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One neat thing about the globe view is that the stars in the background are not random, but are the positions/colors/relative magnitudes of actual stars in the sky:

http://josef.org/wii-forecast-constellations.html

I made a handwriting system a long time ago with the following goals in mind in designing it:

1. It should NOT be easily readable by a casual observer (for notes I didn't want other people to read).
2. The most commonly used letters should be the simplest to draw, so it should be fairly fast to write, like cursive.
3. Letters should be as umambigious as possible, so even the most scribbled/hurried writing would be distinctly recognizable.
4. Each letter should try to hint to the original latin letter to some degree, whenever possible. Although goal #2 usually would take priority over this one when in conflict.
5. A mid-height clear horizontal marked the beginning/end of a new letter.
6. (just for fun) It should look kinda weird and cool in a sci-fi sort of way, so if someone came across my notes they would be kind of baffled =)

While #2 and #3 might work towards making this an easy-to-OCR handwriting system, #1 and #6 probably makes it moot, at least for the system I made. However, I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to make a less-obfuscated more-practical writing system which try to accomplish similar goals to #2-4 above.

I made a font out of my handwriting system a few years ago. If anyone is curious, here is an image chart of the font. =)

I'm curious what other more "efficient" writing systems may exist out there (other than standard and cursive). Does anyone know of any others?

Macromedia apparently has some kind of a business partnership with one of the oldest and most infamous privacy-invading companies on the net: doubleclick.

I was a bit more than disturbed when I stumbled across this little gem of horror in the flash plugin settings.

For those who can't see the screenshot it shows a panel:

[Macromedia Flash Player Settings:]
Privacy
Allow doubleclick.net to access your camera and microphone?
( )Allow (*)Deny

While I admit that it's set to Deny by default, I imagine they could easily change this just as covertly as they have acknowledged their partnership with doubleclick in the first place...

I really have less fear of anything Microsoft might do, when Macromedia is forming partnerships with companies and sharing their technology in frightening ways like this...

I find the combination of an eBay banner with this article, as shown in this screenshot to be quite amusing.

I tried to post it here, but lameness filter would not allow it...

Star Wars 419 Scam

"Bah", to the lameness filter, I say.

on the IBM linux watch our experiments seemed to imply that using a wheel that you could scroll around (selecting things) and also "click" was a good comprimise

On an all-in-ram storage device, if you are competant (i.e. not Microsoft or Sharp) you want to take advantage of a stateless interface model, where there is no quitting of applications or saving. You go to a different work area and the process is suspended in ram as you left it, and your data is just as you left it.

The Palm apps seem to do this most of the time, but I do notice on my new Sidekick, that what you describe is exactly how it seems to work. It's very convenient, and fast...

Just one problem, if you want to be connected to the internet you'll need a cable

No problem here... =)

[...] how about backing up your phone to your pc so that when (not if...) your phone breaks you can restore the replacement phone to have the same phone#'s ans setup and other data?

Assuming the original poster is talking about the new Sidekick, 99% of all of the information is stored on the server, not your client device. Several people in a popular Sidekick forum have already mentioned that they put their SIM card into their replacment and all of the info is instantly there just as it was before.

have yet to see one that can... you can send your data to a web-page for editing, but it still costs money to transfer it, and you cant back-up phone settings...

As to most of the other counterpoints in this thread, the SDK is coming soon...

It has email, AIM, SMS, a decent web browser, and is 24-7 always-on 20-40kbps net connection... I just got one yesterday and I'm in geek heaven.

It's got a very minimal voice plan (200 mins/ 1000 weekend mins), but that doesn't matter to me so much as I rarely used more than 100 mins a month on my old phone, and most of the people I communicate are fairly readily available by some digital medium (email, AIM, or SMS).

This thing is quite kickass though. I was lounging on the couch last night for about three hours just chatting away on AIM, and browsing around. I think this may provide my path to a new level of lazyness.. =)