The Chinese and Japanese can both do a lot of shenigans with their US treasury reserves.

1) Blanket the market and buy as many call options as you can.
2) Announce that your treasury is dumping 100% of it's US treasuries, and you will only take hard assets or Euro as payment.
3)Stock prices now soar on inflation.
4)Exercise all your call options.
5)Blanket the market and buy as many put options as you can.
6)Announce that you have decided not to sell your US treasuries after all as the bids "weren't as high as you expected"
7)Stock prices plunge on deflation.
8)Exercise all your put options.
9) GOTO 1

You can't anonymize it. Any information given with enough detail to be useful is many times more than enough to reconstruct the relation of "anonymized" data points.

They should buy a data center and fill it with D. E. Shaw's special purpose hardware for doing particle simulations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_(computer) , and instead of proposing grants for new software development, propose grants to keep the data center's queue full of interesting chemical simulations to run.

Marketing campaign I am thinking guy with a bucket or water hose going at a pretty good clip. Some line concerning the need for something high bandwith like downloading the full Lord of the Rings trilogy off of Netflix, then guy clicks the menu option for 4G and some huge dude with a much bigger bucket or hose douses the guy.

Verizon should go two tier and rate cap. You get unlimited at 3G bandwidth, and then pay separate for data over so many GB when you have your phone in full bandwidth mode. One easy menu option, everybody stays happy.

There are two sides to a trade. By sending a buy signal this raises the stock price, so any sellers coming in right after get the benefit of a higher sale, even though they might not have any new information. It might mess up other day trading bots, but when it comes to stocks buyer beware.

Cringely does realize if he replaces the word "garbage" with "another nation's military satellites" this is going to get a lot of DARPA funding :p

Port Valgrind and I would probably start using OpenSolaris for development. I have it running under VirtualBox right now, kind of nice.