Bill Gates talked about technology education, the dearth of qualified American scientists and engineers, and the “off-shoring” of some of Microsoft’s R&D jobs to China and India on “Morning Edition” today. Listen to the interview on NPR’s website.

He also told your kids to play X-Box as a part of their “balanced” development. Interactive gaming encourages socialization and organizational skills, you see. Sort of like a game of stickball, only without the stick, or the ball, or the leaving the house.

Former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry–along with MIT Prof. John Deutch–have an op-ed on proposed funding cuts to the long-term advanced R&D efforts at the defense department. Next year’s budget devotes only about $10 billion of the Pentagon’s $420 budget will be devoted to this “technology base,” down 20 percent from last year.

Perry and Deutch point out:

Of course, the administration and Congress need to make tough budget choices. But to shift money away from the technology base to pay for Iraq, other current military operations or research on large, expensive initiatives, is to give priority to the near term at the expense of the future.

Their line of reasoning is one that is frequently our line of reasoning:

American companies not only draw heavily on the Pentagon’s work, but they have also come to depend on it. The research and development programs of many of America’s major information technology companies are almost exclusively devoted to product development.

If you’ve heard of Internet2 and wondered what it is but never bothered to check, Forbes.com has published a nice introductory arcticle about it. This advanced Internet initiative serves as a prime testbed for institutions and organizations researching next generation Internet technologies and infrastructure components. Similar in some ways to the government’s Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative from several years ago, Internet2 is a growing consortium of university, government, and commercial entities.

News.com reports today on HP’s plan to release a top-end server designed for Itanium in 2006. Superdome will support the new Montecito and Montvale versions of Itanium, which are expected to boost performance substantially.

The chips include dual processing engines, called cores, and multithreading that lets each core handle two instruction sequences at the same time.

The economics of supercomputing power and usage continue to evolve. Utility and on-demand computing aren’t new concepts, but for the first time IBM is making a large chunk of computing capacity available to its customers via its Blue Gene supercomputer in Rochester, NY. It’s unclear how well this cost recovery model will work for IBM using this machine, but it further demonstrates that there is a market for serious computational power without the need to own it.

NetworkWorld has published the transcript of a grid computing panel discussion among leaders from various commercial vendors, including IBM and Cisco. While the discussion has an obvious commercial slant, some interesting thoughts and opinions about the pros and cons of grid computing are shared by some of the leading players. Some of the responses to the moderator questions truly expose the position of some vendors, which may or may not be common knowledge.