Google should clearly get into the water business. The techniques they have developed for piping data from the great data lakes in upper Canada would really solve those water problems in the American southwest.

Data is more unlimited than water because we completely control its distribution. Water is plentiful in Chicago, for example, because it's directly next to a huge freshwater lake. In Los Angeles or Phoenix it's a much more complicated story. The middle of the US relies almost entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer, with attendant problems. Even the U.S. Southeast, which is a traditionally wet "humid subtropical" climate zone, has had a decade or so of rather severe drought-related problems. Water requires treatment; it requires physical plant; it requires nontrivial connections to every single portion of a city; it's a necessity; and a single point of failure can cause pressure loss over a wide area resulting in a very expensive repair. Bandwidth has none of these issues. It's limited only by the amount of cable the ISP is willing to run, and their hardware. Nothing as complex as aquifer physics is involved.

Nah. Your standard end user doesn't even understand the concept of software, really. I know people who think Windows is Office, and so on. These aren't people who are totally ignorant—they work with computers every day—they're just not very good at reading. Their excuse is usually "I don't want to think about that stuff, I want to get my work done," never realizing that thirty minutes of thinking about "that stuff" could save them hours of frustration. When I heard someone who's worked in a white-collar environment for fifteen years refer to Office 2007 as "Windows Word 2007," I nearly lost it.

Actually, it lists the results in multiple places. It's used to correct OCR at The Internet Archive. I don't think there's a specific list where you can see what was corrected by the reCAPTCHA method, although there is a post about it in their announcements forum.

Richard Feynman had a bit to say about textbook selection.

This is not an attempt to falsify the teaching of evolution. These backwards magical-thinking buffoons have no evidence, no tests, nothing to point to a different theory; they have a book. A book they believe trumps the evidence of our own eyes and our most advanced scientific methods. These people aren't asking for ID to be taught because they don't think evolution explains the evidence; they are asking for ID to be taught because they don't think.

Wait. Convince the pharmacist you're not going to drink isopropyl alcohol?