Use Qt/ Win32/ Perl/ VB/ GCC - well just about anything You are using libraries written by someone else. For Perl it is called CPAN and is an advertised strength. The only person who arguably does not use a third party library is someone who programs FGPA arrays without a macro assembler. Engineers do not make their own screws and screwdrivers anymore, and whilst it may well be interesting to do so, the industrial revolution tells us that there are better things to do with our time. The points made on trying to make integration easier are useful.

No-one knows what intelligence is. If we did, some smart person would have done it by now.
We are not really making much progress towards answering what consciousness is.
This could be because there simply are not the words to define what we are talking about.
After all and with many apologies to Neitzsche 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay codeless'
The best promise / progress I have seen is the brute-force reverse engineering of some brain functions. You do not need to analyse or understand, just copy.
This includes PET scanning of humans in a vegetative state, Seeing what a cat sees through the implantation of electrodes.
I think I read some researcher is just about able to simulate an ant brain with reasonable fidelity.
Simulating a human brain or equivalent will also imply the ability to receive / simulate and process all the inputs and outputs to and from the brain - i.e. you need the body. This is a big job.
Before we get too eager or depressed, remember that people were making experiments on birds - trying to reverse engineer them - for some hundreds of years (Da Vinchi) before we managed to make powered flight work.
One problem for the AI people is that once they solve a problem to any extent, it is not AI anymore! - remember context sensitive help and text recognition used to be part of AI.

they knew they would be arrested by the grammar police.

Netbook makers will maximise their profits.
If this is through selling windows / intel they will do just that.
I personally think wintel came along with appropriate inducements.
I also think that they asked themselves - does it play BB Iplayer HD / Youtube HD without stuttering at that price - and decided to come back when it does.
No point in a 100usd device if it does not work (whatever you define work to mean).
In the UK, if something like this does not work with Iplayer, it will be thought to be broken (ipad).

There was a uk based comic called Warrior that had a recurring character in one of the strips called Zork. I think the character was based on earlier work from another underground comic - possibly us based.

It is not that a good CEO can contribute 200x as much as us, more that a bad CEO can destroy much more than 200x as much and the high pay is seen as insurance against that.

... Chinese prodigy has hyperdrive in lunchbox ... sounds like one of those films on bittorrent.

I recommend Nudge by Thaler&Sunstien The book discusses how people structure defaults for the choices you make, from the positioning of goods in a supermarket to healthcare to choosing a school and (sort of) attempts to describe a philosophy for working out what default is a 'good' default to present. I largely agree with them. Default choices have been set since time immemorial. Default religion (in the UK) :- Church or England, a few hundred years ago if you chose a non-default religion you may well have experienced adverse consequences.

Grab the silver lining with both hands!

Obligatory wiki link : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
google - 6 ebay - 4 amazon - 6.
The .com is sort of invisible and nowadays expected, which is why it is valuable.
Basically people in the mass do not readily recall things over 9 characters long, but can recall information that is 'chunked'
So flibberty.gibbet will probably be remembered but flibbertygibbet.org probably will not.
Another good analogy is that there are only so many sensible first names and so the chances are that someone else on your office / class has the same first name, but it is unlikely that someone else nearby has the same first/lastname combination.
So, on balance I think this is a potentially good thing
Consider
domino.pizza and domino.ibm and domino.games - you know it makes sense

well, about 5000 such chips would do the job.