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Not Another Hello Kitty game ...

I think Abuse fits that bill better, and it's public domain, with a Win32 port here
That is the full game with all media. It comes with a level editor, and only supports 4 player deathmatch. Still, one of my favorite LAN games.

P.S. I understand the author of this port has a slashdot account. Be sure to let him know what you think.

Do a little reading and you will find that DNA is very easily added to a species genome.

Now, I will provide some evidence to back this up: Viral Transformation is a very common tool for genetic alterations of organisms. It is also a common occurance in non-intended genetic alterations, such as Cowpea mosaic comovirus which inserts its DNA into plants (please note that plants are considered higher organisms).

But wait! If plants are still not good enough for you, there is the GloFish which is a genetic alteration allowing it to fluoresce. Now, it would be highly unethical to do this to a human, but it is very possible.

In addition, there are many things in the human genome (LINEs, SINEs, etc) that frequently move. How do you think that everyone ends up with a different genome if nothing is able to change? Most changes and mutations don't do anything or cause harm, but with time good ones will arise. In fact, good mutations (at least in their terms) frequently occur in bacteria and viruses allowing them to become immune to antibiotics and to our specific T-cells (respectively).

Leviticus 11:23
'But all other winged insects which are four-footed are detestable to you. '

The words of the Bible are meant for the entire earth, not just the scientifically taught of the last 100 years or so. From this perspective, and a small amount of visual research...

Grasshoppers have 4 legs and 2 arms.

http://myplace.westnet.com.au/images/potw/photos/g rasshopper-220403.jpg
http://www.uidaho.edu/so-id/entomology/grasshopper s.htm
http://www.petsdoc.com/pics/funpages/wildlifephoto s/grasshopper.jpg
http://www.debbieharry.net/blkphotos.html

Which would make sense to everyone down through history, except us.

Personally, I think MOH:AA is a piece of shit. Someone gave me the windows version, so I played through it. Of course, it's pretty much non-stop mindless action (kill soldier, retrieve ammunition, get healthpack, repeat).

1) No replay value. At all. Quake had replay value because it had secrets, and went so fast you could complete an entire episode in fifteen minutes, and it had that nice "shooting-shooting" game feel to it. AA moves slow enough to be a "thinking-shooting" game, but there is hardly enough strategy to warrant it's placement in such a catagory. There is one very difficult, strategical level, where you have to clear an area of snipers, without getting your guys killed, and that is about as strategical as it gets.

2) Very little multiplayer value. I started a server just with myself~and couldn't complete objectives! SucK! Granted, I don't actually have friends, so I couldn't test MP in a "real world env".

3) There isn't even pretty graphics to redeem itself: it is the Q3 engine. Although the manual claims that WWII battle gear was so thick that it obstructed blood from seeping out of wounds (only partially believable), you can shoot someone in their fucking head and no blood, whatsoever. Realism, my ass, they're just whoring for their ESRB "T" rating.

In short: Why port this game, of all games, to linux? Why not soldat, as was done with the succulent frabs?

Oh yeah..it's closed source..I forgot..

Clearly it is. On that note, I just finished my first year at the University of Idaho (incidentally, it has the only music college named after a jazz musician--Lionel Hampton, who moved to the town it's in, Moscow, Idaho and helped with the university a lot)... me and some music major friends put together a jazz trio called Theophilus Monk, since I lived in the Donald R. Theophilus Residence Hall Tower. So, marginally more clever. :)

There is no error in thinking that the time a certain molecule stays in the atmosphere matters. If that molecule doesn't stay in the atmosphere long enough to, relatively, affect the energy balance, then it is not as important as other molecules that live in the atmosphere longer***. If the type of molecule is not evenly distributed (spatially), then its global effect is NOT EASILY MODELED, especially if it's also a short-lived molecule.

The IPCC did not ignore surface water and its affect on global warming. They didn't use the models that made a poor job of accounting for the atmospheric water and its affect on global warming (positive and negative).

A bad and poorly understood model is sometimes worse than no model at all! This is especially true if you state, UP FRONT that you have not modeled something because of the poor constraints and incomplete understanding of its affect on the otherwise more simple model. If you CAN make approximations for how much said parameter will affect thing on an order of magnitude (or two or three) scale, then you can state, to "good" approximation what the affect will probably be. The IPCC understood this and said so in their write-up.

