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Guess not much has changed since I used to pirate 8-bit BBC micro games in the 80's with my friends from high school. Of course, as soon as we published a game ourselves, our attitudes changed ;-)

I guess that absence of homegrown coders is one thing that might be different nowadays -- even kids who were just a few years younger than me were used to computer games being studio affairs; the closest they'd get to writing a game would be designing a level on Doom.

Another thing that may have changed is the thrill of breaking copy protection. That was a big deal for us back then -- we'd compete to crack the encryption on the latest games... then take off the copy protection, put our own logos on, and put the encryption back in place so that lesser pirates couldn't steal our glory, heheh..... I never saw any of the really nasty "black ice" that was rumoured to exist (e.g. antipiracy code that'd deliberately wreck your drive by moving the disk head beyond its physical limit)... I heard Infocom games had a lot of this.

Back then we didn't have to resent the kids in US or Asia, cos no-one except Europeans knew what a BBC was.... in fact, looking back, US kids didn't even have Elite, so we were the privileged ones :)

I grew up playing a 3d space sim/shooter called elite on my parents amiga. It was the first computer game I ever loved. It's here. What a good game.

I play Elite on my Archimedes using RISC OS.

Is this the same Lithium that reacts violently with water and could even explode as described here http://www.rod.beavon.clara.net/lithal.htm

Some links on Wave Energy
http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/wave.htm
http://www.wavegen.co.uk/
http://www.technorati.com/tag/wave+power

Yeah, can you beleive getting information on this stuff is as easy as googling it?

Curta Mechanical Calculator
Moon Watch
IBM Model M Keyboard
K&E Decilon Slide Rule
HP-41 Programmable Calculator
Varian A-60 NMR
Electron Microscope

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

If you want to see the prices in other currencies use the XE Universal Currency Converter.

Sure, we need the energy, but do we have to have these things up where they get in the way of the view?

I'm sure they could probably use it somehow ...

You were lucky! We had to program in 6502 machine code, using a non-relocatable assembler, in under 32K, and save onto tape!

(Although, this was peanuts compared to the trials faced by Jeremy Smith and Peter Irvin, programmers of the best ever BBC game, Exile...)

(I don't want to know about punchcards....)

No, you've got it all wrong. Skin-tight high-tech suits drastically increase the odds that we'll see preteens enagage in armed combat inside giant robots blasphemously created from heavenly beings, leading to a really cryptic apolcalypse, any day now.

The same language? Have a listen to a glaswegian, and see what you think then.

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at http://www.primidi.com/. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (http://www.primidi.com/) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://www.uk.clara.net/clarahost/advanced.php) priced at £69.99 GBP. This is

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://

When the angels come, you'll be thankful.

I'm getting around these problems, as I have done all I can to make my mobile phone very secure. You can see a photo of the modifications so far.

Exactly.

My favourite classic space sim remains Elite, which is 20 years old this year.

Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com) to see it for yourself.

Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http://ww

"yes the capital cost is very high, but the fuel is virtaully free"
The reason that Nuclear plants are so expensive to build is that the government often forced construction to be halted on nothing more than a letter complaining "something could happen", until a study could be done disproving the letter, just in time for the next letter to show up.

it is the most complicated steam engine on earth
Actually, they're not all that complicated in the newer designs. That's why, after I've shut down the coal plants, I'd be looking at updating/replacing the aging light water reactors.

All of those rare earth materials used in nuclear power compents are not common and cost money.
Sure, Uranium's expensive. But you don't need much of it. It's got something like 20,000 times the power density of coal. Even more if you take steps to 'burn' it better.

Wind generators in comparison are incredibly simple. Hydro is incredibly simple.
But they're also relatively low-density. You need a lot of wind generators to equal a full size nuke plant, and the construction cost adds up. And you don't get out of maintenance either. Those blades don't last forever.

but there has NEVER been a wind/hydro/tidal plant that has cost as much as a producing nuclear power plant

And are these plants generally measered in the thousands of megawatts? Can they operate just about 24/7/365? I've had trouble finding out what an averale wind turbine runs, installed.
The University of Chicago has determined that the cost per kilwatt of capacity for nuclear would run $1,200-$1,800. (Note: The "standard" 1000 megawatt plant would start at 1.2 billion). But in the end, once your economy of scale takes over, it would only cost 3.4 cents per kw/h. Versus 3.7 cents for non-backed up wind, or 5.4 cents with backup. Add 1.8 cents to go offshore.
Hydro: Well, we're pretty much getting all that we can already get.

Backup for wind power makes costs up to 3.5 times greater?
The economies of nuclear power
Only 20 suitable tidal sites? Only 10 hours of power a day?
You know, I didn't list geothermal due to the limited areas it can be done in...

Doing research finds that Coal/Nuclear has a cost of about 2.3 cents kw/h. Wind is 3.7 cents a kw/h. Wind has quite a ways to go. Solar at least provides power when people run AC the most.

Nuclear plants are run at just about 100% load, all the time.
For the other power sources, you'd need backup power. IE, you'd have to build two plants to provide the constant power 1 nuclear plant does.

