I was going to post the same thing you just said. I clicked on the link hoping to see inspiring pictures of celestial objects. Instead I got:
- A pop-under for "World's largest online casino"
- An X10 "tiny wireless video camera" ad
- An animated banner "hit the button to win" (at least it wasn't "punch the monkey")
- A blinking purple and green "Buy Now" for Starry Night software.
- A bunch of other frame cruft
-...and a little thumbnail of the ant nebula next to the headline. Maybe there was a story body too; I didn't notice.
Bah! With a front page like that, I'm not even going to risk clicking on any of their links. Astronomy picture of the day or the Hubble Heritage Galleryare much better sites.
Ok, this question is coming from a total idiot, as I have little knowledge of physics: but what is the possibility of something like this "mushrooming" unintentionally?
Somewhere between "negligible" and "none".
Have a nice day.
(A useful baseline is to consider the cosmic radiation that hits us every day. These particles can have much higher energies than anything TRIUMF is putting out, and the planet's survived ~4 billion years so far. Experiments like RHIC are at high enough energy levels that it's worth asking the question, but the TRIUMF stuff is quite routine and is not going to run away.)
If I read the article right, it decomposed back into sodium(22). We can create lots of elements with super science gadgets, but none that I've heard of are stable.
Even the sodium(22) is temporary. It decays to neon(22), which is stable.
In general, if it's stable, it's found in nature at high enough concentrations that you don't need to produce it (e.g. gold). The accelerators and reactors are for when you want an unstable element that isn't found in nature, and that does something interesting as it decays toward stability.
However, I have to wonder what would happen to radioactive waste that was modified this way.
It would probably just get more radioactive. If you were able to isolate a particular waste isotope you might be able to transmute it into something more friendly, but it'd probably require more energy than you ever got from the nuclear fuel in the first place.
We've got to figure out some way to make that stuff less dangerous,
Put it back in the mine where you originally got the uranium, enclosed in leak-resistant containers (e.g. a block of glass). That should make it less dangerous than the other background hazards (radon from the natural uranium that we haven't yet mined, radioactive potassium in bananas, carbon-14, pesticides, tobacco smoke and car exhaust, etc).
Or just make bullets out of it and shoot it at your enemies. Worked well for the US in the Gulf war, with the depleted uranium left over after producing enriched power-plant fuel and bombs.
Ever heard of the Can-Du reactor? (safest reactor in the world I believe) It outputs perfect nuclear waste for a nuke (hence all the fuss by the US when a few were sold to China)
Another interesting bit of trivia about this reactor - it can run on natural uranium, while US designs require enriched uranium. In other words, to fuel our reactors you just need a shovel, while to fuel a US-style reactor you need a substantial part of a weapons-program infrastructure (Oak Ridge, etc).
take note: the supercollider project was to be 20,000 GeV of potential...
I think it's worth mentioning that the per-particle energy isn't the only figure of merit for an accelerator. Cyclotrons like TRIUMF are capable of producing a high number of particles per second, making them good for things like isotope production or for experiments that require large numbers of other particles like muons or pions.
IIRC, TRIUMF can produce a beam current of about 140uA at 500MeV (which is a Mega electron Volt, a unit of energy, not the "megavolt" claimed by the article). That's a continuous beam power of 70 kW.
If this decays into radioactive sodium, how long does it last? Are we talking standard half life stuff, or is this "magnesium" only magnesium for a very very short period of time?
But it does kindof worry me that Canadians can now create there own elements at will.
TRIUMF is a couple of km from the UBC hospital, and for years they've been creating elements for medical imaging and treatment. The material is produced in the TRIUMF beamline, extracted and processed through some rather nasty chemistry, then shot down a pneumatic tube to the hospital to be injected into the patient. These isotopes have short half-lives (minutes) so they have to be produced close to where they are used.
