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Then what the heck are we going to do in 292,278,994 ?!

(I saw a more extensive list once during the pre-Y2K buildup, but those web sites have mostly disappeared. Anyone?)

There's a really extensive one at http://www.merlyn.demon.co.uk/critdate.htm, by J R Stockton.

Hi all,

there's an interesting new article over on the Compaq website about the upgrade of current iPAQs to Merlin (PocketPC 2002):

"You made a great decision when you purchased your iPAQ Pocket PC!
Compaq will offer an upgrade to Microsoft Pocket PC 2002 for the iPAQ Pocket PC H3600 and H3100 Series.
You can place your order starting September 17, and shipments of the upgrade CD will begin in mid-October.
* If you purchased the iPAQ Pocket PC H3600 or H3100 Series between September 6, 2001 and November 30, 2001, your upgrade is free*.
(*You only pay for shipping, handling, and applicable tax for the upgrade CD.)

The process will involve completing and printing a form, then mailing or faxing it to Compaq, along with your proof of purchase.

* If you purchased the iPAQ Pocket PC before September 6 or after Nov 30, the upgrade will cost $29.95. Shipping, handling, and applicable taxes will be added to this amount.

Return to this site on or after September 17 to request or order the upgrade. "

The URL is here (thanks to Dave's Compaq iPAQ site for the original source of this news).

This comes after Compaq's announcement that "Customers can be assured that any iPAQ Pocket PC purchased today is upgradable to future Pocket PC software--a feature unique to the iPAQ."

I think this is pretty bad form on Compaq's part. First they announce that all current iPaqs will support Pocket PC 2002, with the wording of the announcement strongly reassuring potential buyers that it's really OK to buy one now, then they announce that they'll only supply the OS upgrade to people who've bought one from the 6th onward! Since I just bought an H3630 (ordered it on the 29th August) partly due to this announcement, I feel a little cheated. Compaq should supply the upgrade free to everyone who ordered an iPaq on or after the day they announced that the current generation would support the new OS.

Of course it does depend on how much the upgrade costs for us non-eligible owners, if it's say GBP30 (USD 50 or so) then while there'd be a fair bit of grumbling, most users would be willing to pay this (assuming there are significant reasons to upgrade).

As for whether it'll fit into the 16MB flash ROM, well according to most reports I've read on the misc. Pocket PC sites there'll be TWO versions of Pocket PC 2002, a scaled down one for all the current devices and the full version for the next-gen machines. There's more info at CNet here
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-7025389.html% 20tag=mn_hd

Oh, I might as well part with a few iPAQ links of my own (in no particular order):

http://www.tekguru.demon.co.uk/

http://www.pdatweaks.com/

http://www.ludipocket.co.uk/

http://www.pdageek.com/

http://www.pdabuzz.com/

If somone could figure out how to selectively extract precious metals out of this mess we wouldn't need another hard rock mine in the US for a LONG time, plus our watershed may still have some hope; its probably too late though. The sad part is that, our leaders are more interested in sucking corporate dick while the taxpayers cover defaulted reclamation bonds. This place could be a really great place if there were only some accountibility.

"It seems to me that if the Open Source community was half as strong as they profess, there would be ample software that they would *rather* use on Linux
than Windows. "

Exactly.

I use Linux, and I've found good GPL programs that I've even found preferable over Windows programs. You don't hear me complaining about a lack of programs for Linux; the only game I play [besides simple things like mines, sol, same, tetris, and the like] is Quake II, which Linux runs without a hitch.

Now to address some of the points raised...

The most common webpage-reading-problem under UNIX is actually because of the way MS Word converts things to HTML (namely, *incorrectly* -- it does not adhere to the publicized HTML standards.)

And TrueType is actually... (yes, you guessed it) Macintosh technology! (details here) True, the fonts may be from Windows... although there's plenty of free TT fonts out there, and I use those for TT work [which I've done all of... once? hah], not the ones shipped by MS.