I recall that there was quite an upstir when Profumo was caught his pants down.

Article

Guess there is more than one here who might symphathize (.)(.).

CC.

Hell, he gets married for christ sakes.
Hey, can you blame him?
Who should marry James Bond if not Emma Peel ;-)

btw:
Dalton totally looks like he would flip out and start killing people at any moment
I think that fits nicely in "Licence to Kill".

I've long held the Starglider series to be the first of a "new" generation of games, in that it made an enormous leap forward in immersion. It was one of the first games I'd ever seen for the Atari ST, and the first game I'd ever encountered with digitized music. ("What, you're not impressed? I nearly crapped myself when I saw this at the 1937 World's Fair!") It was also the first computer game I'd seen with such fluid 3D graphics.

The sequel improved on the original in many ways; not only was it more graphically rich, but the game universe was lavish with detail. In 1988, here was a game that allowed you to travel out to Jupiter to frolic with a school of dolphin-like critters that rode space-currents. While not important to the gameplay proper, it's elements like that that make a 1.44MB world seem both infinitely large and endlessly explorable. (Naturally, I'm also a fan of Elite.)
_____________________________________________
Inago Rage - Bound between rooftoops and create your own 3D arenas in this indie-developed first person shooter. Coming Real Soon. Honest.

Elite and Sid Meier's Pirates! are other examples of early non-linear video games that EVERY gamer should play. Yes they are both still fun to play today. Elite is even a true 3D game, with 3D graphics, physics, and world! Considering that the game was made in the early 80s for the NES and BBC Micro, that says something about programming skills.

While waiting for Duke Nukem Forever - oops Elite 4 - you can find the old Elite programmes in the archive on Ian Bell's website or play the remake Elite:The new Kind.

someone needs to figure out how to use all the energy stored in the rotation of the earth. In a sense, these people are I guess.

So we produce more wind turbines than we need. During peak production we apply the excess to hydrogen production. When there isn't enough wind, we burn the hydrogen to make up the difference. It sounds like a workable solution! This is rather like the >pumped storage hydro electric power in Wales that I learnt about back in the 80s. Of course, in places with large hills or mountains, wind turbines could be coupled with pumped storage rather than H2 production!

I've been wondering the same thing. It seems a little bit strange that we have to rely on a commercial entity to do web searching. Why couldn't we have a distributed peer-to-peer search engine thingy? Every time I wanted to do a search, I'd first have to help perform someone elses search. We'd also need to have some authentication like the PGP web of trust to be sure that Widgets-R-Us wasn't out there spoofing search results. Are there any technical/practical reasons why this couldn't be implemented in the future?

Check http://www.iancgbell.clara.net/elite/ for various versions of Elite you can download.

The reimplementation can still be downloaded from http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/elite/elite -tnk/download.htm (windows binary, or source).

If that goes away, googling should turn something up.

Elite is the grandaddy of them all. It's a 3D 1st person space flight sim/trading game where you can go from pirate to slave trader to bounty hunter to rock miner and back. There are 8 galaxies, each with several hundered solar systems to explore. The sheer variety of ships and missions is amazing - from destroying stolen military ships, to capturing Thargoid alien attack craft, saving refugees from supernovas, evading police, docking with space stations, clearing asteroid belts, skimming suns for fuel, malfunctioning hyperspace untis, civil wars, and edible arts graduates.

It's from 1984 and originally ran in 32k of memory.

I don't need Netcraft to prove that Bigfoot no longer exists: Bigfoot is dead.

Are you serious?!

Discover Elite now!! Check out this page, maintained by one of the original creators Ian Bell and this Elite resource

avoid riaa stuff at all costs. here's some amazing music to check out via p2p or via what few links i've bothered to dig up. what follows is a nice selection of pop and rock from some outstanding bands on some very fine record labels. support these artists, or artists like them--unencumbered by the riaa. support these labels. they do wonderful things. these are great songs from great albums.


aislers set, the - mission bells from (suicide squeeze/slumberland) aislers set on epitonic

ballboy - donald in the bushes with a bag of glue from silver suits for astronauts ep (sl)

barcelona - i have the password to your shell account from moshi moshi: pop international style (march) barcelona on epitonic

beulah - popular mechanics for lovers from the coast is never clear (velocette records) beulah on epitonic

boyracer - tell me where my hands should go from to get a better hold you've got to loosen your grip (555 recordings) boyracer on epitonic

bugs in amber - roller coaster ride from rocketship letters (sign language)

camera obscura - suspended from class from underachievers please try harder (merge)

can i be she-ra? - pizzacato

carissa's wierd - sofsticated fuck princess please leave me alone from songs about leaving (sad robot) more songs

catch, the - empty your pockets

cinerama - your charms from the flirt compilation

currituck county - the collision from unpacking my library (teenbeat)

decemberists - red right ankle from her majesty the decemberists (kill rock stars)

east river pipe - my life is wrong from (merge/sarah) east river pipe on epitonic

evening lights, the - in a day from landscape cdep (shelflife) more songs

faint, the -

Guide to Neon Genesis Evangelion

Great game. If you're into retrogaming, you can find it on Ian Bell's Elite page (in the Elite archives) While David Braben has been milking the Elite name for a long time (and generally being an ass about it), Elite's co-creator Ian Bell is cool with people downloading and playing the game.

