I don't have one yet but an electrician recently quoted me under $300 (USD) for a whole-house surge protector with a ginormous coverage guarantee (maybe $20K?), installed in the circuit breaker box. No it doesn't provide protection for the internet line. But over my lifetime I've probably spent close to $300 for surge protector strips, and my TV and heat pump and refrigerator are still at risk. So this makes some sense now.

Kim Stanley Robinson had some interesting insights in his Mars trilogy (science fiction, of course). It puts a lot of things in perspective, in terms of how Mars might be populated and whether everyone still likes everyone else when they're done.

I bought "The Tent" on a whim. It's a small book of really short stories - 3 or 4 pages. None are related to one another, and every one will stretch both your mind an your horizons. It's a fantastic example of sparse writing: major concepts coming across in very few words. I think my mind would explode (in the nicest way) if Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. LeGuin ever collaborated on a story.

Genetically-engineering decaf coffee beans is the only profitable option for the coffee companies. Natural decaf reduces their costs by eliminating the decaffeination step. Adding more caffeine wouldn't be significantly more profitable: the current user base simply drinks another cup, so they're paying for extra caf already. The flavor options just redirect sales from one part of the coffee market to another; they neither increase profits nor decrease costs.

The Warsash Maritime Academy uses (or at least used to use) miniature ships to train captains how to maneuver oil tankers.

http://gizmodo.com/5285866/tiny-adorable-oil-tanker-makes-pilots-better-trained-slightly-awkward

Boogity boogity boogity!

http://www.amazon.com/Discover...

Daniel Boorstin, Librarian of Congress (1975 - 1987) wrote The Discoverers. It's a book about the people and events surrounding some very early, essential discoveries. Some of the discoveries include

Time (remember, prior to clocks each day had hours of differing duration. The 12 daylight hours were longer in the summer, and shorter in the winter.)

Maps and map coordinates (such as the idea that they should be drawn to scale, or that coordinates were not evil)

the Compass

Money

It's history, not the future view you're discussing, but it does give lots of great insights into the discovery of things that fundamentally changed the world.

Mine's a Logitech, probably an M570 but the print's wearing off 'cuz I use it so much. I started with one of the centered-marble trackballs. It forces my middle finger into a somewhat unnatural position, as it has to be over the trackball for me to reach the buttons with my other fingers. Now that I'm on the M570, my carpal tunnel issues have stopped almost completely.

So yes, for some of us the thumb-operated marble is the way to go.

Dyslexia may explain why you don't need to be fully involved. It's my understanding that a lot of things work differently in the dyslexic mind vs. the non-dyslexic mind. Some are good, some are bad. Ask Richard Branson, Scott Adams or Steven Spielberg.

However, most of the population isn't dyslexic, and for them to contribute to or benefit from the meeting, they do indeed need to be fully mentally involved. What works for you doesn't necessarily work for your coworkers, or neighbors, or...

If you really feel that you don't need to be attentive, I'd suggest that you show some respect for your coworkers and simply dial in to the meeting. You'd be showing respect to them by not behaving in a way that annoys the crap out of them, while you're right in front of them.

Slow-moving, heavy particles. How did they figure out it was me?

See the May 1993 issue of Communications of the ACM, which was all about K-12 education. We here in Western culture have a history of telling girls and young women "don't even try doing {math | science | technology}, you can't do it, women are no good at that." And they hear it from both peers and adults. And they hear it from both women and men. When you hear something enough times, you start to believe it no matter how farfetched it is. Modern politics is based on that concept.

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/1993/5

Now that society is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints...Only a stainless steel (shrew) can be at home in this environment.

Thanks to Harry Harrison for predicting this one.

Pretty close, good guess.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_off_the_nose_to_spite_the_face

Features like stream I/O support were in COBOL in the 80's / 90's. As was linking compiled COBOL to compiled non-COBOL. It was one of the very first portable languages (per Wikipedia). Substringing and multidimentional arrays were easy. And when I took my years of COBOL to C++ class, the instructor told me I was "too structured" - the COBOL I'd been writing was more structured than the C++ he was used to seeing. While a lot of people only needed simple COBOL, it actually had a lot of advanced features available back in the late 80's.

Back in 1961, if you were trying to create a billing system for a big company, your options included COBOL, Fortran, assembly language and not much else. Programmers in the 60's were grateful for the ease of COBOL when used in a business setting, which (back then) consisted mostly of reading punch cards and creating pretty reports for pointy-haired bosses. COBOL made their lives much easier at that time.

Easy to write, easy to structure, very versatile, capable of doing menial tasks to tons of data quickly. Doesn't sound too bad to me.

Most computer languages are horrible if you choose to make them horrible. My point is that you don't have to make COBOL horrible, and most COBOL programmers don't.

It's more typing than most languages...but it's not horrible unless an inexperienced programmer chooses to make it horrible. Or unless you haven't spent much time with it in a business environment.