Sure, immigrants are probably good and have skills and it's hard to compare people in IT.
But what matters is that the H1B program is designed to give the employers an unfair edge over immigrant employees as well as citizens.

If the H1B program was really just about skills we would simply give the people temporary green cards and make them conditional to paying enough taxes or something like that.
Then the employees would be able to switch jobs easily and would not be forced to stay with an employer they don't like just because the employer is sponsoring them for a green card (which can take 5 years I believe).
If immigrants are able to switch jobs as easily as Americans then they can get good salaries and you have a real job market. If they can't switch at will like the American employees then they are creating a bias in the job market. That's obviously not the fault of the immigrants but it's definitely a flaw of the program (that is, if you value people and/or free market).

Well you are kidding, but I expect that with Bluetooth 4.0 this is actually a killer app.
And there is a even a super successful kickstarter on the topic:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-e-paper-watch-for-iphone-and-android

But yeah, I don't think you need Microsoft for that. You need standards (e.g. Bluetooth 4 is needed), component manufacturers and some good designers.

What makes you think the bulk of the money is going to aggregators?
The only money the aggregator makes is the one from people who click on the ads on the aggregation page.
If the aggregated stories are interesting you expect people will click on the stories instead of the ads (after all it's not an Ad aggregation page...).
And then they are on the newspaper's website and if they click on ads there the aggregator doesn't make a dime.
So basically the only way the aggregator makes the bulk of the money is if the articles are shallow and uninteresting.

Note that there was a very enlightening discussion on what makes people click through on TheRegister's podcast years ago.
And basically the guy explained you get more clicks if you tell a bogus Apple or Google story than with an interesting piece with actual content.

So I would say that we get the news we deserve by clicking or not clicking and aggregators are not really the issue.

GPS/Atomic clock is better than NTP. It's a system to distribute time that will have a 400ns precision (probably a couple microseconds once you reach the actual servers in the data center).
If you use NTP or message passing you can't synchronize data centers more accurately than a couple milliseconds (assuming you have paths that are quite stable between them as transit time can be corrected).
So basically GPS/Atomic clock lets you synchronize 2 systems that are far apart more precisely and without having to make them communicate.
Note that Atomic clocks protect them from GPS outages, so they can really rely on the timestamps.

Atomic clocks would take a couple years to drift. So they have the time to hire some ninjas or lobby politicians to get this fixed before there is any impact.

So the solution is simple. Let's all wear burqas to protect our privacy!
I believe you can also analyze people's gaits and recognize them that way. So let's all use Segways.
That would be a rather funny dystopian future, no?
Or I guess we could start making a few laws defending our right to some anonymity.

Impossible, Phone company has struck a back alley deal with RivalCorp that ensures that neither of them will build the towers.
This is good for shareholders of both companies as they will reap the profits of garanteed and unlimited price gouging!

What is producing? Many patents can be implement with a couple lines of javascript or similar. So a troll would just need to have a coder write a proof of concept implementation, put it on the troll's production server. And voila, it's produced.
For easy combination of hardware and software, you can probably do something similar. Have a geek put together a prototype from a PC or tablet, some software, put it on a website for sale for 5000$. Make sure to keep a prototype that works.
I am not sure that would be really onerous to patent trolls as apparently they are getting away with 29 billion dollars every year.

The Roku with the game remote is about 85$ or so. But it doesn't run Android unfortunately, so you need to write proprietary scripts and there is no browser etc.
Apart from not running Android, the main issue with the Roku is that it's not open and they take steps to block cool scripts and websites that allow you to access Youtube or Hulu or other normal video sites. Apparently Roku has to be cosy with content producers and middlemen and so they make sure you can't use the Roku as a cheap and convenient PC. If they did that you could access content that's free for PC users but on your TV and it would ruin the market for Hulu+, Netflix and other companies that sell subscriptions.

So I expect that a box that gives the user a lot of freedom will meet a lot of resistance from the content producers and middlemen as they try to preserve the very high revenues of the TV market.

They can also install crapware and get paid for that. That may help offset the license.

