If no one else picks its nose that means that nosepicking is not within the norms. Depending on what everyone else thinks about it might even be unacceptable. With that knowledge he can decide how to behave without bothering others.
In the second case openness might be the first step to a better relationship between both.
If it bothers others that Bob picks his nose when he's alone, maybe they should stop digging around in his personal business. Or does every moment of our actions & thoughts, no matter how small, need to be put before a public jury now?
I think this has great potential for things beyond gesture control; if it can be accurate I would love to have one of these on each arm to replace my keyboard to allow me to type in the air (I have RSI).
That said, I am not spending a cent until you ship and get a lot of positive reviews.
Please do not do this, md5 is not a cryptographic hash and is relatively trivial to reverse.
Ie; is possible for someone to discover your 'masterpassword' given any one of your passwords generated via this method.
If one of your passwords is leaked then it is possible for an attacker to brute-force this to find out a list of possible 'masterpassword foo' combinations (although not knowing the length increases the search space).
If one of those foos is 'gmail' for your gmail password then it is game over.
Even if your foo is not similar to the service, if the attacker is able to get 2 of your passwords then the search-space is much smaller (looking only at the overlap of the reverse of both md5 functions).
This may not be relevant if you only take a 'random' sub-sequence from the generated md5, thus only disclosing part of the hash to the attacker.
People might not share my sentiment but I think doing this is fine. Yes, all your points are true, but they require the attacker to single you out specifically, and try and figure out your process. Frankly, unless you're a very important person to warrant someone singling you out, an attacker is going to go after the countless easier targets that do not require personal attention.
One assumption in security / cryptography is that the process is always known, otherwise it is security by obscurity.
This is still better than password reuse as the plaintext doesn't disclose your other identified without further effort, however the users should be under no illusion of bullet-proof security.
Ahem, md5 is impossible to reverse. The weakness of md5 is related to the ease with which one can find inputs that result in a specific hash, which does not apply in this case.
Many desktop machines still do, and most of the modern motherboards in full or mid-tower size still have a PS/2 port or two, for laptops PS/2 support is almost non-existent.
I don't think that even thinkpad docking stations have PS/2 anymore. PS/2 support on modern laptops from non-obscure manufactures (leaving myself some wiggle room for whatever weird Chinese thing you might be able to buy on ebay) may very well be extinct.
That's the built-in keyboard, right? I thought those were USB for some reason, I guess not. I guess it would be more accurate to say that PS/2 connectors proper (6-pin mini-DIN) are likely extinct in laptops.
I think it was only common for a mouse, and the PS/2 keyboard controller was only designed to allow one keyboard and one mouse, meaning that the laptops supporting this try to merge the two inputs into one, which is error-prone, particularly when dealing with for example wheel mouse when the packet size changes. Raymond Chen has a blog post, and there is a comment from Ray Trent (then of Synaptics) for more about the problems:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2004/09/17/23083...
If you do this so that the top brick is overhanging by half it's length and then place another brick on it, the first brick is no longer the top brick so this no longer applies.
You are only taxed for the difference between your US taxrate and your place of residency's taxrate, this means for many citizens the tax paid to the US is very little or even $0 (but they still have to go through the trouble of filing).
If you live nearby is it possible for an Etsy representative to come and watch you manufacture a single item?
This way IP is kept relatively confidential, unless the viewer can remember every single detail and I doubt this unless they are very skilled with building electrical components.
You could also get them to sign a non-disclosure agreement if you are concerned.
I also agree this seems unfair, many of the products on etsy don't seem to pass this same test.
One of the emails stated "Unfortunately, we’re not equipped to offer phone support at this time." If they don't even have the resources to have a phone call with the guy, it is highly unlikely they have resources to send a person to his house.
They likely have no idea where he lives. If he were to say, "Look, I live ___ blocks away from you. I'd love to buy you and a coworker lunch and you can watch me build one -- I'd like to avoid having documentation of my process, as that's a competitive advantage for me", he might get some traction.
Probably not, though, if the emails are that much like form letters.
That could be due to other reasons, I prefer email correspondence over phone calls as it allows me to carefully think about my reply and documents it 'for free', and in the case of legal matters I can see this as being useful.