Great game. If you're into retrogaming, you can find it on Ian Bell's Elite page (in the Elite archives) While David Braben has been milking the Elite name for a long time (and generally being an ass about it), Elite's co-creator Ian Bell is cool with people downloading and playing the game.

It had semi-decent reliability and was quite easy (and dirt cheap) to fix. It also had high ground clearance which, combined with its light weight, made it very convenient for use on rough to non-existent roads. Strictly speaking, I should not be talking of these little uglies in the past tense - plenty of them still around.

A brief history of the Zaporozhetz marque can be found here. One of the older Zaporozhetz cars, the ZAZ 965, has a cult following (links here and here).

here is a page that shows just how different the English and American versions of units like gallons and tons etc. Even fluid ounces are different.

...then both share a common flaw: you have to unpack the container to work on the files within, and that leaves the unpackaged files open to interception.

I've been using ScramDisk to store my critical data. For those using a newer OS than I do, there is an updated version called DriveCrypt. Both gves you the choice of what sort of encryption to use and you can use up to four passwords on any given file. It also supports stegnography.

In short, I don't give a rats ass about what sort of encryption PKZIP or WinZip supports - if the file contains things I want protected, I'll zip it as normal and then drop it into a ScramDisk container.

I've resurrected my Beeb recently and got into Repton 2 again, which rocks, as they say :-) I liked it much better than 1 and 3 (with the annoying fungus). Also ELITE of course.

Another favourite was Labyrinth, which featured a bizarre screen mode using remarkably only four colours to simulate many more with pixel patterns. Very cool game.

There are many great Beeb sites out there, particularly 8BS.com - see also my list of (mostly) Beeb games

Have fun!

>_

Super Mario Kart was split-screen. At the time, 2.5-D game engines weren't advanced enough to resize the window for separate 1-player full screen and 2-player split screen, so the game engine always ran in split-screen. The map at the bottom could be toggled to a rear-view mirror with a press of X.

Screenshot

<karma-whore mode="shameless"> I've just put such a link on the front page of my site: http://home.clara.net/pembers/ There's a bit of explanation too, because most of my visitors have probably never heard of SCOX or Linux. </karma-whore>

Expecting my cease-and-desist from Kevin any minute now...

I am so grateful that this reviewer took it upon himself to decode the real meaning encoded in the RotK battles for all of us ignorant non-semioticians. Now that I know, I can feel real guilty about rooting for the good guys, because war is always wrong.

No mention of the other "messages" in this battle: reflections of J.R.R.T.'s real-world experience of the horrors of WWI trench warfare; the concept that, even in this age of relativism, there are some things worth fighting for; the cost of war; etc.

Of course, it's nice to criticize a movie that, though rendered in color, still plays in moral black-and-white. Thus one hallmark of the modern movie critic is to snipe at any attempt to portray notions of absolute good and evil, combined with moral righteousness. It's better that way, don't you think? It's certainly easier. ;-)

For an interesting counter-arguement, check out this, an essay by writer Gene Wolfe (who, btw, wrote a series of books, known as "The Book of the New Sun," as fantastic as Tolkien's but in a different way).

The program is being designed as a way for students, faculty and staff to exchange personal and academic materials on a sanctioned, secure peer-to-peer network. Another advantage is that large files, which would be impossible to send via e-mail or another method, can be shared.

While it all sounds nice and warm inside, how long will it be before it becomes abused. Now wait before you think it's trolling of me to say this, think about how lax security is at colleges.

Problems aren't with p2p they're with the users of it, and while some may think sharing a file or two isn't a crime, the fact is, it adds up. So for this to work think about the kind of boolean settings someone is going to have to program to search for illegalities.

What is staff going to do when snoop|grep -i *.mp* doesn't work because users decided to rename files to madonna.zip or madonna.sda? It's just something to contend with when indeed they do get these p2p programs out. So while it all sounds nice, and the intentions are good, these 'foundations', schools, and business shouldn't advertise or rather expect no shady dealings to go on using p2p on their networks. Sure it'll be closed to the outside world for a minute or two before someone figures out how to use something like datapipe to break that theory.

Controlled? Sorry never heard of the word

The raincoat idea ... we already have completely waterproof raincoats. What people really want is a surface that is more breathable, too. Does this have the potential to be better than Goretex?

This is a 'keyboard' projected on to a table top. Touch type into empty space...

Or how about an antique slide rule?

Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've always dreamed about?

...or just an excellent concept.

Thanks for the tip, but I can't get them to download because I use Firebird, and apparently, this site won't take you to a page with an actual link until you switch to IE AND agree to download all the spyware ActiveX components. Don't even mention the popups. Firebird kicks so much ass it burns.

However, despite that, Google answers all questions even though asking /. is more fun.

Ian Bell's Web Site has Elite and Elite Plus downloads, plus links to other k001 r0X0r1n9 sites...
...including this one, which also has manuals, guides and FAQs.

Cheerio!