Someone Will Pay You $100,000 to Drop Out of School and Start a Tech Company [Genius]
The 24 ex-students, all under 20 years of age, presented their tech company ideas to Thiel and were selected to join his Thiel Fellows program. Some of the initiatives sound great so far—there's Faheem Zaman, who's building a mobile payments system for developing countries (and is only 18 years of age), and John Burnham who is doing what any 18 year old would love to do, working in the field of space—specifically by extracting minerals from comets and asteroids.
Instead of sending out a message that "everybody should drop out of college," Thiel believes "you have a bubble whenever you have something that's overvalued and intensely believed...In education, you have this clear price escalation without incredible improvement in the product. At the same time you have this incredible intensity of belief that this is what people have to do. In that way it seems very similar in some ways to the housing bubble and the tech bubble."
A lot of parents are probably shaking their heads right about now, and hoping their school-age children don't catch wind of Thiel's comments, but as you no-doubt know, a lot of the most successful tech entrepreneurs—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, even Twitter co-founder Evan Williams—dropped out of school early. There does some to be the running theme of opportunity, however—all these people met other people who helped them along into their careers. How rare is it that you actually meet the right person, who's willing to give you a chance? [NY Times]
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Next Meeting is probably the single most useful experimental feature in Calendar, because it shows you exactly what event is coming up next, along with a clearly readable countdown timer so you don't miss it. It shows up as a widget in the sidebar, and the event displayed in the widget is highlighted the same color as the calendar set that it came from.
This feature allows you to quickly jump straight to any date in the past or future, without a flux capacitor. Not only is it great for jumping back to check what events happened on past dates, but enabling it along with the Year View feature (below) is a great way to get a handle on long-term planning.
This feature adds a simple, minimal world clock to the sidebar, and you get to pick and choose which cities to include in the list. It's especially useful for people trying to schedule events with co-workers who are located globally, and even better, it displays cities with dark backgrounds if it happens to be night time in their time zones.
This feature only applies to events that are slated for a specific time period, not a whole day. If there are recurring events scheduled for the same day as a one-off item, they'll dim slightly to make the slightly more important event stand out. Pretty useful if you've got a packed schedule and you're trying to skim through it for appointments.
Gentle Reminders was 
Calendar already offers an option to list yourself as busy during events, but that won't stop people from inviting you to anything and everything while you're gone. This feature handles those invites for you by simply declining each and every one if you tell it to do so.
Sharing calendars with friends or co-workers is great, but it only shares the events. This feature allows you to upload attachments to any event you want, and even grabs items from other Google services. The only catch is that if you're sharing something from Docs, you'll still have to actually set the doc itself to share, too.
MicroSDs are cute and so incredibly useful. Kingmax, a Taiwanese company, is making them even more useful by bumping the size up to 64GB. It's the world's first 64GB microSD card.
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