Yes, human activity with respect to the global water cycle does affect the atmospheric heat forcing. Consider, though, that the oceans make up more than 97% by volume of the water budget, the atmosphere makes up 1/1000 of a percent, streams and rivers (what humans modify) make up 1/10000 of a percent, lakes (also what humans modify) make up 1/10 of a percent, and ground water makes up 68/100 of a percent. So, yeah, if we were to completely vaporize the lakes and ground water, we'd completely destroy the Earth's climate.

*For the mathematically challanged w.r.t. volumes:

radius of Earth=6378 km
radius of Earth+atmosphere = 6387 (km)
volume of Earth = 4/3 * Pi * 6378^3 (km^3)
volume of Earth+atm = 4/3 * Pi *6387^3 (km^3)
volume of atm = V(earth+atm)-V(earth)
volume of atm in m^3 = 10^9*volume of atm in km^3

** The scale height is the distance it takes for the atmospheric pressure to fall by a factor of e.

*** Assume, if you will, that the lifetime of water in the atmosphere is, say, a week (I found one reference to it:in this PDF). Now, assume 1 gram of water is "stuck" together through-out its atmospheric lifetime (clearly incorrect, but just for the sake of simple calculations). Now, let's start this gram of water at the tropopause, 9 or 10 km above the surface of the earth. It's about -80 C or so there. Let the gram fall through the atmosphere non-adiabatically (so that it can gain some heat) all the way to the surface at 25 C. This is a net change of 105 degrees C. So, the gram of water has absorbed 439 J to increase its temperature. Also assume, unrealisticly--but for kicks, that this gram of water went from the liquid phase to a gaseous phase (so that we can over estimate the amount of energy absorbed). It would absorb 2000 J. Assume all of that energy is absorbed sunlight that would otherwise have reflected off the surface of the earth and back in to space. Also assume all of that energy is later released as the gram of water reverses its path and returns back to the tropopause and that this energy directly heats the atmosphere. This me

Not quite correct. I worked for Information Tech. Svcs. at UI as an undergrad in 2001 when the wireless network was first installed. Your comment was correct then. Here are the locations today:

Where are wireless connections available?

Administration Building
Ag & Extension Education Bldg
Ag Biotech
Ag Science
Art & Architecture
Art & Architecture/North
Art & Architecture/South
Art & Architecture - Interior Design
Buchanan Engineering Lab
Career Services
College of Natural Resources
Education/KIVA
Engineering/Physics
Fo od Research Center
Gauss-Johnson
Gibb Hall
Idaho Commons
Industrial Technology (ITED)
J.W. Martin Lab
JAA-College of Business
Janssen Engineering Building
Kibbie Dome
Law School
Library
Life Science South
McClure
Memorial Gym
Mines Building
Morrill Hall
Music Building
Navy Building
Niccolls
Physical Education
POLYA (Brink Basement)
Radio/TV Building
Renfrew Hal
Ridenbaugh Hall
Shoup Hall
Student Recreation Center
Student Union Building (SUB)
Wallace Common Area

Now, my current Institution, UC Davis, sucks! It did not even make the list, and rightly so. The wireless service is pathetic. I hope somebody from UCD is reading this, because they should be embarassed.

How many more buildings than every bilding on campus need to have wireless access to score better than 33rd? I sense bias in the report.

My institute, the University of Idaho, made #33, but there's only wireless access in the Commons (like the student union, except more full of offices), the library, and the Administration buildings. Though to be fair there's a bunch of classes in the Admin. The cooler part is that there's IBM laptops available for checkout that are all wireless internet-enabled at both the library and the commons, available in two-hour blocks, with wireless printer access too--makes it easy to get a burger and print off the chemistry pre-lab before you have to go do it, heh.

This picture confirms our worst fears!

Ferengi rule of aquisition number 235!

Or what about people who are from "Idaho"? No one ever wants to take on this persistent myth.

To clear up any confusion, RackinFrackin was right... what I meant was that if you were caught cheating, your final grade for the assignment would be -20 points (as opposed to having 20 points taken off your final score). (And no, I did undergrad here).

I used to be a sysadmin here when I was an undergrad, and while the lab grew quite a bit during my time there, there's still a lot that I wanted to do (although sometimes, we were funds-challenged).

You will also need to think about 1) setting up good security policies and enforcing them, and 2) physical security. There are other things, but I can't think of them right now.

With regard to policy, you have to remember that security and convenience are often conflicting. Security is a habit that needs to be engrained into users' minds. I'm not saying that you should never compromise, just know when to draw the line. We went through some growing pains, and our policy became more restrictive as we got more and more students. For example, shutting off telnet was a pain in the ass, even though I was extremely proactive and sent out directions and warnings several weeks before making the move.

