While you are at it, test for basic empathy and compassion too.

Who exactly should get a head start, and a head start on whom?
The journal publishers? Researchers sometimes even have to pay a fee to submit papers for publication in the first place.
The peer reviewers? they aren't paid by the journals or by the researchers.
The researchers? they have already processed the information, which is why they are submitting for publication.

Leaving a 6 month clause just begs to have endless lobbying to get it extended to 12 months, then 2 years, etc.
If you are actively researching in a field, you will still be forced to get the expensive peer reviewed journals, usually bundled with a bunch of other journals you don't want at all, but are more or less forced to buy because of the prohibitive cost of buying articles one at a time.

Journal Publishers basically get all the content written and submitted by scientists for free, selected by peer reviewed by another bunch of scientists for free, then slap a cover on a bunch of them and sell them at obscene prices. The price increases have way outstripped the CPI since the mid 80's and it's way past time the greedy bastards got a shake up.

Not nearly enough.

At any rate, it's about equivalent to half a kilo of TNT, which contains about 4.184MJ of energy. Got a long way to go before it's going to be useful for blowing up even small asteroids, let alone planets.

Roads, like all networks are a natural monopoly, and thus should be run by the state.
Unless you want to allow for competition that is by having a second road network constructed and maintained alongside the first. Then you could have a dupoly.
Services on networks should be privatized (bus services, mail services, electricity generation, internet service provision, telephone, etc) but the physical network structure itself should be in the hands of the public, via that trustworthy custodian, the government. If you don't like how they run things, vote in a new bunch.

Sounds great at first, and it is good having the flexibility of hours, but believe me, working from home isn't all it is cut out for. Working from your mum's house is an open invitation to "just take a five minute break to fix ..." several times a day.
You will be distracted by telemarketing calls, friends and family expect you can just drop what you are doing to help out with things,(because you can just catch up later, rlight?) and you don't have that nice delineation between the start and end of your working day.
If you do start working from home, make sure you establish right from the start that between 9:00 to 5:00 (your hours may vary) you are strictly at work and should be treated as such.
Mostly though, I miss working in a team environment and having people to bounce ideas off, and being able to get home and not think about work.
After working from home for 5 years, I can't wait to get back into a regular office environment.

Some of the best moments in science have started with "Hmm, that's funny..." I wonder what this one will lead to.

Small arms are definitely up there with weapons of mass destruction.. If you want to kill off a lot of civilians in a country, just flood the place with cheap guns/ammo, and the population will do it to themselves.
look at the death rate in the US from guns (31224 in 2007 in a population of aprox 300 M compared to say, the UK .(47 in 2007, in a population of 60M)

South Africa is by far the worst though, at about 71 deaths per 100000 per year, with that country flooded with illegal guns.
How many did that most successful (or at any rate the most notorious) terrorist attack 9/11 kill? just under 3000?

I'm not saying you shouldn't have a right to have arms, but the social cost definitely has to be weighed up and should be put into perspective.
Likewise, the social changes put in place to prevent damage to society from terrorist attacks should be commensurate with social changes put in place to prevent damage from other threats like lax gun control, unsafe vehicles and roads, lack of affordable medical access, and unhealthy food - all of which kill a hell of a lot of people each year.

As soon as the leader of one war weary group wanted to build his new residence on top of the same hill as the leader of another war weary group, there would be new potential for conflict and much shaking of pointy sticks. Eventually someone might even throw one of those sticks, and then where would we be?

Until there is a way to deal with assholes whose solution to resolving conflict is to convince their followers to go beat up on some other asshole's followers, there will always be war at one scale or another.
Unfortunately we seem to have a predisposition to listening to assholes and letting them lead us.

I'd like to see a society where all conflicts are resolved with the leaders out first on the front lines. I am sure there would be much greater tendency for them to talk and resolve issues peacefully instead of with pointy sticks/bullets/nukes.

If there is no actual design of how to do it, isn't this just an idea, which shouldn't be patent-able?
Otherwise I could just get a patent on a full 3d head mounted display with 120 degrees field of view and 4k pixel resolution per eye at 120fps in a form factor that looks like a cool pair of sunglasses, with full head tracking. Sure, it's what I wish existed, and I can definitely imagine it and even make pretty drawings showing the purported field of view and stylish sunglasses look, but that is a long way off from being able to actually make it, or even designing the optics to give that sort of wide field of view in a small form factor
  (Currently best you can get is 1080p and about 45 degree field of view per eye, and looks more like a star trek prop than a pair of sunglasses.)

A lot of people are afraid of becoming homeless bums and getting hit by a car?

I'd say that under the current medical system in the US, he's no longer worth saving once it is established that he can't pay his bill.

In other countries, with a well funded public medical system, he'd probably get a lot longer run.

If you want to get that liver transplant, the surgeon isn't going ot do it for free.
The hospital isn't going to provide your bed for free.

There is a huge shortage of donors.
Direct selling of organs would lead to all sorts of abuses, and should never be allowed, but at the moment there are simply too few people who elect to be donors.
If there was an annual amount paid to people with donor status on their licence, (which you could of course elect to drop from year to year) and that amount went up and down according to the needed supply (ie. if there are enough donors, the yearly amount paid to donors drops) then it would encourage a lot more people to be donors. In addition, if you DO have donor status and have been for a few years, then need an organ yourself, you should get either priority or at least your organ transplant costs reduced (which should also in turn reduce the cost of your medical insurance).

Even if it worked out to costing a few thousand dollars on average for an organ under this scheme, it would still be a small fraction of the total transplant cost, which

Of course all the same rules should still apply for donors as it does now - have to be really truly dead, given all attempts at resuscitation etc before your liver is given to someone else!

At a claimed cost of 628,000,000,000 and supposedly being able to house 100,000, it's a bargain too - only 6280 per person. Here in Aus, housing costs somewhere between 50,000 to about 100,000 per person for housing. (Roughly 100000 per bedroom room for a house, on average.)

I think the head positioning and input could be both dealt with by the same way - have a head mounted camera too (ideally it would be part of the glasses).
in a static environment ( say, a room or something) it should be possible to capture and triangulate fixed features in the room, and calculate your head position from them. you might have to go through some kind of calibration step if tracking feattures like wall edges or obkects that are an unknown distance and size, or you could use printed reference marks that are of a known size that you could place in your environment. I have seen some pretty effective position tracking of things with markers on them using OpenVL, to track a patterned marker on a cap, but if you turned this around and triangulated the camera's position from a fixed feature or two in a room, you would know the camera position/orientation and hence the head position.

Your hands within the same field of view could then be tracked and used for input - to make it easier for the system you could wear some kind of patterned gloves, like this http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/handtracking/ to type on a virtual keyboard. Downside: it's going to probably take a lot more more CPU than you have available on an arduino or something lightweight like that.

A lot of apps simply can't be threaded that well.
Even games, with all their graphical snd sound goodness can't use multiple cores that effectively.
you will have one heavy thread which is doing all the graphics, you can throw AI on to one or two threads, put sound on another and UI on another, plus networking and other IO could be on additiona threads, but the graphics thread will be the really heavy one, and the rest will be very lightweight in comparison. You can't break the graphics thread out to multiple threads because your 3d video card's graphics context has to be handled by the same thread.

Oops. Stuffed the screen size for the above mentioned glasses - they are actually 1920x1080, not 1600x1920. Got it mixed up with my laptop's 'almost hdtv' display resolution...