Speaking from experience, being a sole founder is boring and lonely. It's hard enough getting a company off the ground; why not share some of the load?
This program is about keeping consumerism alive to benefit the economy, not about fuel efficiency, The idea of trading in clunkers for fuel efficient vehicles is a thin veil to the real goal of getting people to buy things from an industry who lobbied the government to give them a handout. Instead of Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, the robbers this time are car dealers.
Pride, dignity, and self-respect be damned, he should get on the public dole, right? Oh wait, he's from Kansas, so he probably has some mid-western values in his DNA.
Universities aren't going to disappear completely. The strong ones will survive through adaptation - witness Stanford and MIT vis-a-vis online courses. The stodgy, bureaucratic, state-supported universities risk becoming the do-do birds of higher learning. Current fiscal stressors may be the thing that drives the weaker universities into extinction.
I like Bing. It does a much better job for image search and presentation than Google.
The thing that will make Bing competitive with Google, however, will be the front page. Google has adhered to a simple front page with religious zealotry. Bing, on the other hand, seems to embrace making the front search page more useful. It remains to be seen if MS will clutter it up, but if Google starts adding widgets and tools to the front page, you will know they are paying attention.
That comment suggests an interesting study: how many experiments published in papers are actually repeated by other researchers. I think in computer science it is very low. I would bet that in the physical sciences it could be even lower given the cost of physical laboratory equipment and time constraints to publish "original" research.
Does anybody have data or experience to suggest repeat rates?
I'm glad somebody is excited. Not to be a downer, but I'm personnaly seeing copy-cat evolution, not revolution. The new toys just aren't going to change the way I work and play.