I do usually try to take a pragmatist view. It's hard not to, given the number of predictions that have been wildly off, particularly concerning technology over the past few decades.

For some great anecdotal evidence, look in the back of Popular science magazines where they print headlines from 25-75 years ago. There are doom and gloom ones (e.g. predicting '1984' type of developments) and overly optimistic (e.g., 'by 2000, we won't have to do housework because robots will be doing it for us'). I find that the truth is almost universally between the two extremes.

I also find that this view works extremely well when applied to the economy and politics as well (as in, Bush is not the devil incarnate in spite of numerous bad decisions, and Obama is not going to turn the nation into a socialist welfare state where we pay 60%+ in taxes -- nor is he going to fix our problems in the first 100 days of his presidency).

This view is especially helpful in light of discussions concerning exponential growth. It is easy to show trends that have continued for the past X years and then conclude that since numbers don't lie, this will continue for the next Y years. These arguments are easy to demonstrate and harder to refute (meaning it takes less technical knowledge to make them than to disprove them), making them widely used in persuasion.

Actually, that logic is flawed. The assumption that we will continue to see exponential growth forever in anything is pretty flawed, simply because of different laws kicking in. Look at trends in computer ownership, or TVs or anything else that hits its prime and hits it big. For a good while these things do have an exponential growth curve, but obviously that growth cannot continue indefinitely, or people would have to start buying two or three TV sets at a time every couple of days, and then the next week buy 3 TV sets every day, and then every hour....

This is the fundamental problem with extrapolation taken too far. The truth of the matter is that you have no idea what the curve looks like, regardless of how much data you have. It could be exponential growth for thousands of years, and then suddenly take a nose dive and drop back down close to where it started, or perhaps grow faster. Extrapolating too far is foolishness that happens far too often.
I've heard the discussion of converting all matter into computational elements, but a FAR more likely growth curve for computing power is not exponential, but sigmoidal.

Thus, I would argue that converting all matter into computational elements would be the asymptotic 'end game' of technology that we will never quite reach, but always be moving towards (though our progress will slow). Many growth patterns follow a sigmoidal curve.

It is truly sad that the space program is not at the forefront anymore. Lets consider the cost...
NASA 2008 Budget: $17.318 Billion
The federal government throws this amount of money around all of the time. Heck, lately it's almost a rounding error with all of the spending going on. To put this in perspective, $8 billion dollars is currently earmarked for "state and tribal assistance grants" in the new stimulus package coming out. (see this spreadsheet ).

What are the gains? When the Apollo program was running it caught the public's fascination. It made an entire generation of kids that wanted to be astronauts. It made "rocket scientist" become part of our nomenclature and synonymous with "really smart guy". And most importantly, it spurred an interest in engineering and the "hard" sciences (math, physics, chemistry). The knee-jerk response of today's youth is that these subjects are too hard and not fun enough. And so the US is losing engineers and knowledge workers and replacing them with massage therapists . How many people in 1965 thought that the best job in the world would be to work at NASA? How many think that now? (or for that matter, how many think that ANY engineering job would be ideal for them?)

In addition to inspiring the public to idolize something besides the latest Hollywood tabloid, the space program made numerous technological and engineering breakthroughs that we are still benefiting from tremendously today. The difficulties of doing even simple things under the constraints of space exploration force tremendous ingenuity and resourcefulness that the nation then benefits from as a whole.

I'm not a fan of the "Pay Wave" features on credit cards even. I don't especially like the idea of my information being transmitted from my wallet anyone in my immediate vicinity with a reader. Especially when the payoff to me is zero. I think "Pay wave" is a useless feature. Is it THAT hard to swipe a card instead of "wave" it in front of a reader? Then at least I don't have to worry about other people on a bus/subway/crowd who are close enough to steal my info without ever touching my wallet.
Given my distaste for this feature on credit cards, I sure as hell don't want it on my cell phone.

The real story here is the failure of businesses to work together to deliver a feature to consumers (many of whom would no doubt enjoy this feature).

I'm not MS lover, but really, at what point does this stop? What if a company with a desire to litigate decides they want to enter the utilities market, but are hampered by the preloaded utilities available in Windows (defrag, search, etc.). Does MS have to strip out features every times someone calls foul? How far will it go? What if some company decides to make a CPU scheduler, and think that it's unfair that MS includes one with windows? Where's the line?
How many people are there buying computers who would think of thier computer as complete without an internet browser? Is MS evil for catering to this need?

On a related note, will Apple have to stop including Safari with OS X?

Amazon does book previews as well... does this fall under the "Touch and Feel" patent?
If so, than Harris would be suing about as many people as SCO (at least in terms of high-profile companies).
Hmmm an individual filing a spurious lawsuit against Oprah, Google, and Amazon that has already cost him his job...Nice try.

Are humans deterministic, or non-deterministic? Machines are deterministic, and always will be (unless some weird quantum-like processes are brought to bear that I'm not aware of) because even random number generators generate psuedo-random numbers.

So, the fundamental question is this: If the state of a human could somehow be replicated completely, down to the very molecules and their positions, and you made two identical copies of someone -- would those two copies act exactly the same? (obviously up until the point that the were influenced differently by their environment) If the answer to this is yes, than machines will someday have just as much of a 'soul' as humans. If the answer is no, than somehow a person's soul gives them non-deterministic properties which could be the basis of religious beliefs of how humans are different from non-sentient life.

Stop it. This is a total troll and is 100% FUD. Fedora isn't a "trial" version at all -- it's a bleeding edge distro made for people who don't need commercial-grade support for their distro, but they want a Red Hat based system. Plus, Fedora isn't just "usable," it's awesome. Far from being a collection of bits and pieces, it's a coherent, organized collection of software -- in short, it's everything you expect a distro to be. You should check out: This and this.