As it turns out, the crux of the invention was head-slappingly simple: though a patent-pending idea Smith calls "get out of the way control, " the unit measures the load on each joint as its operator moves about, and figures out the direction it needs to move in 3-D space to literally move out of the way.

ENGADGET: Raytheon's Sarcos XOS 2 military exoskeleton just does the heavy lifting -- for now

To come up with a quote, a good contractor will do a heat-load calculation to determine what size unit and how much piping to install.

FORBES: Magazine Article

RLX's software balances the processing load among hundreds of blades and instantly shifts data and workload from a failing blade to a reserve unit.

FORBES: Attack From Below

When the soundtrack starts to get stale, you have to load a new one, meaning a 20-minute session transferring songs from your PC to the MP3 unit.

CNN: All Music, All the Time

One feature you're not getting with this unit -- besides the inability to record OTA programming -- is DRM support, so if you want to load up your PlaysForSure- or FairPlay-protected tracks, you'll need to strip out the copy protection with one of those handy pieces of software first (not that we'd ever encourage that sort of behavior, of course).

ENGADGET: Genus' SLM radio does DAB and MP3