Subject line says it all: the government is notoriously stupid when it comes to picking winning technologies (Helo Solyndra! Hello corn subsidies for ethanol fuels!) but prizes like this always work because they ONLY pay for success. Even if you sweetened the pot to $10M, you could still have around 50 X-prize type competitions instead of a single Solyndra fiasco.

Here's how it works when you don't have the USA Credit Card to use: 1) announce a prize and set a goal that has to be met. 2) researchers/industry/investors get excited because an X-prize winner will almost certainly attract more investment. 3) VCs, universities, businesses invest their own money into research. 4) Eventually a winner meets the stated goal and they (probably including the losers!) now have new technologies to play with.

Minimal expense. Maximum use of the competitors' creativity and drive. Maximum reward. Why do we need to let the feds pay off their campaign contributors with our money?

Science, bah! The answer is obvious: it's spring break in Australia and all the birds are trying to hook up and get drunk. What they should be looking for are tiny, soaked T-shirts.

Windows is so stupidly far ahead of Android and Linux when it comes to sharing rich data between applications

Windows also made the sharing of viruses across applications so easy that nearly anything you access might be infected. Hopefully someone in Redmond remembered this teeny-tiny problem.

I store hydrogen at room temperature all the time. My method is stable, simple and has no possibilities of explosion. The only trick is to get it away from the oxygen molecules when you need to use it.

While some of these designs are brilliant (and I haven't read all of them), what I would want as a poor rural homeowner is expandability and repairability. Sure, you can a cheap/easy from-the-factory solution today but what happens in six months when you need to patch a hole in the wall? To be a truly transformative force, the ideas behind the design should be easy to apply with local materials/labor even if the final cost goes above $1000 eventually.

That's not their target. Look at their acquisition of Kongregate... the real goal is to have a good quality casual gaming device that you don't necessarily have to smear up with fingerprints. My guess is that it will have a circa-2006 GPU/CPU setup. Good enough for WoW mk 1 and anything you see online for free these days (which will be one of their big selling points!)

Further prediction: there will be a big push on Kongregate, et al, to make sure games will work on this new device flawlessly.