Jinn of Quality and Risk

The easy experimental answer to this question is 264 hours (about 11 days). In 1965, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old high school student, set this apparent world-record for a science fair. Several other normal research subjects have remained awake for eight to 10 days in carefully monitored experiments. None of these individuals experienced serious medical, neurological, physiological or psychiatric problems ... all experimental subjects recovered to relative normality within one or two nights of recovery sleep. [Q&A from Scientific American] 

RealNames vs Microsoft: I am sure that Microsoft will do an excellent job of misinforming the public about the reasons for this decision and so I want to put the record straight. A (somewhat) tragic story of people who believed in their vision, paid Microsoft to be allowed to implement it, and have (finally) shown it to be profitable. Now Microsoft is switching off their access to the market, and developing the same vision, without them. Exit RealNames. Other companies have suffered a similar fate in the past. Beware of the big partner!

Microsoft has $40B in cash reserves.

Addendum (May-13): now that search engines are extremely accurate, fast, and cheap, paid keyword systems aren't needed. Still, there is danger to one company holding monopoly over operating system and Web browser — and abusing that position. 

We will have terabytes (millions of MBs) in a single disk package by 2012. Fujitsu has recently announced that storage density will be multiplied by 6 over the next 2-4 years. Today you can already buy a RAID controller that looks like a single drive with 10TB, or build your own for under $5,000/TB. Just so we can store, index and retrieve pictures, music, documents, emails, videos, books, encyclopedias, anything. Next to become everyday words will be pentabytes and exabytes. 

Most animals have a daily pattern of rest and activity. Some animals are more active during the day (diurnal) and some are more active during the night (nocturnal). How much time do animals spend sleeping? Well, it depends on the animal. For instance, pythons sleep 18h/day, bottle-nosed dolphins 10.4h/day, and african elephants 3.3h/day.