I don't dual boot, I don't use emulators, and I do plenty of meaningful work. I use things like AbiWord, LaTeX, vi, PHP, perl, ICON, gcc, Spice and the like to do what I need to do, which includes word processing, network administration, electrical circuit design, and programming in several languages.

Crappy browser? Lynx isn't crappy. It's incapable, sure... but if you want more capabilities, there's a spinoff project that adds all sorts of crazy features to lynx, called links -- it's like IE without graphics.

And if you want the graphics, there's always galeon, Konqueror, Netscape, Mozilla, or Opera...

I haven't gone back to Windows. Maybe that means I'm not an actual member of the community, hah! :)

And I frequently find it's easier to use Linux boot disks to fix DOS and Windows machines, due to the plethora of disk and MBR utilities available for free for Linux that fit easily on a floppy or two along with a few necessary boot files.

Oh yes, and before I forget, I'm not saying any of this to piss anybody off. I just want you to know that Linux works for me. Maybe I *am* an oddball [very likely true ;)] but I *do* use Linux successfully.

The keyboard design you mention fashioning "out of bits of brass" reminds me a bit of the Twiddler chording keyboard ... Have you ever worked with a Twiddler, BAT Personal Keyboard, Bellaire CyKey, or other "nonstandard" PC input device before?

I hope you have a great sense of humor, or else have just neglected your physics education, because currently I have little faith in your powers of logic.

OTOH, I suppose you're a neccessary part of the scientific eco-system. We always need people criticizing the accepted standards, pushing us to put up (give some physical proof) or shut up. I would prefer, though, if you would adhere to the same standards of intellectual honesty that your typical scientist does. For instance, if you could come up w/ some alternate theories w/ solid predictions, that could be verified or disproven, I might listen. Otherwise, you're little more than a crackpot claiming that stuff doesn't work because it doesn't make sense, to your math-illiterate brain. Well, tough. The Universe is not mandated to 'make sense' to the Joe Public, especially if he refuses to try. The power of populism only goes so far, you know.

At least the original post linked to someone who is willing to make predictions that can be proven or disproven. That man is a scientist, IMHO, whether I agree w/ him or not. Your link is to a crackpot, OTOH.

This is a re-post of a fine piece by nightlight3 some months ago. I'd simply post the link, but slashdot archives aren't working. (I retrieved this from google cache).

This isn't flamebait - it's definitely a subject worthy of discussion. I, for one, have great reservations about whether this is a viable technology. This is especially important since so much money and attention is being poured into research, perhaps often without a real understanding of the basic principles. I happen to know people in Gershenfeld's lab, and know full well their tendencies to let the hype get out of hand.

Perhpas HP is spending the money as a marketing/PR effort, rather than them intending to get real work done. That would explain the press release.

So here it is; I hope nightlight3 will chime in.
- - - - -

"If one existed, a quantum computer would be extremely powerful; building one, however, is extremely challenging,"

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.

While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.

For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:

Quantum Mechanics is not a Science

Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.

For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:

Caroline Thompson's Physics

Check it out here, on the official Sealnd government page:

The Amazing Sealand

I believe it's approx. 60 x 100 feet.

Thank you for the amazing breakdown. I myself am a Huge Fan of this series, and was watching since GROPOS. It's a must-see. Infact, the only series to actually come close to its glory has been Farscape, but still has not beat it just yet.

