Personally, I'd settle for users learning how to use the tools they already have. Excel in particular (I spend a good chunk of my week fixing people's formulas and teaching what VLOOKUP does). Programming is still mis-understood in the world - it varies between "oh, this is simple, why aren't you done yet" and "this is arcane mystical power you wield, please help me I beseech you", with little middle ground. (And oddly, the really simple Excel stuff is treated like dark magic, and the complicated database work is the stuff they think must be really easy.)

My roommate sees your automated cat feeder and raises you a self-cleaning litter box. (I'm not positive it's this one - http://www.catgenie.com/ - but it looks close). At this point the cat isn't really a pet, so much as a roommate who doesn't pay her share of the rent. :)

I think there's a distinction being missed. It's one thing to lie to someone. It's another to simply choose not to say anything. ("if you don't got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all", as my mother put it). Saying every single thought that comes into your head, stream-of-consciousness style, isn't going to get you in trouble for your honesty. It'll get you in trouble because no-one likes a blabbermouth.

Yes, all net traffic should be encrypted. We can argue about the method, but in a world where you should not only suspect, but expect that your traffic is being intercepted, tracked, compiled, and stored for future reference - either by your ISP, your employer, authorities (yours or others), and who knows else - that there's no compelling reason not to make reading your data as difficult as possible.

Aren't we most of the way there? To sign in just now and post this very comment, I hit "sign in", it asked me which credentials I wanted to use, and ta-da. I can't remember the last time I had to sign on to SE. I hit log in, use OpenID, and it works.

Even weirder is that they booked Garrett Wang with both you (for Boy Wonder - and could they *think* of a worse title?!?) *and* the DS9 panel (and I also see him on the Shatner panel). What the heck?