Opera has been spearheading a lot of innovations in browsers. Likewise, one can notice that Apple's OSX Lion may have taken some inspiration from Gnome-Shell. Most notably the idea of a flexible number of workspaces. Of course, no one knows whether this is really where they got inspired, but hey, at least some of us saw it first in Gnome and then in OSX. So I think being the spearhead of innovation in desktop environments and leading the way in innovation, would be a great new goal (or mission) for GNOME. It is well set up for that too, because it doesn't have nearly as much at risk as Apple or Windows have. This is a typical benefit of being small: more agility. Also, I'd like to point out that GNOME has, in my view, achieved more than what they said out to do. A *working* free desktop environment? Gee, this is more than just working! I personally prefer it over the OSX Lion desktop environment I use at work -- and Windows currently isn't really a player. GNOME has worked hard to make it to the top: now go and lead the way, at least for a while!

If everyone would just publish their papers on their web sites, as most computer scientists do (e.g., using bibbase.org), then this wouldn't be necessary. Of course, journals need to secure their funding, but I believe that with the web and the new open (peer) reviewing approaches, we don't really need journals all that badly anymore. Also, in computer science, e.g., it seems that there are now conferences that have higher standards of acceptance than the top journals in the respective fields. That is not to suggest to remove the concept of longer, more thoroughly reviewed articles though. They are important too, but could be reviewed and published in different ways (web). Print is so 19th century :-)

.. or are they just going to forget about the laser in the future and just use the accelerometer for that purpose? Sorry, but to me that doesn't seem quite patent worthy "a device with a motion sensor and a touch screen"? come on! I believe there are even already apps for that (using your touch-screen phone as a mouse).

You may want to consider a scientific workflow system. These systems handle both data storage (including meta-data and provenance -- where the data came from), and design and execution of computational experiments. If you are concerned about the complexity of the meta-data (e.g., pH value..) and would like to make sure to be able sort things according to this, you want to give "Wings" a try. You can try out the sandbox to get an idea: http://wind.isi.edu/sandbox.

In the annual RoboCup@home league they have robots following humans all the time and have been for the past few years. It's one of their standard challenges, e.g.: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKfP_Cz9oa0