Some good sites to go to for Babylon 5 information and discussion:
The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5. A great reference source. It has THE most comprehensive episode guide for the series, it's movies, and its spinoff, Crusade. They Include a Synopsis, Notes, Comments from JMS, and other related information. The site also includes a B5 term encyclopedia, which can be beneficial for those who don't understand a term.
B5 Tech Reference. This site, while containing large amounts of fictional information, is a decent reference for anyone seeking information on the spacecraft of Babylon 5.
FirstOnes.com. While this is a shameless plug, If you want to talk with other babylon 5 fans, go there and visit the forums. You'll meet some interesting people from around the world. While it's primary mission has been abandoned (to raise the Babylon 5 Space Combat Simulator, Into the Fire, from the dead), it is being transformed into a source for everything Babylon 5. (well, that's the plan, at least =) )
Hyperspace Ship Guide. Another great reference page for the spacecraft of babylon 5. This has less fanfiction than Babylon 5 Tech, but less information as a whole. It has some great images, though.
The Down Below Sound Archive. This Page has a sound bite of just about anything you could want from this show. It's a great place to go if you want something along those lines.
Babylon 5: The place to be. This is another great site, loaded with 3D art and the models to make your own! Check it out sometime.
The Music of Babylon 5.. This is another great Babylon 5 Resource. It's webmaster posts various soundtracks from Babylon 5 on a regular basis. Most recently, the site had put up Battle Sequences A-F, the Sampler tracks for the music in Babylon 5: Into the Fire. Take a few minutes and listen to it.
The Shadow Information Office. A great page dedicated to correcting the popular belief that shadows are evil monsters. Rather, it shows that they have a very incolved culture, and exist for the sole purpose of assisting the other races. Check it out.

I hope these links are put to good use. There is a lot of information on the web. most of it bad. This should clear up some of that. Sanfam Out.

Aren't any /.ers even slightly conversant with Merzbow? Shit man, if Merzbow can't blow up your speakers, a pussy little square wave isn't going to. Actually, there is one person who might be able to fuck your speakers AND your CD player.
JLIAT
He has dicovered that giving sounds a particular negative DC bias can actually crash CD players. The first time I've heard of any content EVER doing that. Please don't make me do bad ASCII art, just go to his site and check out his findings.

Gelf.

We've had thin CRTs since the 80s. Remember Sinclair's flat screen TV? :-)

Are you a sheep?

A while back I was threatened with a court case over something I put on a website in the UK; several Americans mailed me offering mirror space, even financial support (!) This is a global fight... and no, I don't just mean North America and Europe. Take a look at the distribution of decss mirrors... they're in tens of countries, all round the world. American corporations have a long arm, but not *that* long .
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

Last time I threw up a quick mirror in response to a Slashdot story I ended up as a "J.Doe" on the DVDCCA case in California. Not sure how they think Californian law works in the UK, but there you go...

When will these people learn that you can't pout the toothpaste back in the tube? *sigh*
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

replacement = /local/images/ad-killer.gif
http://*.doubleclick.net/*ad/*
http://images.slashdot.org/banner/*
etc.

Which was great until I switched to using Mozilla as my browser of choice. (WWWOFFLE doesn't seem to like Mozilla's HTTP/1.1 requests - which is fair enough as it's an HTTP/1.0 proxy - and sometimes pages are truncated).

Which is a pity, 'cos WWWOFFLE has lots of other cool features too. Like de-animating GIFs, removing <BLINK> tags, demoronising MS non-Latin1 characters. (As well as being quite a cool caching/offline proxy).

When did they buy the name, and from whom? Webster? I distinctly remember another program called Illustrator released aeons ago: You used it to make graphical illustrations to text adventures written in the Quill game-authoring software. This was back in 1984-85 or so - how old is Adobe's product? Can Gilsoft go after Adobe for infringement?

There is a manual of sorts for Illustrator here. Those screens are from the most popular version, for Sinclair Spectrum (recognizable from the font.)

This song is basically what I think of Rand's "freedom".
http://www.dickalba.demon.co.uk/songs/texts/callit fr.htm

WTF?? You're not just claiming that in theory everyone is provided with the necessities of life under communism, you're claiming that this was the case in the actual USSR? That seems outright delusional.

• So just remember if you're sent to a labor camp, at least that you're not dying because you can't afford to live
  And if you're shot in the head as a dissident, at least you're not dying because you can't afford to eat
  And if you're starving in a famine in the Ukraine, at least you're not dying because...er...shit

Well, no. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help much against a dedicated attack; since this is the only type of attack you need to worry about when you're using reasonably strong crypto, there's no loss in admitting the type of encryption. With only a handful of popular algorithms (and those not equally likely), you'd only be gaining one or two bits worth of security were you hide the algorithm. It isn't worth the trouble.