Run network tests (like worms) on a private, disconnected network. If you have to run things on the open (highly unlikely) that may generate suspicious packet activity, make sure you get permission from the higher ups! For example, things like having an unauthorized vulnerable box on the open network, even for research purposes, can be a bad idea and it can piss off people more powerful than you.

As someone mentioned before, a lawyer is important. At least do some research into the legality of certain actions.

Also, good security involves knowing what not to do. Sometimes they're obvious (don't write down the root password, don't finger punch the root password), and sometimes they're not.

Yes, patch your machines, upgrade your kernels, lock your doors, lock your workstations, and make good passwords. But the scope of security spans many disciplines, such as psychology, business, and law... it's not about just hardware and software.

Water that is neutral, that is that has an equal amount of hydronium and hydroxyl ions, has 1 x 10^-7 M of each ion. That means that for approximately every 10 million water molecules there is 1 hydronium ion and 1 hydroxyl ion.

The idea is that water breaks down into hydronium and hydroxyl at a certain rate. At 25 degrees Celsius this rate is that one in every 10 million water molecules is broken down at any one time. This number depends on temperature so that at higher temperatures the water is dissociating (breaking down) faster.

Take a look at this web site to learn more about pH.

And in 1976, I wrote my first program in FORTRAN on a coding form, then typed it into a teletype terminal on an IBM 360 mainframe at the University of Idaho where my father was a E.E. grad student. I was twelve then.

I was also reading those old telescope making books, which were written from the 1920s through the 50s, and while they discussed vacuum aluminization, I had no idea that you could send a mirror away to a commercial lab to have it coated inexpensively. I thought I'd have to build my own vacuum chamber if I wanted an aluminized mirror. So I figured I'd have to coat it myself.

I ground my first mirror in complete isolation. I never even discovered Sky and Telescope magazine until I ground my second, a 10 inch, a couple years later. One of the great things about the Internet is that young geeks don't have to be isolated from each other the way I was back in 1976 when I was 12.

The way I got my first kit is that it was among the effects of a chemistry graduate student named David Denny, who was drafted and killed in the Vietnam War. His parents were friends of my grandparents. Years later, when they heard I was into science, they gave me all of his old chemicals and glassware. Included was the mirror kit that hadn't been touched before he had to go to war.

Anyway, I got all my chemicals from the University of Idaho chemistry stockroom, where my dad was a E.E. graduate student. My dad came with me when I bought the chemicals, which was helpful because one of them was the fuming nitric acid required to clean the glass before silvering. Fuming nitric acid might be harder to get this days because it's needed to make such explosives as nitroglycerine and TNT.

Silvering a mirror is very difficult to get right. The slightest impurity or incorrect chemical proportions will ruin the coat. The temperature has to be just right, and you have to let the mirror soak for just the right amount of time. I think I tried a half dozen times before I had a coat I was willing to accept, and I was never really happy with it.

Here's a fun factoid for you: the spent chemical solution that's left after silvering a mirror is hazardous waste. Potently hazardous waste. Not simply because it is toxic, but if left to sit it will spontaneously explode. It can form fulminating silver, which is similar to the fulminating mercury that's used to detonate bullets, except that fulminating silver will explode spontaneously, without any heat or agitation.

One of the amateur telescope making books has a picture of someone's grinding shop that blew up after the owner left some silvering solution lying around.

There are people these days who still silver mirrors. There are certain advantages to silver if you don't mind having to recoat it after it tarnishes ever six months or so. It is very expensive to vacuum coat large mirrors, and there aren't many labs that have big enough vacuum chambers, so some of the people who make big scopes silver their mirrors.

In modern times, their has been quite a bit of success with applying the solutions from two different spray bottles, so that the silver starts to form when the two solutions mix. With some practice, you can get a better coat this way than by soaking the mirror in a basin like I did.

They talk about silvering quite a bit on the ATM list.

Heh. Reminds me of the cows they have at the University of Idaho that have "windows" installed to see their stomachs (article here or google for more info)

They are quite a sight.

Really no problem with that, since we know that Idaho does not exist.

ACS student chapters have been doing this for about 10 or more years. It is lots of fun. Mainly because while your are freezing the ice cream, you can get another bowl and fill it with the N2(l) and dip in other fun things like worms, flowers, bananas, etc. Then you smash 'em.

