My team members at work use it for our list of tasks we are assigned/working on/have completed. It is actually extremely useful for this. We can all immediately edit the same document, and see each other's edits in real time. We use to have to update a task list in excel every 2 days and this was rarely effective.

The amount of human life that can be sustained on the planet is directly attributed to the resources required to sustain them, and this amount of resources goes down as technological advances allow them to be created more efficiently. We are now growing 10 times more corn/acre than we did 50 years ago. Genetically engineered crops won't require fertilizer or pesticides, and will use far less water. While hundreds of billions is far fetched, the basic point is this: If we used 1700's agricultural and energy technology(wood burning stoves for heating/cooking) this planet wouldn't be able to support a tenth of the current population. It would be worse if we were all hunter gatherers. The viewpoint that the solution is less people is, frankly, myopic.

I am an American, and like close to half of my brethren, I am educated enough to know that Iran's democratically elected President was overthrown in a coup instigated primarily by the British and with heavy American involvement. I love how you lump all Americans into the category of "most brainwashed people in the world." The fact of the matter is that during the Cold War both America and the Soviet Union used the developing world as a battleground for their proxy wars. Some were more direct (Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan) and others much less so (Central America, Middle East, half the countries in Africa). America overthrew left leaning democracies that they saw as potentially becoming Soviet aligned and in their place put right wing dictatorships. The Soviet Union installed and supported numerous left leaning, but still authoritarian dictatorships. Now that the dust of the long Cold War has cleared, America is seen as the victor and also being responsible for all the damage that was done in the process. This is not to justify what happened. In all these cases, like Guatemala and Iran, it was horrible what happened, and had the American people known what was being done covertly in their name they would have been horrified. So here's the big difference: I can sit here and criticize my government and what they have done and speak out against it. I can run for office without being removed from the ballot by the Council of Guardians and the Supreme Leader. I can vote in an election if I don't like how my President has run up double digit inflation and made ridiculous denials of the Holocaust(despite the fact that most Iranians know it happened) and actually have my vote counted. Iran is no longer a democracy, or even a semblance of one. If people in the developing world would stop making America the hegemonic boogeyman they make it out to be, and instead understand that it is a highly polarized country with a large contingent of people who believe in the international community, they might make some progress. Instead they just blame America for all of the world's problems, ignoring the fact that if the Soviet Union had conquered the world, they would live in states resembling East Germany of the 1980's.

IBM has a known history of making overblown claims. This is what happens when you let your PR mesh with your technical research. Deep Blue was a giant PR stunt, and they had humans retooling the code in between matches. What a crock. When they get a robot that catches mice, purrs, and jumps on the table to eat my burger when I leave the room for 2 seconds, maybe then I'll believe it.

Currently, you can run Google's web apps offline if you have Google Gears(Chrome Browser has it built in). According to them, this is a temporary move until HTML 5 matures. The difference is that the apps, whether you are online or not, will run in the browser.

This is being targeted at netbooks and ONLY netbooks. They are expecting customers to be folks who already own a main computer for dedicated application needs.

I'm pretty sure there is going to be a rather small permanent storage capability for the offline (but still in browser functionality) that Chrome allows for. Currently this functionality is provided by Google Gears, but once HTML 5 has matured they will be using that. All I know is that I can open up and use Gmail in the browser offline, and Chrome OS is supposed to provide this functionality. I can't wait to see what the open source community does with the Chromium OS. Either way, MS needs to fix IE. It is horrible. Comparing it to Firefox makes it look bad. Comparing to Chrome makes it look completely irrelevant and obsolete. Now they're going to be eating it in the Netbooks market too.

I joined a local rock climbing gym less than a year ago. Filled with geeks(I seriously can't go 10 minutes in there without overhearing somebody's discussion of the merits of linux vs. osx, or NetBeans vs. Jdeveloper, or semantic search vs. mathematical search) it takes a lot of brains and an intuitive understanding of physics. Plus, its very fun and will get you in fantastic shape. (provided you cut out the sugar from your diet: can you say DIET mountain dew?) If you live near a mountainous area you can do it outdoors, but a rock gym allows you to get a quick 90 minute session in after work.