But still, when I encrypt data with one of the symmetric ciphers (-s) and specifically selecting the algorithm (blowfish, serpent, aes, etc.) with the --cipher-algo switch it produces some encrypted file which when I decrypt... does NOT require me to specify the cipher algo, yet still knows when I put in the wrong password.

This could still be accomplished by trying each of them and reporting failure if none of them worked. But in fact, the PGP file format simply stores the information. Blowfish, etc. are handled similarly.

What does any of THIS have to do with public/private key ciphers?

Nothing. In my first post I was just addressing your question about how it could "know" if you had a bad key, without weakening the encryption.

-- MarkusQ

Well, no. "Security through obscurity" doesn't help much against a dedicated attack; since this is the only type of attack you need to worry about when you're using reasonably strong crypto, there's no loss in admitting the type of encryption. With only a handful of popular algorithms (and those not equally likely), you'd only be gaining one or two bits worth of security were you hide the algorithm. It isn't worth the trouble.

But still, when I encrypt data with one of the symmetric ciphers (-s) and specifically selecting the algorithm (blowfish, serpent, aes, etc.) with the --cipher-algo switch it produces some encrypted file which when I decrypt... does NOT require me to specify the cipher algo, yet still knows when I put in the wrong password.

This could still be accomplished by trying each of them and reporting failure if none of them worked. But in fact, the PGP file format simply stores the information. Blowfish, etc. are handled similarly.

What does any of THIS have to do with public/private key ciphers?

Nothing. In my first post I was just addressing your question about how it could "know" if you had a bad key, without weakening the encryption.

-- MarkusQ

These types of actions on Microsoft's behalf is exactly the reason why I bought an Apple iBook with OS X recently, learned how to use Unix over the last four years, and put a LINUX firewall between my Microsoft machines and the Internet--I don't trust M$ products enough to hang a Winbox's bare ass off the network like I would Linux or OpenBSD.

I don't mean to sound like a Slashdot M$ basher. I have my reasons...

• Microsoft's Hidden Files
• Why your data will not be safe with .NET thanks to the Passport Terms of Use
• How Microsoft Spied on You
• How Microsoft Steals Information

I can't find the link right now, but Microsoft and the NSA have backdoors into your system. Microsoft doesn't deny NSA involvement, either.

Given their past history, anyone who uses .NET is either ignorant, foolish, or just doesn't care.

Where do you want to be violated today?

If you want to waste your time writing code that won't make you money that's fine with me

If you think the only worthwhile use of one's time is that which makes one money, I feel sorry for you. As it happens, I do produce free software.

don't expect companies to follow suit

Oh, I must have imagined reading that IBM are employing thousands of people to write free software. I must also have imagined seeing their web site. Or could it be that you are mistaken?

It's time to destroy the PHBs. Withdraw your expertise. Don't give them your minds. Don't enable their parasitism. Brilliant tech people are a direct threat - we represent intelligence and reason. Don't underestimate or think for a second that they aren't threatened by us and seek our destruction.
- Scoove

I completely agree. We, the computer literate - geeks, nerds, hackers, whatever you want to call yourself - I'd say the /merely competent/ for modern living -- should rise up, overthrow the clueless PHBs, the cookbook programmers in it for the money, the middle managers who choose our tools based on marketing hype and FUD, and (presumably) institute the First Republic of Hackers (something like the Republic of Perl?)

I've been hearing whispers that my employer is looking at a wholesale switchover to Java from mod_perl, entirely for marketing-driven reasons. Our intranet runs on ASPs and of course is a pile of shit - yet is touted as a "leading edge project management tool" in our PR guff. It goes on, and on, and on... putting massive investment into mobile data and WAP when any idiot could have seen months ago that it was dead in the water... drenching everything in Flash, unreadble arty fonts, blandest-of-the-bland 'Design'... and all the other signifiers of lameness.

It makes me sick - not just that it happens here, in what is supposed to be a nimble, aggressive young startup, but that it's seen as the norm, as something every company must aspire towards. Sadly, it seems that they're right to believe that our potential customers (blue-chip corporates) won't take us seriously without a sufficiently stinky pile of marketing bullshit in the pitch.