We used to make much larger portions than this guy and it would take more like 10 minutes to freeze the 1 gallon batches we made.

robi

ACS student chapters have been doing this for about 10 or more years. It is lots of fun. Mainly because while your are freezing the ice cream, you can get another bowl and fill it with the N2(l) and dip in other fun things like worms, flowers, bananas, etc. Then you smash 'em.

We used to make much larger portions than this guy and it would take more like 10 minutes to freeze the 1 gallon batches we made.

robi

ACS student chapters have been doing this for about 10 or more years. It is lots of fun. Mainly because while your are freezing the ice cream, you can get another bowl and fill it with the N2(l) and dip in other fun things like worms, flowers, bananas, etc. Then you smash 'em.

We used to make much larger portions than this guy and it would take more like 10 minutes to freeze the 1 gallon batches we made.

robi

I'm taking Ph.D. classes at the University of Idaho Engineering Outreach. They send you DVD's of the live class, and you follow 1-2 weeks later. The 800 number to the instructor and email to the class and instructor work well.

I've heard good things about Univ of Pheonix, but last I checked, they don't offer Ph.D.s in Computer Science.

What I don't like about U of Idaho is how fast the papers come back to you graded. (Sometimes a month or so, depends on the instructor.) At first I was upset about it, and now I just figure that is how distance learning at the school works.

I've got only 18 hrs worth of Ph.D. work. It would be better to work off a local university, but if you don't have the option, this isn't bad too. The classes are entertaining and educational.

I've also heard it is a good idea to make sure that the instructors haven't graduated from the university they teach at. Inbreeding is a bad thing.

Not only has everyone seen TV shows and movies illustrating that, but it happens in everyone's brains all the time. Go read #5 of the Reith Lectures 2003 by Vilayanur S Ramachandran.
Zen Buddhism's claim to enable the practitioner to "live in the present" seems to be connected with these phenomena, and seems to have actual foundations in the material phenomena in the brain. Everybody interested, go read Zen and the Brain by James H. Austin

Deuterium has different hydrogen bonding properties from H-1. This is a problem because a lot of biology (DNA, for instance) relies on hydrogen bonding to hold things together correctly. If you started drinking a lot of D2O, the differently shaped molecules wouldn't fit together correctly and you would begin breaking down at the cellular level. If I recall correctly the effects are a lot like radiation poisoning.

Another way that D2O differs from regular H2O.

The Matrix is to movies what wolf3d or doom have been to games. It has set a trend, a particular style of filming which lots of movies seem to be aping

I think free will and the omniscience of God are always going to be concepts that conflict in my mind. Whether or not this is the best of all possible worlds, it remains that if God knows in advance what choices we make, then we are destined to make those choices.

I suppose one possible resolution to this would be the idea that God sees time not only from start to finish, but also all possible alternate times as well, in which people made different choices.

Also, I suppose I haven't really chimed in on the creation/evolution topic specifically... I myself lean toward intelligent design, but, by the nature of God (who could set things up from the Big Bang and know exactly how it would turn out in the end) there's no way to really know if God made it happen, or if it was all one big coincidence. In that sense, I don't really believe that evolution and intelligent design conflict at all, and I see no reason to exclude one or the other.

Try Abuse. It's an old DOS game, but with minor tweaks to let it run under Windows. (You may need to go to the Free Abuse site for the tweaked version.)

It's a 2D platform game. Run, jump, grab weapons, shoot. Mindless, but lots of good, visceral fun. The controls are trivial (move with arrow keys, aim and shoot with mouse) so even non-gamers can be up and fragging in no time. When my friends and I have LAN parties (which we've been doing since the DOS version was new) this is the "network test game" we run while people are setting up their machines. When you can jump into Abuse, you're on the net.

H. Beam Piper's books about Fuzzies have to be some of the best novels ever written.

Fuzzy Wuzzy may have been quite fuzzy but Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't a Fuzzy! ;-)

Halon Escape looks like fun.

OT, but interesting: GR actually places a limit on how rigid something can be! link. I always that was really cool.

Er, should I put in the obvious joke, or post it as a reply for double karma? :-)

I initially picked up my 8mhz, 1-bit display powerhouse down at the local goodwill as a kind of novelty. I thought it might be cool to bring back childhood memories. When I got it home and turned it on, the happy little mac face on the 9" black and white display was somehow pleasing. I got to rummaging around and the thing had a whole slew of software on it. Word, Pagemaker, Eudora... you name it. The version of word that shipped back then is sweet (can't remember the version number).

