Let me second this sentiment. As a smart person - you should go outside your comfort zone, work with the locals and try to come up with innovative and sustainable solution to whatever problem they have (access to water, sharing access to the internet, getting their goods to the market). You will gain a meaningful experience (and possibly skills) out of it and so will they. I have been working on projects throughout Africa for the past 3 years and can assure you that they need smart people to complement the local knowledge.

I have to review (and comment on) on average 500 pages of legal, engineering, due diligence documents, feasibility studies etc each week. I used to print these out double sided, 2 per side to bring to read during meetings, during flights and while on the road. But the ipad now changed all that. With apps like Goodreader and other MS office editor apps, my printing is down from about 150 sheets per week to less than 5.

In fact, the ipad allows me to keep my pdf annotations; I can search through them, and send them to other devices.

I currently live in and have been working in one of those 'hot' countries for several years. First, your concerns about privacy seem misplaced to people who live around here. Tracking is for the general plebes who live there and have nowhere else to go. As a foreigner, your behaviors doesn't matter as much so long as you are not part of the problem. If you are a problem, forget about your supposed rights and privacy that you believe that you are entitled to.

First, the government/state/security/police can just break into your house whenever it wants, and your only recourse is that you are important enough that your embassy or company will raise a big enough fuss. Otherwise, you are out of luck. Unless, you want to carry around your laptop with you all the time, you can assume that they can get physical access to your computers when they really want. Same for your phone.

The government/state/security/police will question your building security, maid, nanny and almost certainly obtain their cooperation in tracking your movements and rumaging through your personal belongings. They also have access to all your financial transactions within the country, and all cross-border movements.

Is it your financial privacy that matters to you? Or is it that you do not want your phones or computers seized? In the latter case, just keep a low profile and don't cause trouble.

Each state in which Amazon is located also benefits from the jobs, both direct (employed by Amazon) and indirect (e.g. transport services and power generation) which Amazon pays for. These workers in turn pay income taxes and sales taxes (when they purchase goods and services) which pay for the roads and infrastructure. Corporate and sales taxes directly paid by the company are usually not the primary means by which a company contributes to a government's tax revenues. It may well be argued that if Amazon is expected to contribute towards its consumption of infrastructure, then it should be some of its taxes back in many states.

will exist just as banking and tax havens abound now. There is a great demand (meaning high willingness and ability to pay by a small set of individuals) for online anonymity. Else connecting to your offshore bank account will be pretty meaningless if they know you just connected with your 'internet passport'.

Old games can still be played on today's pc's (starcraft comes to mind). If you bought an older game for the previous generations of gaming consoles, it will not probably play on the latest generation of consoles.

I still buy pc games that I don't have time to play today in the expectation that I will be able to play them in the future when I have more time. That said, I am buying almost exclusively stand-alone games that don't need to connect to a server with thousands of other players.

as it is a restriction (or extreme discrimination against imports) of trade which is not allowed under the current version of the WTO to which the US is a signatory. Hence the 'harmed' nations with affect internet poker sites will be entitled to discriminate against US trade.

The US can always choose to ignore the ruling since it is a powerful nation. But that will only encourage smaller nations to set up internet poker sites and obtain compensatory damages - preferably calculated by the RIAA lawyers. Then the fun begins where the compensatory damages can be in the form of ignoring US intellectual property 'rights' in the host country.

This should be a slashdot poll. When will we have an AI that can debug VB better than humans: (1) Wha, VB can never be truly debugged! (2) Soon. April 1, 2010. (3) Within 5 years when I am old enough to move out of my parents' basement and go to college. (4) 2112 and two minutes later, the AI will become smart enough to know better and outsource the job to low productivity humans.

Coventry is only 86 miles from London. Living in London, I have come to realize that the English are a little touchy about the glorious little towns of their country and have that distorted European sense of distance. For instance, look at a map of Africa (or centered on Africa), Europe is a little patch of land to the north that looks a little larger than the Congo and Mauritania combined. Also this distorted sense of distance seems to explain why the French and English kept trying to build cross continent railways in Africa that ended in utter failure.

It is not clear how much money you want/need and how much you think your company can make in 2 years, in 5 years and what it takes to get there. From your post, it sounds as though you lack many basic business knowledge. What does the market for venture/seed capital look like?

If you have a savvy investor who can provide something more than money such as a network of expertise or investors, they will want to know what your answers are to key questions. Who are your expected customers? How do you address their needs? What is the competition and how do you expect to mitigate competition risk?

Making public the emails of any large organization (e.g. US Dept of Transportation, Sierra Club, Red Cross/Red Cresent, Google) will mostly be fodder for the trolls and pundits. Any large organization will have some (stupid) individual employees or contractors who expresses racially or sexually offensive views, or make threats or talk smack.

This was covered in a recent episode of the Security Now podcast http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm. See episode 80 from Nov 19 "A security vulnerability in SSL". The transcript is also available http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-223.pdf.