The hell with it, I say. I'm sick of explaining to these people why security is a Good Thing, or why it's Bad to have webpages that only work in IE 5 and above. Think I'm going to go work for myself in a bit, but (to get back on topic) a union of tech workers should stand up for those values. (Those SORT OF values, that is, rather than the things which just flew off the top of my head just then!) That's the sort of union I'd join, not one that threatens a nationwide PHP-monkey strike if their demands for at least two free soft drinks a day are not met... ("It'll hoit, buster, it'll hoit!" -HHGttG)
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

Infocom compiled all of their games to a virtual machine to make porting easier. Clearly, if this is going to be a proper text adventure, it should be available for that VM. That way, if you want to configure your kernel on, say, your pilot or your VIC-20, it would be no problem.

Humm. Kernel config -> Inform -> Z-Machine code? This shouldn't be too hard, but the problem is, Z-Machine (AFAIK) can't save stuff to a file in an arbitrary format...

I use a proxy which implements filtering by url. Right now I'm surfing 98% ads/bugs/counters free.
Here is a link to WWWOFFLE on Freshmeat, and to the program's homepage.

If I had to pick someone who would be an authority figure on whether women are hurt or offended by porn, who would it be? Why, a prominent leader in the Women's Civil Rights movement, of course. How about Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique and co-founder of the National Organization for Women? Surely nobody can take an AP American History course in high school and not recognize the name; we studied her pretty prominently in my course. And she was not only not against pornography, she actually supported it.

These women are only devalued if they allow themselves to be. In the past, they were certainly undervalued, but that's why the Women's Suffrage and Women's Liberation movements came about. Were the situation as severe as people claim, this wouldn't be a few women who claim to be feminists fighting against porn -- it would be a genuine uprising, led by women's leaders. But it's not. Porn does not make women worthless.

As before, reproduction tech influenced the character of the music. Could a player piano reproduce a slow, soft Beethoven movement? It could try, but because the paper rolls allowed for no dynamic subtlety, every key would have been banged out exactly as loud as the next.

True enough, at first. You fail to take into account the reproducing pianos, developed shortly after 1900, which could faithfully reproduce the performance of the person cutting the roll, including dynamic and tempo variations. These rolls and pianos were remarkably faithful to the original performances (especially considering the technology used), and rolls of Rhapsody in Blue cut by George Gershwin have been used in concert as recently as the mid-1980's.

More info on these pianos can be found here.

At it happens, I've recently been working on this very problem. I've devised the Herbivore Protocol to solve it, and am currently coding a prototype version (Herbline).

This example illustrates how Herbivore will work:

Alice and Bob both use herbivore-compliant MUAs. Alice sends a message to Bob (it's the first time they've emailed each other). The message is send as plain text, but the herbivore subsystem inserts some extra headers, which say that Alice's MUA is herbivore-aware, and what Alice's GPG public key is.

Bob's MUA reads the email. The Herbivore subsystem in the MUA notes that Alice's email is came from a Herbivore-aware client, and remembers Alice's public key.

Bob decides to reply to Alice's message. He composes his reply as normal, and presses SEND. The Herbivore subsystem in Bob's MUA automatically encrypts the email with Alice's public key, before sending it to her.

When Alice's MUA receives the message, it is automatically decoded (using Alice's private key). Alice then sees on her screen the message that Bob sent her.

Was looking at this the other day:

http://www.vision25.demon.co.uk/oss/herbivore/intr o.html

Sheesh, why does slashdot put a space in the link?

The obsession with phonetic spelling is an unhealthy and rediculous pathology: to understand why, have a look at Justin B. Rye's Spelling Reform page (subtitled And the Real Reason It's Impossible).

The obsession with phonetic spelling is an unhealthy and rediculous pathology: to understand why, have a look at Justin B. Rye's Spelling Reform page (subtitled And the Real Reason It's Impossible).