QPBC was actually a fairly inoffensive book club. I don't know if they still do this, but when I finally got tired of sending in my monthly "No thanks" cards and asked to cancel my membership, they offered to switch me into a mode where I would still get the regular catalogs but didn't have to respond if I didn't want anything.
Maybe I should look at them again... online OED access would be nice. Do you have a link that mentions that offer? I didn't see it in my quick glance at www.qpb.com.
But you have to realize that a clean, well-mastered (or even better direct to disk ala Sheffield Labs) LP has musical fidelity that no CD will ever match.
That's an opinion, but I have yet to see convincing experimental evidence to support it (however, I've never really done a literature search or anything). A competing hypothesis is that an LP merely distorts the original signal in a way that "sounds good".
This debate can be reduced to a simple test: Can an audiophile distinguish between an LP, and a CD recording of that same LP, at a statistically-significant accuracy in a double-blind test?
In other words, take an LP player producing a line-level audio output, connected to an amplifier. That's "A". For "B", the line-out from the LP player is sampled and recorded to a CD, then that CD is played into the amplifier. For each experimental trial, either "A" or "B" is selected at random, and the tester is asked to identify which one is active. Not which one sounds better, just which is which.
On cheap equipment like a $5 PeeCee sound card, I'm sure it'd be easy to hear the difference (e.g. your recording would include electrical noise from the hard drive motors, etc). However, with proper equipment (and of course a green pen to color the edge of the CD), I'm not convinced that there would be any audible loss of fidelity.
Does anyone have any references to actual experimental results for this sort of test?
I know people who work for the company that leads Fuel Cell research (Avista Labs), and I've heard them say that the technology is not yet feasable for normal use.
Then maybe they aren't actually the leaders in fuel cell research...
Of course I'm a bit biased, as some of my former classmates work for Ballard.
You can put in this much solar capacity, or more, for this price.
Does your budget include all of the flashlights (and associated batteries) that you need to shine on the solar panels to get this much power at night? Solar's not particularly useful for 24/7 standby power applications...
You can make a closed system if you have to (e.g. for a satellite), but you don't have to. In many applications it makes more sense to generate the hydrogen at central facilities, and distribute it to the customers the same way that propane or medical oxygen tanks are refilled today.
Except, if you look at the pic on the website, the container looks like a bottle of motor oil. [...]I can not imagine a container costing more than its weight in gold. Of course, they can make it out of platinum, and I would be wrong...
1. The pic on the website doesn't just look like a bottle of motor oil, it is a bottle of motor oil. It's a symbol, just like the PC motherboard that appears next to this story on the Slashdot homepage. They're not actually selling hydrogen in cheap plastic containers.
2. The storage container wouldn't be made of platinum (although the fuel cell itself probably contains some), but it could be filled with palladium or other exotic metals. More information about metal-hydride storage is here, but the bottom line is that you're paying for a lot more than an empty jar. These fuel bottles are like rechargeable batteries, except you can't recharge them at home.
You'd lose the "No carbon monoxide; safe to run indoors" claim if you were running on a hydrocarbon fuel. Also you'd need to add the equipment to convert the hydrocarbon fuel into hydrogen (and waste CO2), so the initial cost of the device would be higher. It would make sense for a continuous-duty device or a vehicle, but for standby UPS applications I can see the logic of just using hydrogen.
Doing some basic math, the cost of a fuel comes out to about $416.66 per bottle, unless I am missing something major.
One thing you might be missing is that you are paying for two things with each bottle of fuel: the fuel itself, and the bottle that's holding it.
For example you might pay $416 for a new bottle of fuel, but get a $350 credit when you return the empty one (I couldn't find their actual price for fuel refills, but since they're using a metal-hydride storage technology, the cost of the cylinders will be significant).
I spent many hours working on my C-128 with a soldering iron, and I don't recall seeing any 6510s in there. If you want a second opinion you can also look here or hier.
But thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.
