.

C) Infections that most people think you have to live with for life can be cleared from the system using a few herbs and vitamins.

D) Gray hair can be reversed (at least to some degree) with the right supplements, which depends in part on why your hair went gray. I have less gray hair now than I did in my mid-thirties.

all of the things you are talking about requires hardware + software. which is more expensive, slower and more dangerous than building web 2.0 sites that are easily patchable.

that's actually a very prohibitive point, as most startups we hear about nowadays use software because of its low bootstrap cost and economies of scale

-the limiting factor to flying cars is actually air traffic control - which is still manually done, but could easily be automated (it's basically a giant constraint satisfaction/optimization problem)

-kiva robots (constraint satisfaction/optimization applied to mobile robots)

-heartland robotics - rodney brooks's startup, uses machine learning to control light robot arms so that heavy expensive limbs used in industrial robots aren't needed (robot arms for a few dollars in parts).