This seems a rather mercenary outlook to me. You are asking for suggestions on how to spend your spare time with the goal of keeping yourself employed, without regard to whether you would enjoy the subject or process.

I'm all for goal-driven careers, but studies show that the most successful people are the ones who like what they do. It largely doesn't matter whether the skill is the most "in demand", it only matters whether the skill is in demand "enough". This is illustrated by successful people in (what we would consider) pedestrian careers such as furniture sales, property rental, or owning the local laundromat (which, BTW, is the most common way to be successful).

The first step is discovering what you enjoy. The easiest way to do this is to spend 1 hour in quiet solitude. This is unexpressibly difficult if you've never tried it - you need a situation which has no interruptions whatsoever (kids, phone calls, other people), and you need to stick with it for the duration. Solo long road trips, long walks, hiking, and biking work well for this.

For the first 1/2 hour your head will be full of day-to-day thoughts, reminders, personal maintenance, reviewing memories, and so on. After awhile, this will quiet down and your mind will start to wander. Whatever you think about most is likely your source of joy.

Figure out some skill that feeds into your joy, choose a project that requires this skill and which also feeds into joy, and resolve to complete the project by the end of summer. Write the goal down (this part is important!) with as much detail as you can, stick it in an envelope, and put it away for later.

Your brain has likes and dislikes, as well as a goal-setting mechanism that you can use to your advantage. If you want to be happy, you should start the process of being happy right now, while you still have leisure to do so.

(Oh, and to answer your question: I'm writing a paper on hard AI.)

To quote the excellent Rap News 19: Whistleblower:

Some praise these acts as heroic, worthy of mimicking
Others condemn them as illegal and prohibited
But, can't both be equally applicative?

To be good humans we're sometimes
called upon to be bad citizens.
Some nations were even born by
breaking laws of the tyrannous.

Do you support heroes from days of yore
who in order to cause reforms disobeyed the law?
Then what about those in the present
who heed the same call?

The GPL is all about preserving access to code. If you use GPL code, you have to publish that code. If you make changes to it, you need to publish those changes as well. This is to stop people "proprieterizing" GPLed code by making a few incompatible changes and releasing it.

Well then the GPL has failed because that is exactly what these people are doing. They're altering the GPL code, offloading code to proprietary files, then releasing the whole thing as a finished product. I presume this can be done with split .c files as well, in which case the GPL has this flaw from the start.

I think the DOE was predicting last year that their first exascale system will come online in 7 to 9 years.

The Jaguar/Titan system mentioned in your link is used for unclassified scientific computing. The NSA is building a computer facility at ORNL, but that's a different system (and was never claimed to be for stockpile stewardship). They don't put classified jobs onto unclassified systems.

Exascale computers would be helpful for climate modeling. Right now climate models don't have the same resolution as weather models, because they need to be run for much longer periods of time. This means that they don't have the resolution to simulate clouds directly, and resort to average statistical approximations of cloud behavior. This is a big bottleneck in improving the accuracy of climate models. They're just now moving from 100 km to 10 km resolution for short simulations. With exascale they could move to 1 km resolution and build a true cloud-resolving model that can be run on century timescales.

Funny you should mention that; apparently someone has gone and invented a book that, get this, you can use to look up the definitions of a word!

Name one spoken language, where there is an authoritative source of definitions of words. Anybody can go write such a book, and none of them will actually be authoritative.

without government regulation or fear of monopolies.

How would you avoid monopolies without government regulation?

it should be abundantly clear at this point, there is not and never has been such a thing as a free market

Before you even try to answer if there is a free market or not, you need to figure out what the words free market actually means. Do you have a free market if a single established player in the market or a small group of players can force newcomers off the market? I'd say no. But then you need regulations to protect the free market. There are people who say it is not a free market if there is any sort of regulations. And by their definition a market controlled by a monopoly is more free than a market with multiple competing players subject to government regulations protecting consumers from the most immoral business practices.

If your definition of a free market is one where there are no regulations and a newcomer can take a part of the market by producing a better product than the established players, then such a market cannot exist. Because without regulations established players can and will squash newcomers.

I don't really care much how people define the words free market. I care more about how the market actually works. And I consider some amount of regulations to be a good thing. At the very least consumers should be able to know what the products on the market are, such that they can make informed decisions on which products they want. Misleading information about products undermines fair competition, so regulations to prevent such misleading information is a good thing.