Yes, even Commodore used a Z80. Specifically in the C-128, which could boot into a CP/M mode running on the Z80, or into regular C-128 mode on the 8502, or into C-64 emulation mode (also on the 8502). I don't think there was any way to run both CPUs at the same time.
I don't know how many people actually used this feature (probably not many, given how well the C-128 did in the marketplace), but it was kind of neat at the time.
I can buy an automated projectile system to shoot down guided missiles, but a laser? To shoot down artillery shells? Can you imagine the engineering required to lock onto said shell and the laser power to detonate it?
As far as the tracking, it seems to me that it would be significantly easier than in a projectile system. In the projectile system, you have to move something rapidly through 3-dimensional space and trigger it when it's within a small distance of another thing moving rapidly through 3-dimensional space. With the laser, you just have to track two angles so that the beam stays on the target. That's a much simpler control system.
This really is no big deal. There a many high-quality hard crypto techniques around. If al-Queda really want strong crypto they can just FTP it from ssh.com like anyone else. Or PGP. Or OpenBSD.
Or code it themselves. Rijndael/AES is a fairly simple algorithm, and only relies on a few "magic numbers" (the 256-byte S-box is generated mathematically). It would be easy for someone with a math or electrical engineering background to memorize the algorithm, then implement it from scratch at a later date without any source code or reference material. It took me an evening to write an AES implementation based on the PDF specification on the NIST website, and it would be faster to re-do it now that I understand how the algorithm works. Does that now make me a "controlled munition"?
There is no good way to control or restrict the *distribution* of strong crypto. All that can be done is to restrict the *use* of strong crypto, by widespread wiretapping combined with severe penalties for anyone sending messages that can't be cracked or don't correspond to the copy of your private key that you "voluntarily" registered with the government. The government doesn't have to be able to break a terrorist's message, if that encrypted message itself is sufficient cause to throw the "terrorist" in jail with no further communication to the outside world.
Not that I approve of this, mind you, but it could be done. It might even work, in a theoretical world where law-enforcement officials were all 100% free from corruption or the possibility of bribery/blackmail.
Funny, Season 12 had the highest ratings since Season 6...There goes that theory.
I can't remember the last Simpsons episode that was actually good - lately most of them have been competing for the title of "worst episode ever".
Face it, the show's over and all the talent has left the building. It's the same thing that happend to Star Trek: TNG, and exacty the thing that *didn't* happen to Babylon 5 (because that story was written with a specific ending). I don't care if the ratings are higher, it's still crap. People are idiots (except for the moderators with itchy trigger fingers who are looking at this post. They are paragons of society. And that's a good thing).
I can't really blame Fox for trying to milk every last dime out of the Simpsons franchise, but really, it's time to move on. Futurama is, well, the future (though Family Guy is good too).
That's a funny attitude to take. An install with an graphics mode would do much to dispell the image of BSD as a niche OS. And seeing as both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are commercial products, one would think that their repective owners would be keen to broaden their appeal.
Two words: "serial console".
For me, one of the biggest advantages of OpenBSD is that it can be installed, configured, and maintained over a very low-bandwidth channel. This is very useful when you are building servers to be installed in colocation facilities, where you don't have easy physical access.
It is very easy to do a network install of OpenBSD onto a server with no CD-ROM and no video card. All you have to do is connect a network cable and a serial terminal[1], and add a 1-line configuration file to the standard boot floppy. Then you will be able to do the entire installation over the serial console. Linux can be set up for serial-console operation once it's installed, but I haven't seen an installer that supported it as well as OpenBSD does. I have better things to do with my time than plug a video card in just so I can install an OS (especially on a 1U server like the Intel ISP1100, that comes with no video card and only has one full-size PCI slot).
For my money, OpenBSD _is_ a "niche OS", and that niche is sitting between my network and the outside world. It does that very well - the grouchy, spiky blowfish protecting the soft, naive Penguins on the inside. I would be very annoyed if OpenBSD started adding graphical "fluff". That's what SuSE is for (the 7.3 installer does look very nice, I must admit).
