Shady deal

Smartglasses, printed food, and the complexities of copyright law: let Dave guide you through another confusing week in tech

I was almost as excited to learn this week that Google Glass is teaming up with the company behind fancy shades maker Ray-Ban as I was to discover that Google openly acknowledges the pejorative use of the term "glasshole" to characterise the creepier users of its technology.
In a bid to cool up a technology dubbed "cumbersome, weird-looking and generally a bit meh" by expert analysts I just invented, Google has signed a deal with Luxottica. The Italian designer, which is the brains behind Ray-Ban and Oakley, has promised to bring a touch of the "avant garde" to eye-based wearable technology.
Google certainly has a way to go to make its Glass product seen as mainstream, desirable and not at all completely odd, which it seemed to tacitly acknowledge with a recently published list of Glass etiquette rules.
One such suggestion encourages wearers to avoid being "creepy or rude (aka a ‘Glasshole')".
Though they probably did little to allay the fears of those thoroughly creeped out by the whole smart eyewear thing by stating: "If someone wants to secretly record you, there are much, much better cameras out there."

Mail merge misery
I'm sure we've all received a missive greeting us as "Dear [insert name here]" or similar.
Unless you're mercilessly schadenfreudian, you can't help but feel an empathetic pang of terror on behalf of the poor marketing intern who will shortly be facing a tongue-lashing; it's not nice to savage people for honest - and clearly fairly minor - mistakes.
That said, if you pitch your organisation as being designed to "establish, uphold and advance high standards of statistical competence", and are emailing people to invite them to enter awards recognising high achievement in the use of "numbers and data", then all bets are off, I'm afraid.
I'm sure the "Statistical Excellence Awards" are very much the Oscars of the statistically excellent journalism industry, but the jury remains out on the rigour, prestige, and general unimpeachability of the Royal Statistical Society until they can send an email without addressing all recipients as "Mr Chris Munford".
"The Society stresses that entries don't have to be statistically complex," notes the message.
Probably just as well, eh?

Recipe for disaster?
Smashing into the lucrative market niche of people who have about 90 per cent of the dedication required to make a meal from scratch comes Foodini, which claims to be "the first 3D food printer to print all types of real, fresh, nutritious foods".
Manufacturer Natural Machines has so far received almost half of its $100,000 funding target on Kickstarter in pursuit of getting the product to mass market. You may say "but I can't print an apple, you madman?!", or perhaps "if I still have to cook the ingredients beforehand or afterwards, what differentiates this expensive product from, say, a normal knife?".
Well, egg and your face will be very much in alignment when I reveal that the Foodini means you will no longer be "forced to buy pre-filled food capsules". Making this the perfect product for time-poor urbanites residing in some kind of steel-and-chrome Logan's Run-style dystopia.

Copy cats
I was intrigued to learn this week that changes to UK copyright laws will soon make it legal for you to copy music from your CDs and upload it onto your MP3 player, 15 years after the first such devices went on sale in the UK. And not just because (ahem) someone I know has been doing precisely that for roughly the past decade and a half, in blithe ignorance of the fact it was technically against the law.
Alas, it "will still be illegal to make copies for friends or family" (I'm not looking forward to telling the wife she can no longer borrow my iPod when she goes jogging). Keeping hold of any files you've copied from a CD you've since sold is also still technically verboten (farewell, Sham 69 boxset - you shall be missed.)
"The law... is changing in a number of small but important ways, to make our copyright system better suited to the digital age," said the Intellectual Property Office. Great news - and only a year or two too late to see that particular digital age disappear into the horizon as everyone switches to streaming services instead.