Here is my dream: I go for a one hour walk each day in nature before starting my work day, and could use a voice system through my headphones:
listen to email, do short replies, flag some emails for later action, etc ...
I would then start the day with probably 20 times less items in my inbox which would be great!
As long as it does not eat up 100% of the free time I have...

thanks for sharing that with us. I'll keep this in mind.
Maybe what should be put on those usb keys is data more than software.
open source books.
pictures of family event.
videos of family events.
software only for the guy you know is a nerve, and especially if he does not have a good Internet connection. Eclipse for your nephew starting to program, Gimp for the one into pictures and special effects. AND OFFER YOUR TIME TO INSTALL AND EXPLAIN THE SOFTWARE, THAT'S THE TRUE GIFT!

Also, I would fill each key with things targeted to the person you're giving it to. Make it feel personal.

Definition i remember from school is: "a fruit is what grows after the flower dies, and contains the plant seeds".

... justifying tera-hertz processors!

I think people have absolutely no idea what artist lives are like, especially painters. And the replies i got to my post show it clearly.
Most painters live in misery all their lives, selling their paintings for almost nothing.
Then a few become famous, and it's mostly the art industry that make money off of them.
Sorry, but the car analogy does not work here!!!
The Germans are doing something in the right direction to try to get the money to the artists instead of to the resellers.
It may not be perfect, but it's better than the system we have in other countries.
In the music industry, no one is surprised to see that the artist or their kids get some money decades after they created a music. The Germans are trying to do a bit of this for painters, I say it goes in the right direction.

it's 80% of electricity energy that comes from Nuclear power in France.
it's not 80% of ALL energy.
Also, any nuclear plant has to be by a very big source of water for cooling. So any nuclear plant on earth is at risk of flooding. It's not a French specific problem.

It's not a bad idea after all. Look at this scenario:
An artist does a painting, sells it while he's not famous for a thousand euros, then some time later he becomes famous and his painting is sold to a new owner for a million euros.
Shouldn't the artist get some of that money? or should only the "art industry" feed on it?

well, it's attracted lots of comments from slashdot nerds, so somehow it fits slashdot

Here we don't have emergency calling when the phone is locked (at least not on iPhone). So it would not happen as easily.
People do get drunk here too, but calling emergency is so well hidden in our phone system that it would be hard to do for a drunk guy.

totally agree about your remote desktop on phone analogy.
new simpler uis from unity or gnome 3 are not all that bad though.
unity has lots of shortcuts:
I have "windows" 2 launching or switching to firefox

you say you can't get to the list of your multimedia apps. Here is how you do on unity:
"windows" a
then click on all applications and select multimedia.
Now a great thing on fedora with gnome 3:
"Alt" "Tab" lets you switch between apps grouped by type. I usually have 5 terminals, 4 skype windows, etc ... and it's a pain cycling through them in gnome 2, windows XP, etc ...

If the UI coders could just listen to users, they would create great UIs, innovating, keeping what people like, innovating again, etc ... at least the gnome and unity guys are innovating ...

+1 piece of junk orbiting earth! 170 million$ burned. Didn't people the money here instead of orbiting earth?

Sure, but we're talking of the ratio of failed Android devices / total Android devices. And that does say something on the quality of the average Android device.
Android is succesful in the low-end of the smartphone market. Not too surprisingly those devices are low-end hardware and fail more.

centos is a clone of redhat getting all the work done by redhat for free. If you work in a for profit organization and will use the servers in production, i.e. making money, then it would be fair to pay redhat support if your company like so much redhat that they chose a clone of it. Otherwise, they could go for Ubuntu or other free Linux, and participate in debugging and developing it, that would be fair too. If your company is willing to save a few hundred dollars per year to get redhat's work for free, then you should question if you should stay. I mean I bet you do some kind of internal support on Linux machines for them, and they clearly don't value that much ...

one thing's for sure, it will be hard to type with both hands on those droids

the machines will take our work. It was said in the 19th century. Look what happened, 2 centuries later, we have a few more billion jobs.