That's not appeal to authority. Appeal to Authority is when somebody says "I am the expert, believe me and don't check the facts". Very unlike the current situation. You are welcome to read through as many publications as you feel like, you are free to participate in the science yourself.
But that's not practical because it would be a full time job, so you need to do what we all do for areas where we can't afford to become experts: identify the best sources, estimate how trustworthy they are assess their current level of knowledge and certainty etc.
Climate science is science and with a minimum amount of checking and research you can tell the crackpots from the serious people. And with some further reading you can get an idea of the serious people's arguments and the level of confidence there is that they are right (i.e. how much data they have, how many different ways they used to reach the conclusion, what's the statistics relevance of the data etc.)

This is definitely science and nobody is asking you to take it on faith as everything is published and debated constantly.
Every time I have seen studies denying climate change they were based on very shallow reasoning and it didn't take long to go through it and see it was crap. On the contrary the evidence for climate change is much more in-depth, comes from many sources and uses very clever methods (looking at trees, animals, ice, satellite data, temperature etc.).

That's a rather accurate and complete description.
I only have a couple things to add.

The quoted price is what you risk paying if you don't have insurance. So a high quoted price is something good for the insurer as it will scare you into buying their overpriced services.
Some insurers might pay more than others for the same service, so one could think they would want to reduce the "quoted price" so they all benefit by paying less. But I am more and more convinced they actually benefit too much from the absence of reasonable public prices and therefore are trying to keep the non-transparent pricing in place.

I am not familiar with many drugs, but the few I know make it clear that your insurer doesn't care about getting you a good price for drugs. The copay of drugs can be 2 to 3 times more than the list price or quoted price of the same drug in France (whereas food, clothing, gas and many other commodities are rather cheaper in the US). This is a clear indication that the insurance company acts like a broker that helps you buy services but it actually doesn't care if you get ripped off. The only meaningful difference is that in France, the insurance company negotiates the list price down. So everybody, even those who don't have insurance benefit from the negotiation.

If we were able to switch insurance providers easily, we would be able to choose the best brokers and also the best coverage. The only issue is that you don't want freeloaders in the system, so you need a minimum level of coverage that people must get. Otherwise they can just go with a dummy insurance for 2$ and then when they are sick they can just benefit from our humanity (i.e. we are human so we won't let them without care when they show up at the emergency room).

Overall, healthcare is an issue that is both social and individual. Therefore it can't be simply handled by pure market or pure governmental solutions. But at least we should make sure we have working market components in the solution and working governmental components too.

That's really an intriguing interpretation of the economics at play. It makes you wonder why anybody would ever pay for penetration testing or audits of any kind...

Well, that was after a long stagnation. And the disruption was so major that there was little connection between the old business and the new. A customer with a Treo or Palm V probably had the same shock switching to an iPhone or a Palm Pre.

Also, webOS came after the iPhone. That makes it less innovative, since most of the differences between an old Pam were pioneered by the iPhone:
- get rid of pen, use fingers
- capacitive multi touch makes keyboard less needed, so get rid of it.
- get modern OS and not 16/32 bit kludgy memory address space
- get real browser
- PDA swallows the phone and not the reverse

Personally, for me the Treo was the time when Palm failed to innovate. Notably, they rejected the low end. I remember seeing 100$ phones, 100$ Palms. But there was no 150$ Palm-phone, only a very expensive Treo.

So, in the end, I'd say Palm is really a company that failed to innovate in time. And note this is really a case of innovating and not inventing. If you look at my bullet list, nothing was really groundbreaking in 2000. So it's not that they were unlucky and the guys in the labs didn't have the "Eureka moment". It's that they didn't look at what was possible and put it together quickly enough.

That's really quite sad, Palm was a company that had understood some really important things about simplicity and focus on the core features.

Actually, Wired has an article on this this month. And it turns out the classic hooks is still better in some respects and are preferred for some occasions where strength, speed and feedback are best.
I suppose when you are outside your home (i.e. where people can see you and gather anecdotal statistics as the ones we discuss), you might want the most reliable, fast and simple gear.
So some of the people we see with old style gear might have more advanced prostheses at home or at work for tasks that benefit from them.