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Every day, Google run a daily puzzle on Wired GeekDad challenging the geeky masses with a search puzzle. The previous day's answer is posted when the new puzzle is published. 

Although it's difficult to predict what the future Internet will look like, it's probably safe to say that certain trends we've seen during the past decade will continue. This means that the Internet will become further integrated into our daily lives, becoming more ubiquitous, available, autonomous, and mobile. The engineers who are guiding the Internet in this direction are doing so by developing mobile agents, which are pieces of software that can autonomously migrate from one computer to another and interact with each other.

What are the results of the patent system itself? The results are distorted research, protectionism, wealth transfers, and enrichment of the patent bar. Large companies, such as IBM, amass giant patent portfolios.

The daily email deluge is the scourge of productivity, but how can you stem the tide? Over at Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image president Mitch Joel offers his tips for handling email overload. His advice goes over some ground we've covered about before, such as using rules and folders/labels, but one tip really stood out to me: You should tell people in your emails how to work with you.

Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't have a clue about the daily necessity of keeping your team professionally content because they've either never done the work or have forgotten how it's done. These are the people who show up when your single best engineer casually and unexpectedly announces, "I'm quitting. I'm joining my good friend to found a start-up. This is my two weeks' notice." You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary "diving save". Whether it's HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee. It's an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They've quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, "I no longer believe in this company". What's worse is that what they were originally thinking was, "I'm bored". Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.