Uh... I actually met the dude once in an airport and shook his hand, just because it was interesting to meet him. I didn't do anything rude like blow up about the Vietnam War or anything, and he was nice enough and all.

I just can't see why anyone would want to lock lips with him. Sorry. It seems very unappealing.

Yes. The US GPS system has never been the only game in town. If they want to add their own, fine, go ahead. I'd love to have more navigational systems that are publicly avaliable so that receivers could be more reliable and acurate. The European system is not going to be fully functional for some time. The Russian Glonas system has global coverage but is not nearly as acurate as the US system in most cases, but they are upgrading it now. They only started coming out consumer-level with combined GPS/Glonass systems a few years ago. If the EU, China and maybe india get in on this, we'll only have better navigation

The thing about innovation is that it is, by definition, innovative, which means it's new and has not been done before. Hence, nobody sees it coming, because if they did, they would make it themselves.

I predict that in the next few years a product will come along which will change our lives, be enormously successful financially, spawn a whole subculture, become a cultural meme, result in a slew of spinoff products and accessories and make some people very rich. I should add that I don't actually know what this product may be, because if I did, I'd be patenting and selling it right now. However, it will happen, as it always has and will continue. Nobody will see it until it is here and then it will seem obvious.

This is as stupid as saying "I don't think there will be any surprises this coming year." There will be surprises, but if I knew what they were, they would not be surprising.

Products are constantly being produced (including software products) that draw on previous research and development by other entities. These can include any number of research groups and organizations: Universities, government, private companies etc.

The iPhone's Siri is a recent example. It uses research from DARPA and from various universities as well as earlier work by apple and by various researchers in plain speech command. Actually, most software products are not entirely independently developed with zero previous research or concepts going into them.

So why is this any different?

If Google put together the end product then they own it. They own the final software. The only question is whether there are aspects of it which require royalties or licensing to third parties. Of course, this is not an uncommon thing to have with software. You might not even realize it, but when you buy a piece of software, there are often portions of it that are licensed from third parties, such as codecs, file format types and even interface elements.

It's an issue for Google's legal department. I'm sure they can handle it.

This is what is known as "cloud to cloud lightning"

It's likely there's a lot of wifi and other traffic going around. You can probably overcome it with enough gain on the antennas. Directional antennas are best. You can send a beam out that is much higher power than the standard antennas that come with the router. You can go all the way up to dish-style antennas but that is probably going to be rather large and probably overkill.

If you can place routers and access points at multiple locations that would help too.

My advice would be this: Get multiple antennas and connect each to an independent router. Have them arranged in a circle to give full coverage - one facing north, one south, one east and one west etc, OR even do 8 in a circle. Make sure the beam width is good for this application. You can also add some dedicated (possibly even higher gain) antennas to cover areas of importance (like one pointed at a balcony area, one pointed toward the entrance area etc.

I'd recommend some good Yagi or directional panel antennas.

You can also put high gain external wifi antennas on the client side, like using high gain USB wifi adapters. That works okay for laptops, but for things like ipods, that is probably too cumbersome, so more focus on the infrastructure side.

Amplifiers can work too, but don't expect them to make the difference alone. Antennas matter more and amplifiers will boost your output signal but won't make as big a difference with the return signal. So I'd say use amplifiers but also lots of high gain antennas.

Oh, and this may, by the way, make it harder for others to get a good signal from their own wifi, but that's not your problem.

And a couple of important things to remember:
Trying to outpower everyone else's network may come down to being a pissing contest, but that doesn't mean you can't win.
Brute force works. If it doesn't work, that means you're not using enough of it.

It's not a big deal. Fox is a media company with very broad focus. They air sports, The Simpsons and Family Guy (both of which took some shots at Fox News) and plenty of other things. Fox is part of Newscorp, which admittedly has some pretty conservative-leaning news coverage on their Fox News Channel, but that's not exactly the same as Fox. There's some level of independence to the station management. More importantly, for a major network, ratings are more important than ideology.

I expect it will be good. It won't have Carl Sagan. It won't be the same. Style will probably be different to some extent. It will be a new take, but with the same name.

I expect it will be good because I know Dr. Tyson and he's really about the perfect choice for this. He's a big skeptic and won't let it degenerate to anything less than inspiring and very science savvy content. He's the perfect man for the job.

Pff... the damn thing is 300 feet down. Why hasn't someone just gone down and taken a look-see? That's not super-deep by technical diving standards. Of course, if they don't want to send anyone down, they could also drop a tethered camera or something. It just isn't that far down, really.

No, no it can't. The power density of ambient RF energy is nowhere near enough to run even the basic circuitry of a phone. Sorry.

There are always ways. It only depends on how much effort you want to put into it. You could use proxy servers to mask IP and change them frequently or even jump from one free wifi hotspot to another. You could repeatedly purge all your cache, cookies, history etc after every site you visit. You could use multiple computers. You could write scripts to send your browser clicking thousands of links and visiting thousands of pages to obscure the actual surfing behavior.

If worst comes to worst, you could travel across the country, nomadically roaming between random libraries, public internet terminals and wifi hotspots, each time using a different browser, operating system and site logins. Or you could just start using paper to get your information again.