The smart notifications you are mentioning are from Google Maps. You can disable them individually by going to Settings -> Apps -> Maps-> Notifications and then unchecking everything under "Your contributions". But I agree they are anoying.
I am playing with a RetroPie based gaming system on an rpi3 and all nes and snes games I tried worked without any problem. It even works for PS1,though I only tried one game so far.
Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64.
Proving that the code was used to aid a company is not a good measure of the seriousness of of the crime. What if you take the code and store it on a device with really low security? You don't share it, but you allow "hackers" to easily take it, so you are in fact aiding competing companies.
I like my Pebble a lot. A had Sony LiveView before it, and, even though it's not color, it cannot even be compared to it (I haven't seen the Sony SmartWatch though). Other grat things about it:
- managed to get 9.5 days out of the battery, having it connected to my phone only during the day
- there are some really cool watch faces available already
- the hardware packaged within is impressive, even if developers can't access it yet (compass, accelerometer, bluetooth 4.0).
I do think they might have trouble with their users hearts. If you read the comments on the Kickstarter campaign, they are filled with dissapointment regarding repeated delays and lack of communication. They haven't done a great job at keeping their backers informed.
They might also think about bombing the US because they don't want an "atheist capitalist state" to have nuclear power. This kind of non-argument can go both ways.
I am wondering if Google will implement an Ingress play mode especially suited for Glass. It would be really nice to walk around town, be notified when you are near a portal and be able to hack/link/whatever that portal without taking your phone out of the pocket.
It may be an "e-paper" display, similar to the one Pebble is using. Looking at the Pebble demo videos, you can see that they do support high framerate. Not so sure about the size though.
The salt does not need to be hidden. First of all, it needs to be unique per hashed information (password), so you cannot store it in code. Second, its purpose is to force any attacker trying to use a lookup tables to calculate one lookup table per password.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29
Edit: also, instead of using a "system salt", why not use an HMAC to replace hash function?
The article said the technology is very similar to Google Goggles. From what I could deduce, Goggles uses some kind of local invariant descriptors (like SIFT or SURF), and TinEye uses some kind of global descriptor (maybe something like this: http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/432-Loo... ).
If that is right, Google will be able to retrieve different photos in which the same object appears, whereas TinEye only retrieves the same image, with or without some changes. So, they're quite different beasts.