- DARPA’s META program and its VehicleForge platform were the day’s dominant topic: a $6–9 M open-source hardware/software competition to build a next-gen collaborative engineering environment, with participants ranging from MakerBot and Local Motors to Raytheon and BAE.  
- Participants observed that DARPA’s presentation was unexpectedly competent, featuring a 3-D visualization of five years of Linux kernel evolution and explicit statements that awards might bypass “the usual suspects,” causing ~30 big-industry attendees to drop offline.  
- Rat-brain-controlled robots (Singularity Hub video) and remote-controlled roaches were discussed as early examples of biological-robotic hybrids, prompting jokes about rodents or insects becoming the first post-singularity overlords.  
- Hardware hacking threads included plans to mate Arduino microcontrollers with Ubiquiti Rocket radios for a 100 km-range RC vehicle and the perennial problem of running SolidWorks without a native Windows box.  
- Open-hardware governance was linked to the new mil-oss.org Google Group and the Open Hardware Summit definition mailing list, framing military adoption of open-source practices.  
- A new “Gene Designer” web app (press release shared) and the Brede neuroinformatics visualization/wiki tools were circulated as examples of open, micro-publishable scientific infrastructure.  
- Functional vs. mainstream programming sparked a brief debate; QuantumG dismissed FP productivity claims while others noted Haskell/Scheme readability benefits.