The Havenco web site says it is now fully operational and open for business." A lot of people seemed convinced that Havenco wouldn't even be around by this time, but sticking around is the best revenge.

No, wait, I'm sorry, this is an excellent venture! Let's all do it! I've just proclaimed the People's Republic of Scotts Valley, with myself as Supreme Guru. To reserve your space in our data haven, please send US$10,000 via Paypal to the above address!

__

quiet power supplies from PC Power & Cooling

no fan on the processor, only a very large heatsink on a PIII 300

fluid dynamic bearing hard drives from Fujitsu MPG3xxxAH-E series

IBM's latest GXP hard drive: very quiet

sleep the hard drive when it is not in use

lower the voltage on K6-2 200 fan from 12V to 5V, with temp monitoring. In 2+ years no problems.

use external firewire/USB enclosure for loud peripherals so I can unplug them (plextor CDR, older hard drives)

but I just bought an G4 Cube last week (with ATI fanless video card).

The silence makes this machine livable. I am going back to school (photography) and needed a computer I could use in a small appartment where it would have to live in my room. I also have all my CDs in MP3 because I do not want to lug them around and wanted to watch DVDs on it. No matter what I do, unless you play the music VERY loud, my PCs make too much noise. The Mac is not perfectly silent, but even when there is sound around, you can hear yourself think.

I also use a Vaio picturebook C1-XS and contrary to some posts on how quiet laptops are, it is very loud especially when the fan comes starts to be happy. It also has a disturbing whine which may come from the toshiba 30GB HD I installed in it. Sadly I did not have a choice as the 9.5mm in those densities are quite rare. IBM has one now I would have bought. The moral is that you only hear the loudest component...

I would prefer a desktop that uses technology designed for laptops with convection cooling, even if it was a tad slower. There are lots of progress to be made in how processors are cooled. Why not use the computer case as a radiator ? On another aspect, I would really appreciate a computer system with an external power supply (like the Cube) also capable of powering all the stupid little periperals that each require an annoying wall wart (imagine some larger cable like a power bus (including a few lines at different voltages) with different interchangeable plugs along the way that can power all sorts of devices: camera, USB hub, KVM switch, modem, hub, ...).

And in the "Less is better" vein, if getting rid of sound is number one and wall warts number two, then cables are number 3 (I use airport or IEEE 802.11 cards)...

My apologies for getting mystical on you... As in meditation, in the quest of perfect computing happiness, or computing Nirvana, the less, the better...

/philippe

www.phitar.com

I looked into this for while as I'm paying nearly that much in POTS charges, but now I've decided to run my own web proxy, upgrade to 56K (yep, I'm still on 33.6)' hopefully that'll reduce charges whilst speeding up access a bit. I'll look back at DSL when the contention ratio is better and the service is cheaper. Oh, and I've got the OpenBSD firewall/gateway working properly... at present it keeps locking the password file apparently at random...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"

I hope the music industry suffers 100% drop in sales.

I also hope that no-one buys another film DVD, ever again.

That would serve them right for trying to take away freedom on our computers. it would also reduce their financial capacity for instituting lawyer attacks on open source software.

Personally, I would like to see vermin like Steve Heckler bankrupt, homeless and living as a down-and-out.

Heinlein's Predictions for the Year 2000

--

Don't like Echelon/Carnivore/whatever? Then you should routinely encrypt your emails with GPG (or equivalent).

However, I don't like Echelon, and I don't do this. Why not? Because it's too much hassle, both for the sender and the receiver of the email.

To fix this problem, I'm designing a system called Herbivore which is intended to make the encryption transparent to the user; it does this by adding some extra fields to the email header, which broadcast a user's public key.

So if I'm using a Herbivore-compliant email client, and the person I send email to is too, then all messages (except the first one sent between us) will be automatically encoded and decoded using GPG.

(Before you rush out to download Herbivore -- it isn't implemented yet. I'm currently writing a very simple command-line email client that implements Herbivore; then I will add the functionality to one of the common open source email clients (probably kmail as that is what I use)).

