It's always a good idea to have a rough map of where you think you're going, but be careful about getting too carried away with formal business plans. You'll meet lots of people educated in business who will tell you that you need to sweat blood over a comprehensive plan - to the neglect of everything else - and then tour the country with a finely polished road show pitching it to potential investors. They tell you this because it shines the spotlight on their own training and talents. In reality, successful software business development almost never works this way, unless you have a stellar track record with several big hits behind you already (in which case they're investing more in you than the specifics of your plan). As others here have pointed out, what matters most is your rapidly growing list of happy, paying customers. Don't let your focus get diverted too far from that.

The essential tension of adolescence through young adulthood (and maybe some old adulthood too) is between the need for acceptance (i.e., to "fit in") and the competing need to distinguish oneself (to be seen as special or unique in some way). It explains a lot of what goes on during those years.

To divide ice cream equally between two kids, have one dish it out and the other choose. My parents did this with my brother and me, and there was never anything to fight about afterwards. You'll never see more precise measurement in your life, though.

You can tell a lot about a person (or political party) by whom they choose to ridicule, and why. Gore never said he invented the Internet, but rather that he was instrumental in its creation. And it was quite true. This is what Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf had to say about the matter:

So the kids in the back of the class are laughing and shooting spitballs at the smart kid. It's Junior High all over again.

Because this will be its biggest consumer market. Just imagine: I can surround myself with icons of the glorious figure that is me, and they will make great gifts (suitable for worship) for all of my friends and followers as well. And who on this Earth wouldn't be interested in an ultra-realistic 3-D model of what I ate for lunch? You could almost recreate the experience of what it is like to be me, looking at my lunch.

It's not just regulation and consumer acceptance that limits the pace of technological change: it's also the need to amortize development costs over shorter and shorter product lifecycles (before being leapfrogged by competition). Does this imply that technology-driven markets will increasingly become "natural monopolies"? Not because of patent laws as we all fear, but because a monopolistic company can set the pace of innovation in its market such that a desired minimum ROI is achieved.

I know very little about them or where they came from, but I do know that the continued flow of hundreds of billions of dollars per year to who-knows-who depends on the inability of the US to extricate itself from this quagmire. And so now we have these public decapitations, clearly designed to inflame the public and create a political environment guaranteeing that the torrent of war money continues for years to come. And when that finally starts to slow, who doubts that some other convenient outrage will be perpetrated to start the cycle all over again?

I'd argue that the capacity to become interested in a subject to the point where you're motivated to spend a lot of time learning the hell out of it is a big part of what "intelligence" is all about. And yes, the top schools do select people who have this fire.

My first thought, exactly. Who would have thought that academics would equate intelligence (and other admirable traits, as well?) with academic achievement? Are there other ways in which this innate component of intelligence can manifest? Might cultural and socioeconomic factors - among other things - muddy the association?

I don't use Adblock, but I've been using this for years. I rarely see an ad unless it's served directly from the site I'm visiting, and it blocks a lot of malware as well. It has something like 16,000 entries, but doesn't seem to slow things down at all.

It's not like CO2 is some unwanted and avoidable by-product of burning hydrocarbons in oxygen. It's the main product of combustion, along with water. So the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions per mile is get more miles per gallon of fuel. Is that what they're promising?

So... A nationwide broadband monopoly is okey-dokey, then?

At least in bioiniformatics, the correction of p-values for multiple comparisons ("q-values") has been standard practice for quite a while now.

They don't and they know it, but science fiction fans are an important part of the public support that keeps their funding flowing, and this is just the kind of thing that appeals to that demographic.

These sound more akin to fuel cells than batteries. Swapping the things (or a sub-assembly) in an out - like propane tanks for a gas grill - might not be too big a deal if a mechanized infrastructure was in place.