And then I found the games. The games they made back then were perfect. Simple, fun, and addicting. If you have never played the game Crystal Quest, you have not lived.

Eventually I became obsessed with getting the thing on the internet. I searched on e-bay for a network card that would work with the thing (well... actually i needed an external scsi box). I finally found one that would work, but the next day at work, i stumbled acroos the same box in storage. Some hours later, the mac classic was on net! Problem is, only mosaic www 1 ran on the thing (it runs system 6), and it's unusably unstable. So my good friend lynx came to rescue. I simply telnet to my linux box (sorry, no ssh for this puppy) and surf away. I actually use it to code on when I'm getting really distracted by other more full-featured computers.

At any rate, I highly suggest even the most hardened anti-apple among you to pick up a mac classic, an SE/30, or any of the compact models and see what you can do with it.

Oh, here's a much better, though more technical paper!

From the article:
The law of gravity is one of science's most sacrosanct principles; any breaching of its walls would represent a major threat to the current theoretical framework.

Really? One of the few things I can remember from my Physics courses at school is that noone understands why gravitation mass is the same as intertial mass. The closest anyone's got to an explanation is Einstein with his Equivalence Principle, but even this seems a bit woolly (only works in a uniform gravitational field). So there are still aspects of mass (and so gravity) that are not fully understood.

Of course, this experiment sounds rather dodgy, and it's unclear from the article what they're measuring. Got me wondering though ...

I agree that the "universal" IDS information format will be a long time comming. It's been worked on and thought about for years, but the security corporations seem to be doing just fine on their own. In the realm of security, implementation is usually the most difficult obstacle to any solution.

Several people, including James Foster at the University of Idaho have been doing this kind of thing for a while. He got some really interesting results, including circuits evolved to take advantage of quantum effects and highly temperature dependant circuits. Actually, the gist of his work is that there are some severe limitations to this approach. There are references for papers on his web page.

That's supposed to be "In the grim future of Hello Kitty there is only war."

Here is the technology: Hummer

Here is the company implementing the research: TriGeo

I want Simoleons, dammit!

As long as Beowulf clusters have been around people have been doing this. In a homebrew system made from varying types and qualities of hardware, are you seriously going to have each node doing the exactly the same task? No... you write your program (and Beowulfs are ALL in the programming) so that each node does what it's best suited for. The node with the big hard drive stores the data, the fast machine gets twice as many work units, the slow machine is devoted to taking user input or receving the end result, etc. To do otherwise would be, well, stupid. The weak link in the system would slow the whole thing down.

Creating job classes in a homegeneous cluster is just as useful. I seem to remember someone working on The Collective project at the University of Idaho was doing this with a genetic application. This cluster is pretty close to being homogeneous.

If you visit the site, the Borg penguins are my handiwork. :)

Must... not... nit-pick... willpower... weaking... ARGH!

IMO, you're throwing around the word "mass" a little too loosely. Technically speaking, there are two kinds of mass: inertial mass (that which resists a change in motion) and gravitational mass (that which attracts other mass, a gravitational "charge" so to speak). Under current physics, they just happen to be the same (that is, 1 kg(inertial) = 1 kg(gravitational). They tend to call it the equivalence principle.

On the other hand, this equivalency principle is a side-effect of general relativity (which states that it is impossible to tell the difference between force due to linear acceleration and force due to gravity, so therefore you can't tell the difference between the two types of mass). If this experiment holds true, what we have on our hands is an object with low mass (inertial) and a high mass (gravitational), which negates the principle and possibly does some ugly things to general relativity.

The 6 inch had a decent figure but I didn't know I could send it away to be vacuum aluminized, so I chemically deposited silver on it using chemicals I bought at the University of Idaho chemistry stockroom. Take my advice, it's much better to get a mirror aluminized.

I hurried a bit too much on fine grinding the 10 inch and wasn't happy with it, so I tried again with my 8 inch and was much more patient, and got excellent results from it (1/10 wave according to Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop's Paul Zurakowski).

Grinding telescopes and being a sciency kind of guy led me to study astronomy at CalTech where I assisted CalTech astronomer Jeremy Mould in observing the the Palomar 60 inch and 200 inch telescopes - the experience of a lifetime for an amateur astronomer.

It's been about 18 years since I last worked any glass but I just bought an 8 inch plate glass kit from Dan Cassaro. You can buy Pyrex kits and optical glass (suitable for lenses) from Newport Glass.