FreeBSD, on the other hand, would probably benefit from a graphical installer. It's more of a general-purpose operating system, and it's already menu-driven. Adding VGA graphics would give it a more modern feel (as long as it was still possible to do a text-mode install).
[1] e.g. a Palm IIIx running a terminal emulator. Yes, I've done it, and it worked just fine.
I really like the OpenBSD "Patch Branch" - a CVS branch that contains security fixes and other "safe" changes, but not all the new development junk. Just a "cvs update -rOPENBSD_2_9 -Pd" to freshen/usr/src, then rebuild. There are even targets to re-build a complete set of installation files incorporating all the patches.
It's really nice to build a fully patched version of the OS, then upload it to a local FTP server (for network installs) or burn it onto a CD. That way you can install new servers *once*, as opposed to installing the base OS then manually upgrading the dozen or so packages that have critical bugs.
(I don't know how Debian compares to OpenBSD here; I haven't tried Debian since I had some pain with the installer a few years ago. But OpenBSD's really nice; just wish it had SMP and a few other goodies).
However, I think the IBM solution is more practical and widely usable... For instance, it has higher memory densities, and USB is all over the place.
You can get USB dongles for the iButton.
However, they are really for different applications. iButtons are for applications where you need tamper-resistant security and built-in cryptographic operations, not for transporting data between systems (I think the biggest memory capacity is something like 134 KBytes).
The door lock is a good example - a regular USB disk wouldn't be very secure, because any secret codes on it could be copied to another device. The iButton will not allow you to extract its secret key, but it will let you verify that a particular key is present (by signing a challenge, which is then verified against a public key).
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to post the same thing you just said. I clicked on the link hoping to see inspiring pictures of celestial objects. Instead I got:
...and a little thumbnail of the ant nebula next to the headline. Maybe there was a story body too; I didn't notice.
- A pop-under for "World's largest online casino"
- An X10 "tiny wireless video camera" ad
- An animated banner "hit the button to win" (at least it wasn't "punch the monkey")
- A blinking purple and green "Buy Now" for Starry Night software.
- A bunch of other frame cruft
-
Bah! With a front page like that, I'm not even going to risk clicking on any of their links. Astronomy picture of the day or the Hubble Heritage Galleryare much better sites.
Ok, this question is coming from a total idiot, as I have little knowledge of physics: but what is the possibility of something like this "mushrooming" unintentionally?
Somewhere between "negligible" and "none".
Have a nice day.
(A useful baseline is to consider the cosmic radiation that hits us every day. These particles can have much higher energies than anything TRIUMF is putting out, and the planet's survived ~4 billion years so far. Experiments like RHIC are at high enough energy levels that it's worth asking the question, but the TRIUMF stuff is quite routine and is not going to run away.)
If I read the article right, it decomposed back into sodium(22). We can create lots of elements with super science gadgets, but none that I've heard of are stable.
Even the sodium(22) is temporary. It decays to neon(22), which is stable.
In general, if it's stable, it's found in nature at high enough concentrations that you don't need to produce it (e.g. gold). The accelerators and reactors are for when you want an unstable element that isn't found in nature, and that does something interesting as it decays toward stability.
However, I have to wonder what would happen to radioactive waste that was modified this way.
It would probably just get more radioactive. If you were able to isolate a particular waste isotope you might be able to transmute it into something more friendly, but it'd probably require more energy than you ever got from the nuclear fuel in the first place.
We've got to figure out some way to make that stuff less dangerous,
Put it back in the mine where you originally got the uranium, enclosed in leak-resistant containers (e.g. a block of glass). That should make it less dangerous than the other background hazards (radon from the natural uranium that we haven't yet mined, radioactive potassium in bananas, carbon-14, pesticides, tobacco smoke and car exhaust, etc).
Or just make bullets out of it and shoot it at your enemies. Worked well for the US in the Gulf war, with the depleted uranium left over after producing enriched power-plant fuel and bombs.