Where's Matthew Smith http://www.jonlan.demon.co.uk/spectrum/matsmith/

Try it. Building GNOME on Solaris was a complete pain in the arse. http://www.clanger9.demon.co.uk/computer/gnome/ is a list of the various hacks to build on Solaris (no longer nessessary).

Peacefire wasn't caught in the cross fire, it moved into an IP range that was already blocked.
A quick glance at Steve Linfords www.spamhaus.org and Sapient Fridges Spamware vendor list gave me:
209.211.253.68 www.extractor-pro98.com
209.211.253.69 www.list-sorcerer.com
209.211.253.70 www.massmailer.com
209.211.253.71 www.bulkemailpeople.com
209.211.253.73 www.e-mailblaster.com
209.211.253.74 www.marketingmasters.com
209.211.253.84 www.bulkers.net
209.211.253.88 www.bulkbarn.com
209.211.253.89 www.web-promotions.com
209.211.253.139 www.firstlinesoft.com
209.211.253.169 www.peacefire.org
209.211.253.248 www.bulk-isp.com / www.bulk-isp.net etcetera.

Not really a nice region, is it?

EDL has hacked the firmware of the Sony SCSI MD-Data drive, allowing to also use MD-audio discs on it, and not only MD-Data discs as Sony wants it. I heard they do NOT have good relations with Sony. This is quite expensive, but I guess intensive users, like radio stations for instance are customers for this. See also the great minidisc.org

The audio on the disc is in Sony's propratory ATRAC format and they usually like people to buy a piece of hardware with the ATRAC chips in it. While there's software from Sony to rename and reorder tracks on the disc, software methods of getting at the audio have always had to reverse engineer Sony's encoding method. That's not to say it can't be done, just it costs a bit. Take a look at the Electronic Design Lab home page. For a little more info on the Sony MDH-10 drive mentioned, look here....

Here is is then: Borg penguin logo

When you could be a follower of The Invisible Pink Unicorn (blessed be her hooves)

It's interesting to compare your scorecard with that for Robert A Heinlein's predictions of 1950 for the year 2000 (http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/heinlein.html) . Heinlein scores far worse - 3.6 out of 18, or 20%.
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Of course, there's always the obvious grudge match... Starfleet versus the real Star Fleet.

Star Fleet would probably send the Federation running with the fantastically cheesy theme tune alone ;-)

Aircraft

Automobile even more links if you look for "build your own sports car"

Nice looking Computer

I can not think of an example where such advancements are made for mass producing consumer goods. But i think the above examples invalidate much of your story.

One point is that lots of inventors never(seldom earn any money, and only few exceptions make a lot of money.

I think that whilst the great discoveries of our time and times gone by will more often be found by scientists and visionaries of the academic kind
Another point is that a lot of inventions were made by accident.

This always happens to me... When ever i do research on a topic (or am about too), it comes up in Ask Slashdot... must have a mental connection with Cliff... oh well

Anyway, here's what i've found (other than what's already been mentioned)

FuzzCat -- it seems to work, but A) it's more full featured than i'm looking for and B) i can't seem to find the source code for it... :(

HTML WYSIWYG Editor -- This is a good tutorial on how to write a formatting editor with javascript and IE4+. I think i'm going to use this (combined with some tricks used by Yahoo mail...)

Here r some others (from a german PHP list):

http://www.mycgiserver.com/~fuzzcat/webfile/text/t ext.html

http://www.secretgate.com/axadir/classic.html

http://netword.secretgate.com/

http://www.kalbi.demon.co.uk/winsite/win.htm

http://home.earthlink.net/~hheister/

If you want to ride one of those motorbikes, have a look at this absolutely STUNNING bike. I saw this a few years ago and I WANT ONE! NOW! (SCREAM)

I guess I'll just have to make do with my Suzuki Intruder 800. Vroooooooom Squeeeeeeeal YAY!

Alan

RIAA & similar scumbags, please don't bother trying to sue me under American law like you did when I mirrored deCSS. I don't give in to legal threats.
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If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles