If anyone didn't spot the reference: http://www.giantbomb.com/shodan/3005-423/ Shodan was the baddy AI from System Shock, classic 90s FPS.

Nice, but citation needed.

Universal education was an invention of the enlightenment, so started coming in mid-18th century e.g. universal primary education was introduced in, say, Austro Hungarian empire by Empress Maria Theresa during 1740/50s.

A couple more

• The LASER
• Superconductor (concept)
• Superconducting wires
• Particle accelerators

The list is endless

Agreed. There is a lego clone called megabloks - that uses the same interface as lego but much cheaper. If you mix lego with megabloks, it is clear that the megabloks build quality is far inferior, leading to crap buildings that fall over. lego is actually decent stuff.

The ability to have autonomous vehicles is immensely powerful. Flying drones is stupid and can be dismissed out of hand - but the technology to do this with the road network is already here.

The bread I make at home lasts about a week. Store it in a bread bin or a bag on your bread and yours will to.

There is an interesting study where they gave a bunch of monkeys some dolls and diggers. The female monkeys went to play with the dolls, the male monkeys went to play with the diggers [citation needed, maybe someone into developmental psychology has it]... just one of those things...

Oh, I didn't realise they had been here already http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Founder. Oh what, you don't mean some ancient race of star travelling shape shifters, you mean a bunch of guys right. Okay, just checking.

I used to have an application that would let me use the keyboard to find and launch applications. I had to remember quite long key combinations, which was a pain, but I could do a manual search for them if I needed to. But then windows 3.1 came along and ever since then it never seemed to work quite so well...

Posted from my Linux Mint laptop... it just works tx. It's an OS, its job is to "just work". If you notice it, that's a problem.

Googling around - looks like proprietary bs to me

Should also look at test framework/test coverage. Gives a good idea of how many bugs you will hit...

Been reading Le Carre?