Ever heard of the Can-Du reactor? (safest reactor in the world I believe) It outputs perfect nuclear waste for a nuke (hence all the fuss by the US when a few were sold to China)
Another interesting bit of trivia about this reactor - it can run on natural uranium, while US designs require enriched uranium. In other words, to fuel our reactors you just need a shovel, while to fuel a US-style reactor you need a substantial part of a weapons-program infrastructure (Oak Ridge, etc).
take note: the supercollider project was to be 20,000 GeV of potential...
I think it's worth mentioning that the per-particle energy isn't the only figure of merit for an accelerator. Cyclotrons like TRIUMF are capable of producing a high number of particles per second, making them good for things like isotope production or for experiments that require large numbers of other particles like muons or pions.
IIRC, TRIUMF can produce a beam current of about 140uA at 500MeV (which is a Mega electron Volt, a unit of energy, not the "megavolt" claimed by the article). That's a continuous beam power of 70 kW.
If this decays into radioactive sodium, how long does it last? Are we talking standard half life stuff, or is this "magnesium" only magnesium for a very very short period of time?
The CRC handbook lists the following half-lives:
Na21 22.5s
Mg22 3.86s
Na22 2.605y
But it does kindof worry me that Canadians can now create there own elements at will.
TRIUMF is a couple of km from the UBC hospital, and for years they've been creating elements for medical imaging and treatment. The material is produced in the TRIUMF beamline, extracted and processed through some rather nasty chemistry, then shot down a pneumatic tube to the hospital to be injected into the patient. These isotopes have short half-lives (minutes) so they have to be produced close to where they are used.
QPBC was actually a fairly inoffensive book club. I don't know if they still do this, but when I finally got tired of sending in my monthly "No thanks" cards and asked to cancel my membership, they offered to switch me into a mode where I would still get the regular catalogs but didn't have to respond if I didn't want anything.
Maybe I should look at them again... online OED access would be nice. Do you have a link that mentions that offer? I didn't see it in my quick glance at www.qpb.com.
But you have to realize that a clean, well-mastered (or even better direct to disk ala Sheffield Labs) LP has musical fidelity that no CD will ever match.
That's an opinion, but I have yet to see convincing experimental evidence to support it (however, I've never really done a literature search or anything). A competing hypothesis is that an LP merely distorts the original signal in a way that "sounds good".
This debate can be reduced to a simple test: Can an audiophile distinguish between an LP, and a CD recording of that same LP, at a statistically-significant accuracy in a double-blind test?
In other words, take an LP player producing a line-level audio output, connected to an amplifier. That's "A". For "B", the line-out from the LP player is sampled and recorded to a CD, then that CD is played into the amplifier. For each experimental trial, either "A" or "B" is selected at random, and the tester is asked to identify which one is active. Not which one sounds better, just which is which.
On cheap equipment like a $5 PeeCee sound card, I'm sure it'd be easy to hear the difference (e.g. your recording would include electrical noise from the hard drive motors, etc). However, with proper equipment (and of course a green pen to color the edge of the CD), I'm not convinced that there would be any audible loss of fidelity.
Does anyone have any references to actual experimental results for this sort of test?
100BaseTX uses 2 pairs. However there were some earlier 100 Mbit technologies (100BaseT4, 100BaseVG) that did use 4 pairs. I found a bit of info here.
I know people who work for the company that leads Fuel Cell research (Avista Labs), and I've heard them say that the technology is not yet feasable for normal use.
Then maybe they aren't actually the leaders in fuel cell research...
Of course I'm a bit biased, as some of my former classmates work for Ballard.
You can put in this much solar capacity, or more, for this price.
Does your budget include all of the flashlights (and associated batteries) that you need to shine on the solar panels to get this much power at night? Solar's not particularly useful for 24/7 standby power applications...
