Bill Gates frustrated because Microsoft is irrelevant in mobile.

Europe feeds itself and then some, and can likely do so for the foreseeable future; it doesn't need the increased yields and cheaper food that GMO adoption would produce.

Africa needs GMOs; cheaper food and nutrient-enhanced crops could save many lives there.

Africa can't adopt GMOs as long as they have to sell to Europe, and while Europe has its OMG-NO-GMO policies in effect.

Europe's anti-GMO policies are starving people in Africa. The morality of this is questionable.

Vernor Vinge coined the term.

And we really don't want it.

See above. One gram of uranium can replace a thousand kilograms of any chemical fuel.

Here. Refined nuclear fuel has roughly a million times as much energy per gram as any chemical source. Even counting the ore and refining, you just have to move much less stuff to get your energy - 1/100 to 1/1000 as much.

Built into my eyeglasses, encrypted link to a server *I* own which anonymizes my queries, nobody gets my data off it without a subpoena.

Google and the government can both go jump off a cliff.

Yes, the tax code is screwed up, but it's the only game in town. Unlike people with little disposable income, you can choose to do stuff that will reduce your taxes. Some of them are a pain, but they can cut your taxes by a third or more, mostly by doing stuff you are already doing or ought to be doing.

You have a house, and probably deduct your mortgage interest.

Do either/both of you have access to a tax-advantaged retirement plan? 401K, IRA, whatever - you should save at least everything your employer matches.

Do either/both of you use enough health care that a Flexible Spending Account or Health Savings Account would win? If you can predict your health care spending, you can probably pay for most of it in pre-tax dollars.

Gentlemen, you're right - I haven't looked closely at Xerox in a year or two. Ms. Burns had the right promoted-from-within credentials to run Xerox without grossly screwing it up, but it appears she did so anyway.

This just solidifies my plan to sell the Xerox stock I've had since 1988.

... which has had all female CEOs since 2001.

Xerox is not as exciting as HP, but its CEOs have not done large, showy reorganizations that destroyed once-proud solid engineering traditions, so there's that.

What I don't like is the ridiculous way that the majority of the year is DST. DST used to be approximately half the year (end of April to end of October). It got extended for stupid, venal reasons:

* Politicians wanted to look like they were "doing something" about the energy crisis
* Certain businesses make more money during DST (basically any that sell outdoor activity gear), so they support any extension

DST should be half the year, max.

I don't want to relive my life in real time. I want to remember what I promised in the meeting last week, where I'm supposed to show up for lunch, and where I left my wallet this time.

And, I want to do it with one interface, without making an effort to take notes.

A box that has a GPS unit and a database of state boundaries. It is attached to your car, and it logs how far your car moves within each state. It does no long-term path logging - its only purpose is so you can bring it to your state DMV once a year, get its totals read for your state, and get a bill for highway maintenance.

This thing must be open-source, so we can all trust that it's not a Big Brother tracking box.

Just put a bag of iron oxide and aluminum powder next to the hard disk and stick a piece of magnesium ribbon into it.

One match, and I guarantee no readable data will be found in the resulting puddle of slag.

My neighborhood has very reliable utilities - the lines are underground and we are ~5 miles from a major power substation. Big swaths of the DC Metro area have lost power and comm for days at a time during extreme weather - my house has lost power for about an hour total in the past 15 YEARS.

Anyway, the last time we lost power for 20 minutes or so was in the middle of the derecho storm. During that event, we also lost Comcast cable, AT&T cell phone signal, and Verizon land-line. That's the first time I've EVER noticed a land-line outage.

In addition to their efficient global operations, cash heap that supports volume purchasing of stuff like flash RAM, and investments in processes like unibody machining, that is.