It's such basic science that you can do it in your kitchen. Take a look at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8394168.stm and see a simple experiment you can replicate yourself

I just came back from a conference in France including a maker faire element. Plenty of geeky/artistic women there, and you'll have a huge amount of fun. Just go with an open mind, and try things you wouldn't normally do. Another thing to try might be http://dorkbot.org/ - kinda hard to describe - they do "strange things with electricity" but another creative/tech mix. Take a look and see if there is a group near you.

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Of course no-one would complain if it wasn't for the fact that Microsoft has probably caused each individual slashdotter many many man-hours (months? years?) of pain and anguish trying to make a stupid DOS|Windows|Win NT|Win95|Win98|Win2000|WinXP|etc... machine work as it should do. Hell I remember how difficult it was to get the Network edition of Windows 3.11 to do TCP/IP!!! Even if we abandoned Microsoft for more reliable alternatives, it continued to cause us pain because of friends and family who needed our help and we couldn't refuse.

I repeat, if Microsoft had made a reliable fast product (I still feel sad that OS/2 died), no-one would be complaining. So, yes, given that Gates was personally responsible for running the company that made many many hours of our lives a misery with a thoroughly mediocre OS, I would say quite a few of us have a problem with him for good reasons.

And no, having made your money as a convicted monopolist, spending it in a philanthropic way does not remove the reasons to dislike him. I am glad that, having made billions of dollars, he is spending it in this way, but I would much rather he hadn't made it in the first place, and just maybe, we would have had a very different software industry based on sharing of code and tools that people in the third world could have afforded to join.

You're right. I once used a sci-fi Novel by Brian Aldiss to prove that a concept wasn't new. For controlling with other appendages take a look at www.fufme.com - this has been around since the dot.com boom

Don't you think Jeff Han might just have some prior art on this? This link http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html shows his multitouch interface more than a year before Apple came out with their iPhone and before the Apple patent was filed.

I wish I held the cards. The world would be a different place :-) However, I have a deep and abiding suspicion that you are 100% correct.