You can make a closed system if you have to (e.g. for a satellite), but you don't have to. In many applications it makes more sense to generate the hydrogen at central facilities, and distribute it to the customers the same way that propane or medical oxygen tanks are refilled today.
Except, if you look at the pic on the website, the container looks like a bottle of motor oil. [...]I can not imagine a container costing more than its weight in gold. Of course, they can make it out of platinum, and I would be wrong...
1. The pic on the website doesn't just look like a bottle of motor oil, it is a bottle of motor oil. It's a symbol, just like the PC motherboard that appears next to this story on the Slashdot homepage. They're not actually selling hydrogen in cheap plastic containers.
2. The storage container wouldn't be made of platinum (although the fuel cell itself probably contains some), but it could be filled with palladium or other exotic metals. More information about metal-hydride storage is here, but the bottom line is that you're paying for a lot more than an empty jar. These fuel bottles are like rechargeable batteries, except you can't recharge them at home.
You'd lose the "No carbon monoxide; safe to run indoors" claim if you were running on a hydrocarbon fuel. Also you'd need to add the equipment to convert the hydrocarbon fuel into hydrogen (and waste CO2), so the initial cost of the device would be higher. It would make sense for a continuous-duty device or a vehicle, but for standby UPS applications I can see the logic of just using hydrogen.
Doing some basic math, the cost of a fuel comes out to about $416.66 per bottle, unless I am missing something major.
One thing you might be missing is that you are paying for two things with each bottle of fuel: the fuel itself, and the bottle that's holding it.
For example you might pay $416 for a new bottle of fuel, but get a $350 credit when you return the empty one (I couldn't find their actual price for fuel refills, but since they're using a metal-hydride storage technology, the cost of the cylinders will be significant).
Actaully, it was a 6510, not 8502 (or 6502)
Vic-20 = 6502
C-64 = 6510
C-128 = 8502 + Z80
I spent many hours working on my C-128 with a soldering iron, and I don't recall seeing any 6510s in there. If you want a second opinion you can also look here or hier.
But thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.
Yes, even Commodore used a Z80. Specifically in the C-128, which could boot into a CP/M mode running on the Z80, or into regular C-128 mode on the 8502, or into C-64 emulation mode (also on the 8502). I don't think there was any way to run both CPUs at the same time.
I don't know how many people actually used this feature (probably not many, given how well the C-128 did in the marketplace), but it was kind of neat at the time.
I can buy an automated projectile system to shoot down guided missiles, but a laser? To shoot down artillery shells? Can you imagine the engineering required to lock onto said shell and the laser power to detonate it?
As far as the tracking, it seems to me that it would be significantly easier than in a projectile system. In the projectile system, you have to move something rapidly through 3-dimensional space and trigger it when it's within a small distance of another thing moving rapidly through 3-dimensional space. With the laser, you just have to track two angles so that the beam stays on the target. That's a much simpler control system.
One of the perks of cryptography seems to be the chance to make up words for big numbers!
That's one of the perks of writing press releases. Cryptographers just use 2^N notation.
This really is no big deal. There a many high-quality hard crypto techniques around. If al-Queda really want strong crypto they can just FTP it from ssh.com like anyone else. Or PGP. Or OpenBSD.
Or code it themselves. Rijndael/AES is a fairly simple algorithm, and only relies on a few "magic numbers" (the 256-byte S-box is generated mathematically). It would be easy for someone with a math or electrical engineering background to memorize the algorithm, then implement it from scratch at a later date without any source code or reference material. It took me an evening to write an AES implementation based on the PDF specification on the NIST website, and it would be faster to re-do it now that I understand how the algorithm works. Does that now make me a "controlled munition"?
There is no good way to control or restrict the *distribution* of strong crypto. All that can be done is to restrict the *use* of strong crypto, by widespread wiretapping combined with severe penalties for anyone sending messages that can't be cracked or don't correspond to the copy of your private key that you "voluntarily" registered with the government. The government doesn't have to be able to break a terrorist's message, if that encrypted message itself is sufficient cause to throw the "terrorist" in jail with no further communication to the outside world.
