J2ME? Palm/WebOS? iPhone? Android?

Are you saying that buying servers is the same thing as maintaining, backing up, securing, auditing servers? What is your threat profile? If NSA or Amazon hacking your data are realistic top concerns, by all means deploy your own datacenter with armed guards. If it's common crooks, big providers are more likely to discover and patch exploits, detect intrusions and withstands DDOS attacks. It's their nest egg and they focus on protecting it.

SF Bay Area, the birthplace of smartphones, badly needs dual sim phones. There are coverage gaps even with AT&T/Verizon, right alone highway 101 and major tech companies. Having a second prepaid sim would be a godsend for actually being able to call people when you need to. Especially if you want T-mobile unlimited plan rather than paying $1K phone bill because of a bug in one of your apps.

As opposed to what? Data on thousands of individual laptops? Servers in the hands of IT department in a company for which IT is not a core competency? I would think a cloud provider that specializes in this sort of stuff is less risky, all things considered.

Now, government secrets or say Coca Cola formula should be obviously stored in physically secured datacenter guarded by best security money can buy. Probably still not users laptops. But city gardening logs? I think Google Docs is fine.

Ergonomics is for 40 hours/week desk workers. If you are a gardening supervisor and spend most of the time interacting with workers, you can manage an hour/day hunched in front of a laptop filling in forms. In fact, you will prefer the flexibility to work anywhere, connected to a Windows XP cloud instance running your thousand custom applications. Obviously if you are going to spend most of the day at your computer, you should have a nice big monitor and a height adjusting desk.

Do all 8300 employees need individual desktops? This is not a software development company, and those machines still need to be managed, maintained and replaced. Keep big depos of $250 chromebooks where anyone can get one for temporary or permanent use at office or home. Then return when done, as still working or broken. No IT costs, as data is in the cloud.

For heavier use, provide computer labs with a choice of platforms, so if someone really needs to work on the latest version of Office or Photoshop, they can.

And of course, anyone who is expected to work on computer for hours every day, or handle sensitive data, should get a laptop/desktop of their choice with reasonable price constraints. Savings from all the other use cases will more than pay for the luxury.

Luckily all chromebooks come with multitouch touchpads which are perfectly capable of handling pinch/rotate gestures.

A half full bus is dramatically more efficient than each of the passengers driving their own car. Plus there are many alternatives to batteries for relatively few vehicles traveling fixed routes - trains, trolleys, natural gas, biodiesel. The first priority should be getting people to ride public transportation, even legacy one. The second is getting ones that can not into electric cars. This is not even on the radar.

$49 only gets you the Edison module, which is useless by itself. You also need a base board of some kind. The Edison module with the Arduino-compatible base board shown in the photos will set you back $99. Still a pretty good price. 3x more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but it is a lot more capable.

I'd get more excited about a 64-bit ARM embedded board, but those aren't available yet, other than a $6000 development board from ARM.

Every revolution results in the most brutal, morally crude, religiously exploitive group coming to power. This is a simple function of a free for all fragfest. If we are so revolted by some head chopping, what about French revolution and its guillotine? If US and other countries didn't launch military intervention after similarly brutal bolshevik revolution in Russia, we could have avoided much of cold war, including current Ukrainian episode. Any country would want to establish a friendly buffer zone after being repeatedly attacked from the same direction many times.

We have nothing to offer to people of Iraq. The government we installed last time supported Shias killing Sunnis. Now it's the other way around. To change that, minds of millions of people need to be changed. It's not a matter of installing one government or bombing one rebel faction. When there is a visionary with big following, we could try to support him, like German's who helped install Lenin into power in exchange for a big piece of territory. All the good it ultimately done them.

A rule based language. 1000's of productions can be waiting to fire by querying a database (lhs waits, fires, triggers rhs updates). In my mind, its a bit like a seeing a VHDL language meet a database wrt the parallelism that comes out from it.

Programs written in it don't look at all like programs you normally would write in the life of a typical coder.

Most education should be free or very cheap. Sure, if you need access to a particle collider or DNA sequencing, these things cost money. But for learning math, programming and majority of other subjects, there are excellent free ebooks and software. We should mandate use of textbooks that are free online and free software that runs on most devices that would be available to student's family (Windows, Android, Chromebook etc). Even if minimum wage is $15/hour, the cost to have one person who continuously circles the classroom during the test and ensures that only approved software is used is trivial.