Anyone remember TI graphing calculators, which at the time I was using them (90s) I think ran on 8088 processors?

Quite a bit MORE expensive than this. MUCH less powerful, even factoring in Moore's law. AND, they were in no way intended to be an open, hackable design like this is. And even with all those limitations, they became one of the primary "introduction to hardware and software hacking" devices of my generation.

When I was a 16-year-old HS Freshman, I had a TI-81 that I hooked up to a PC with a serial port and "hacked" zShell onto. I learned a bit of assembly code and put on lots of little programs like games etc. onto my calculator. I even got an image display program where you could load up bitmap images that were converted to a specific size and color depth (4-8 grays if I remember right). I got busted in my Geometry class that year looking at a blurry grayscale picture of a topless Pamela Anderson. On my calculator. If that doesn't put me in the running for biggest nerd ever, I don't know what would.

Anyway, I can only see this "Chip" thing (I agree that I'm not too big on the name) as a very cool idea. Sometimes, something as simple as a hackable platform or a blurry 4-bit picture of some boobs can be enough to push someone towards a lifelong interest in IT and other technology. Raspberry Pi and the others are great too, but the price of this one gives it a real leg up in the universal accessibility department!

Wait a minute... People keep going back to porn because it "isn't working"? It doesn't "actually satisfy"? Ahh yes, as opposed to intimate sex with a loving partner, which you engage in one time and then you're completely satisfied and set for the rest of your life. ...Oh wait, she didn't intend to imply that? I don't think that porn viewing and a healthy mutually respectful and loving relationship with an actual human being are by any means mutually exclusive.

I hit puberty just as dialup internet was becoming available in my hometown. My family were early adopters and got internet service pretty much as soon as it was available. As you might imagine, I grew up with rather free and easy access to internet porn, and I browsed for quite a lot of it. However, I think that in examining my own experience as objectively as possible, I believe that I was able to self-police or direct my exposure away from the sorts of porn that I would agree are potentially damaging; for example violence, rape, or demeaning behavior (although definitions of each of those vary a lot). But in any case, I think that the reason that I was able to achieve this self-direction was though good parenting. If these things concern you, talk to your kids about it, and explain why. Provide them with the framework they need, and you'll probably be surprised at how well they react.


And just for one more anecdote, I thought I'd contribute a story that exposes just how much of a nerd I am. When I was a sophomore in High School, I was into math. I was taking trigonometry with mostly seniors and a few juniors. I had a complex graphing calculator, a Texas Instruments TI-85, with a roughly 2.5 inch by 3.5 inch screen. On the internet, you could download programs that would overwrite the basic "operating system" of the calculator, and allow you to load programs that people coded up in assembly language compatible with the machine's Z80 processor.

One such program was an image viewer. The calculator normally just had a 2-color liquid crystal screen; each pixel was either ON (black) or OFF (white). This viewer program allowed the screen to be treated as grayscale by adjusting the contrast/brightness values sent to individual pixels, as opposed the the screen as a whole as per usual.

What did I do with this program? I loaded it up with porn, of course. All softcore nudes, mostly Pamela Anderson as I recall. So, with the correct button presses to get into the assembly loader, I had a very low-resolution porn image browser. Being a sophomore, I thought that I could gain some "street cred" with the upperclassmen by showing off my porn. And, as you can probably guess, they immediately turned me in to the teacher just because it would be fun to watch me squirm. Fortunately, my teacher was very cool about it. He said: "I don't want to see it, I don't want to know about it, and if I ever hear anything about it again in the future, I'll be highly displeased". That was enough to get me to delete the program from the calculator.

The segment about porn on (the oh-so ubiquitous) cellphones brought that episode to mind.

They wanted to have the software also track black people, but it was patented and is licensed exclusively to law enforcement. Similarly the Arab face tracking software was exclusively licensed to Homeland Security.

on a serious note, yes it's all about contrast. the first step in most image processing algorithms is to convert to b&w or grayscale, and use contrast deltas to determine points of interest. They could switch to using wavelets to track global versus local motion vectors, but it's much more CPU intensive and would have a greater lag between human movement and camera "following".

If you keep the current Sifter image, why not just convert it to grayscale so there is no conflict with the different channel colors?

If you're in to Windows modification I highly, highly recommend nLite (or vLite, if you run vista). Its a great tool for modifying windows that is very user friendly and lets you strip all the components from the OS that are unneeded, while warning you which ones are critical or necessary for certain functions. Great stuff.
Wish MS would just put out a stripped down version of the OS themselves. Freaking DOS with modern functionality and a grayscale GUI, who cares, just let it take up 5k of RAM and get rid of all the problem features.