NASA's budget is already pretty small, 17.2 billion. The current stimulus plan is valued at 135.15 billion. In other terms, NASA's budget would have covered 12.7% of the economic stimulus if allocated in that way. The type of reform you're talking about would require more than the entirety of NASA's budget. What is amazing to me is the number of jobs for our educated persons that are created with that 17.2 billion dollars and also the amount of technology we get back out of it. I understand you believe that we need to pump more into economic recovery but please look somewhere with deeper pockets than NASA for the money.

You realize that the way two factor security is supposed to work is that is requires you to know something and have something right? The way that two factor security is usually done from what I've seen is requiring a password that the client knows and a rolling code from a small device the client has. As long as a bank does not allow that same rolling code to be used twice it doesn't matter what kind of keystroke logging, mouse gesture capturing, or screen recording is used nor how fast it is sent to the bad guys.

For you car enthusiasts, it's like taking the engine with you when you leave the car. Even if the car is hot-wired, it's not going anywhere without that thing you still have.

You don't have many cars or buildings out in the ocean. Most of the Earth is covered by ocean. Most meteoric impacts are going to be in the ocean. The better question is "why haven't we seen more boats taken out by meteors?" However the odds are still greater that any given plane will be hit by a meteor than any given boat because airplanes travel over both land and water.

The only application where infofuses would actually outperform other forms of communication I can come up with is the transmission of a message from a location other than where the sender is located with little complication. Simply attach a normal long delay fuse to an infofuse atop a high structure such that it will light the infofuse at a predetermined time when someone will be looking. Essentially a data drop-off point. I can imagine several espionage scenarios where this could be useful. It would be much more difficult and noticeable to rig a lantern, semaphore, or radio system to do the same thing. It also beats dropping off a one-time pad encrypted note in that the receiver of the message is not required to be in physical contact with the message. In addition there's the prospect of signal interception or discovery. With some mechanical lantern or semaphore system the apparatus would likely have to remain after the message was sent, allowing for the possibility of reverse engineering the device to determine what message was sent. Once an infofuse burns up the best you can do is determine what signals were sent but not in what order.

Keep in mind that for the longest time something excel could do that calc couldn't was determine the linear regression for a set of data and display that regression equation on the graph. That's a fundamental difference I've encountered that's forced me to use Excel in the past. Open office can now display the regression equations on the graph but there are bound to be more fundamental differences out there.