Not that I approve of this, mind you, but it could be done. It might even work, in a theoretical world where law-enforcement officials were all 100% free from corruption or the possibility of bribery/blackmail.
Funny, Season 12 had the highest ratings since Season 6...There goes that theory.
I can't remember the last Simpsons episode that was actually good - lately most of them have been competing for the title of "worst episode ever".
Face it, the show's over and all the talent has left the building. It's the same thing that happend to Star Trek: TNG, and exacty the thing that *didn't* happen to Babylon 5 (because that story was written with a specific ending). I don't care if the ratings are higher, it's still crap. People are idiots (except for the moderators with itchy trigger fingers who are looking at this post. They are paragons of society. And that's a good thing).
I can't really blame Fox for trying to milk every last dime out of the Simpsons franchise, but really, it's time to move on. Futurama is, well, the future (though Family Guy is good too).
That's a funny attitude to take. An install with an graphics mode would do much to dispell the image of BSD as a niche OS. And seeing as both FreeBSD and OpenBSD are commercial products, one would think that their repective owners would be keen to broaden their appeal.
Two words: "serial console".
For me, one of the biggest advantages of OpenBSD is that it can be installed, configured, and maintained over a very low-bandwidth channel. This is very useful when you are building servers to be installed in colocation facilities, where you don't have easy physical access.
It is very easy to do a network install of OpenBSD onto a server with no CD-ROM and no video card. All you have to do is connect a network cable and a serial terminal[1], and add a 1-line configuration file to the standard boot floppy. Then you will be able to do the entire installation over the serial console. Linux can be set up for serial-console operation once it's installed, but I haven't seen an installer that supported it as well as OpenBSD does. I have better things to do with my time than plug a video card in just so I can install an OS (especially on a 1U server like the Intel ISP1100, that comes with no video card and only has one full-size PCI slot).
For my money, OpenBSD _is_ a "niche OS", and that niche is sitting between my network and the outside world. It does that very well - the grouchy, spiky blowfish protecting the soft, naive Penguins on the inside. I would be very annoyed if OpenBSD started adding graphical "fluff". That's what SuSE is for (the 7.3 installer does look very nice, I must admit).
FreeBSD, on the other hand, would probably benefit from a graphical installer. It's more of a general-purpose operating system, and it's already menu-driven. Adding VGA graphics would give it a more modern feel (as long as it was still possible to do a text-mode install).
[1] e.g. a Palm IIIx running a terminal emulator. Yes, I've done it, and it worked just fine.
I really like the OpenBSD "Patch Branch" - a CVS branch that contains security fixes and other "safe" changes, but not all the new development junk. Just a "cvs update -rOPENBSD_2_9 -Pd" to freshen /usr/src, then rebuild. There are even targets to re-build a complete set of installation files incorporating all the patches.
It's really nice to build a fully patched version of the OS, then upload it to a local FTP server (for network installs) or burn it onto a CD. That way you can install new servers *once*, as opposed to installing the base OS then manually upgrading the dozen or so packages that have critical bugs.
(I don't know how Debian compares to OpenBSD here; I haven't tried Debian since I had some pain with the installer a few years ago. But OpenBSD's really nice; just wish it had SMP and a few other goodies).
However, I think the IBM solution is more practical and widely usable... For instance, it has higher memory densities, and USB is all over the place.
You can get USB dongles for the iButton.
However, they are really for different applications. iButtons are for applications where you need tamper-resistant security and built-in cryptographic operations, not for transporting data between systems (I think the biggest memory capacity is something like 134 KBytes).
The door lock is a good example - a regular USB disk wouldn't be very secure, because any secret codes on it could be copied to another device. The iButton will not allow you to extract its secret key, but it will let you verify that a particular key is present (by signing a challenge, which is then verified against a public key).