I doubt the USA will ever build a significant natural gas refueling station network to let it take advantage of cheaper natural gas for transportation

Commercial trucking may go to natural gas. Once that's well along, getting it deeper into the suburbs for light vehicles may not be a stretch.

You'd probably have gotten an amused and approving 'd'oh!' from your co-workers over the bios thing if you didn't already have a reputation for being the over-anxious newbie. The lesson is this: don't rub their noses in your eagerness to learn everything. It's not as impressive as you think it is. They've already figured out how much new stuff is actually useful in their lives. You will, too. Celebrate your actual successes (like the bios thing) modestly and with good humor.

Scientific installations used to use Solaris a lot. Linux isn't better. It's just cheaper.

...so it won't be at all unusual to not see people wearing these.

Ever seen a woman wearing an in-ear phone?
Ever seen a man wearing an in-ear phone and not thought it looked silly? Or that he likes his technology a wee bit too much?

OEMs are more pragmatic than that. If it's a salable tech that is already developed and offered by a major player like Intel, they'll use it, whether it smells of Apple seconds or not.

OMG the horror. People making social connections and finding things to talk about.

I don't just want an elected official to do what I say. If I'm honest I'll admit that I don't give things that aren't my full-time job enough consideration to make decisions I want acted on. I want my elected official to spend more time considering it that I did. I want him to take into account my wishes, and the wishes of everyone else he represents, but also do some research that I didn't do, surround himself with experts that I don't have access to, and talk to people that aren't in my social circles, and make a better decision than I can. I vote for people I hope can do these things with diligence and integrity, not people who will vote the will of a million uninformed people.

The task proves difficult, so we denigrate the task?

"Having to fool a human" is not the point. Fooling a human is a measure of achievement, not an end in itself. Yes, a machine that can solve human problems but doesn't appear to be human is a useful thing. But one that appears to be human demonstrates specific capabilities that are also very useful. Natural language processing, for one. Serving as a companion is another, possibly creepy but technically awesome and potentially game-changing one. Being able to fool a human is a demonstration of proficiency in these kinds of things.

They can be unfair with flat-rate pricing just as easily as they can with metered pricing.

iPhone users use less data on average because many of them don't even need a data plan. But they must pay for one. A "high-end 4G Android device", on the other hand, is more likely to be chosen by the spec-optimizing, lives-on-the-internet, gonna-use-everything-I-paid for geek crowd.

Blowing a mod point to say this is a geek pipe dream. Normal people don't give a rat's ass about geek dogma.

Amazon reviews are so thoroughly gamed it wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn there's a campaign/reward system in place for highlighting passages in ebooks that Amazon is more than happy to ignore. Some of their "top reviewers" sell search optimization services and are brazen enough to advertise them in their Amazon profiles.

*than is apparent

More than you might think. Not that those two are huge, but the same people are also everywhere else, including slashdot. Probably not so much on Facebook. Some people spend an inordinate amount of time online and have multiple personas. They spend so much more time online than most people they skew the statistics. You can't really say X% are doing A and Y% are doing B because mostly the same people are doing both.

There are fewer people online that is apparent.

We're so used to ignoring things that look like ads or links to other stories that we fail to notice the images down the column at the right are, in fact, the images we're looking for.