I'm starting to write about the telescope I'm about to work on here.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area check out the Eastbay Astronomical Society's Chabot Amateur Telescope Maker's Workshop (there's an observatory there too, it's in Oakland), Fremont Peak Observatory, which has a 30 inch reflector that's open to the public, with regular gatherings of amateurs who bring their telescopes up there, and the San Francisco Sidewalk Astronomers - the Sidewalk Astronomers set up telescopes on city sidewalks and introduce people to astronomy by inviting them to look through their scopes.

You can get books on astronomy, and importantly, the specifics of how to actually grind and polish a telescope from Willman-Bell and Newport Glass.

Check out this guy who made a ribbed mirror blank by cutting out a pattern from one disk of glass with a water jet and fusing it to a solid sheet in a furnace.

Visit Google's index of Amateur Telescope Making, particularly http://www.atmpage.com.

If you want to get into amateur telescope making, take advantage of an immensely valuable resource that wasn't available to me when I was a kid - subscribe to the ATM List - here's the FAQ.

Mike

• Distributed Lock Manager: locks can be simulated with certain types of MPI messages.
• Cluster-wide File System: use MPI to pass data back and forth between nodes, including instructions on where to write the data. Not only is there a cluster-wide file system, it's a customizeable cluster-wide file system!
• Process control: Scyld's bproc allows all processes to appear as if they are running on the master node. You can also move processes between nodes transparently with this.
• Connection manager: Scyld provides this to some degree. You can do remote shutdown/startup of nodes or groups of nodes.
• Shared System Disk: well, nodes bootstrap from thier own drives, but download a new kernal image from the master node on bootup. They also pull down libraries from the masternode on bootup.
• Single security and management domain: permissions are the same on the slave nodes as they are on the master. But the slave nodes are truely compute nodes, and permissions there matter little, except for data files.
• Cluster wide process control: you said it. Beowulfs do it.
• Mixed Architecture: what you can do depends on your cluster. For a mixed Mac/Alpha/x86 cluster, you'd have to have different executables for each node. I'm sure there's Beowulf software that lets you do this, but for ours we don't need it (all Athlons.)
• Rolling Upgrade Support: yup. Acually, with Scyld, if you reboot a node, it will come back up with the newest configuration, imaged off the master node.
• Parallel IO support: simulated/managed through MPI pretty easily. Set up "IO" nodes and let them handle it.
• Interconnect failover: networking on a Beowulf is up to you. We use a high-performance switch and some channel bonding. It can be done.
• High-end scaling: Beowulf? "OK?" Have you ever heard of ASCI-Red?
• Load Balancing: ours does round robin scheduling of jobs, but it usually doesn't utilize the higher number nodes unless you run a job that requests a large number of nodes. We wish for better control, but this works pretty well.
• Cluster Alias: yeah, what you said. :)

Check out Abuse (link below), even though the game came out more than 6 years ago the community is still going and active on a daily basis. I attribute this largely to the addition of LISP which made the game very expandable.

http://abuse2.com

Recently Jermey Scott made a Win32 port of Abuse and converted the IPX code to DirectPlay so you can play multi-player over the net. That can be found here:

http://www.uidaho.edu/~scot4875/

1. People read the articles before posting.
2. Slashdot editors turned 30 seconds of their time toward making sure people can read the articles.

OK GOD... Lemme have it!!!!

http://www.privatebuy.com/ from ecount.

This looked great right up until I got to the part where you can only load your account using an existing credit card.

Somebody else in this thread mentioned that one thing that holds back anonymous payment methods is that they could be used for money laundering, and I have to begrudgingly admit that that's a valid point. Even with limits such as those established by privatebuy ($500 worth of transactions per day, no more than $1000 in your account at one time), somebody could still hack a system where money was chanelled through a large number of accounts under different names. After all, the crime syndicates of the U.S. Government and credit card companies do need to protect their interests against the machinations of lesser crime syndicates.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Neal Stephenson's short story The Great Simoleon Caper is an entertaining, thought-provoking look at the topic of anonymous e-cash.

This page suggests a solution to the insecurity of software that I almost agree with -- basically, that anyone with the know-how should be spending their time writing viruses and exploits for the woefully insecure OSs we are blessed to work with today, until OSs HAVE to be secure to stand up to the sea of malfeasance that comes in through their net connections. My recommendation is a loop of snide but informative walls...

But freebsd and such are far too developed to look at the concepts and are high developed code. Perhaps saddling up on an early OS project might be the best way to learn. A list of Alternative OS