I love how the summary introduces him as the "inventor of the QuickTime codec".

A common enough confusion I suspect. To be pedantic: QuickTime is a media container, not a codec. It's similar to the way that AVI and OGG aren't codecs. They're containers for stuff like MP4 (confusingly sometimes also the name of a container format), Vorbis (the codec behind most Ogg audio files), or Mp3.

... in the AI race, that is. True to its roots, it appears IBM is developing a concentrated mainframe form of AI in contrast to the clustered AI being employed/developed by Google for its search services. So who will be first to develop human-level artificial intelligence?

Microsoft may well be a dark horse here if it has other stuff in its research labs similar to the Kinect controller. On the other hand, I wouldn't bet on Apple, which is little more than a design company, arguably the best in the field of consumer electronics, able to put a pretty face on technologies developed elsewhere. I wouldn't put it beyond Apple to develop the world's first true consumer-grade android (not the OS), the iDroid perhaps.

Not dreaming. For very practical reasons, the US is likely to keep its leadership in space for as long as it keeps its status as the world's top military power. Do you think the DoD will allow the US to become second place in space to let some neo-superpower gain the high ground?

So the question is, can the US keep its military superiority? Who knows, maybe in the future a cash-strapped US will hire out its armies to the highest non-hostile bidder (i.e. anybody but China, Russia, and certain socialist or theocratic states) and earn the money it has lost from the outsourcing of its non-military industries.

YMMV but I've never reinstalled Ubuntu since Feisty Fawn (2007.04). My Debian rolling upgrade cycle, which consists of tracking a mix of testing/unstable, would have gone back longer to turn of the millennium if not for the migration to AMD64. Sadly Debian didn't allow a bootstrap upgrade from i386 to AMD64. Only one problem I had all those years, fixing a bad Grub boot-loader config.