VR has a lot of obstacles that probably won't be overcome until a Matrix-like neural interface is invented. There are too many ways a person's senses betray them in present VR simulations. IIRC the vomit problem is caused by your sense of balance/motion (in the inner ear) in disagreement with your visual sense of motion. Some sensitive people get ill watching a video clip of riding a roller coaster!
I can tell you it will be released next month guaranteed... Because I finally caved in and bought an iMac G5 last week! I'm sure it will be released just far enough into April to be conveniently after any 30 day upgrade period:)
Depending on where you live/choose to buy you can meet the average return for the S&P 500. I bought my home near the NH seacoast 3 years ago, and since that time it has increased in value a bit over 10% per year. If I sold tomorrow I would make over $100,000 in profit. Of course then I'd have the problem of finding a new, affordable place to live!
And there are plenty more where that came from. Obviously I'm a special case, since I work in industrial automation. I have a lot more software than that to run- most of those listed are used to program the various types of Allen-Bradley PLCs and HMIs, I didn't even mention software for other PLC and HMI vendors! (For those that don't know: PLC=Programmable Logic Controller, HMI=Human/Machine Interface.)
The Visual Studio packages get plenty of work creating ActiveX controls to embed in the HMIs, as well as writing software to log and report data, download info from databases into PLCs, etc.
There are many days I'd love to be running OSX, but it is not possible for me. Maybe when I retire...
When you say "new house" do you mean that it's being built for you right now? If so, forget the wireless idea immediately. Go to Home Depot, buy boxes of Cat5/6 cable, spools of coax, and heavy duty speaker cable. Pick out a closet somewhat close to your living/family room and make it the distribution hub for your new home. Get your butt down to the construction site and run coax, network, and speaker wires to all the rooms of the house from this central location. It also wouldn't hurt to run RCA, S-Video, and maybe even VGA or DVI from the closet to the expected location of your main TV.
Any wires that you do not plan to use right away can be left inside the walls (Take pictures of EVERYTHING before they sheetrock the place, you'll be glad you did later when you want to find the wires!). The rest of the stuff should have standard boxes that you can add the appropriate wall plates to later.
Smarthome is your friend for a lot of the finishing touches. I recommend a box like the ChannelPlus that allows you to insert your own audio/video on an unused cable channel. I did that and now I can watch DVDs or Movies coming from the computer in the closet on any TV in the house. ChannelPlus thoughtfully has IR devices that feed back up the coax line to the source so your remote controls will activate everything hidden in the closet.
I could go on and on about this- I've done it for my current home and will be building another home this year. I've already started thinking about improvements to my original layout:)
I think you may be confused. The iPod mini uses a 4GB CF slot hard drive. This is the model that people have described after removing them from iPod Minis as well as the Nomad MuVo.
Disclaimer- I have never actually broken open an iPod Mini, so it may not contain this exact model hard drive. However, the hard drive I linked to above is exactly the type I would install in my dream device:)
US 1 dollar bill = 6.125 x 2.5625 inches = 15.6953125 Square Inches.
1 Square Foot = 144 sq.inches so we can fit 9.1747 $1 bills per sq.foot.
1 American Football field = 360 x 160 feet = 57,600 Square Feet (including endzones).
Rounding down, we carpet one football field with 528,462 $1 bills.
So with 10 billion dollars we can carpet (astroturf!) 18,922.8 football fields with $1 bills!
I have also been hoping for such a device. Here are my expectations/wishes:
1) Ramped down Pentium-M (somewhere between 500MHz and 1GHz)
2) 512MB of RAM
3) A small system hard drive to contain the OS and swap file (like the 4GB iPod mini hard drive). This eliminates the worry of flash memory degradation by using a disk as swap space.
4) Additional storage- user data would be stored on CF of SD cards. The unit should have 2 CF slots and 1 SD/IO slot.
5) Screen- Ideally Transflective for indoor and outdoor use, between 8 and 10 inches across, and a resolution of either 800x600 or 1024x768. The graphics chip should be capable of rotating the displayed image for landscape or portrait viewing.
6) Ports- 2 USB 2.0 ports
7) Networking- Wireless 802.11b/g, Ethernet(10/100 is acceptable), Bluetooth for internet access via cellphone (or ability to directly access cell providers networks for a link to the internet).
8) No legacy ports, No optical drive (I can use an external or a shared network device to install software or burn CD/DVDs. No need for the useless power consumption and weight in my device).
I'd expect this all to fit in a 3lb or smaller package with a battery that could power it all for 12 hours of real-world use. That includes backlight if needed, and at least one form of wireless radio active. The thought here is to have an easily portable, always connected device that is capable of working through an entire day on battery power.
On a side note there is a device that may be close enough to what you and I are looking for coming out in April 2005. The Clio NXT (an update to an older device) is planned to run Windows CE 4.2.NET on a 400MHz Intel XScale processor. I believe the original Clio in 1998 was capable of 8 to 12 hours of battery life. I will probably buy one if it is possible to reflash the 64MB Flash ROM with a more agreeable OS. I really like the flip screen so it can be used like a slate or a laptop. Why has no vendor tried this for the Win XP Tablets? Oh well.
I have already purchased one of the older Clio 1050 models on eBay with the thought of gutting it out (re-use only the case, screen, keyboard, and battery) and creating my own dream device. Who knows when I'll get around to that project though. Please, if some hardware vendor is listening, build this device and we'll eat them up...
I can appreciate why people might want to do something for the experience of it. I do find that solving problems is enjoyable. I've written my own web browser and wifi sniffers just because I wanted to learn how things worked.
In my personal case, I do not have the time to invest right now, but do have the knowledge. I actually was looking at building an NAS box recently but since then booked a ton of new contract work. In my case, it is easier to spend money on a known, working solution.
Finally, I think it is unlikely that I or the article submitter would be able to build something as small, functional, and attractive as the TeraStation for less money, especially if you value your time highly- lord knows I've pissed away $75 in the last hour browsing Slashdot:)
Doh, go ahead and mod me down! I didn't realize he already saw the TeraStation, that'll learn me to RTFA! Seriously though, my WHY? is still a valid question...
If you think you can beat a device like the Buffalo TeraStation go for it, you will be rich! It was shown at CES, and goes on sale next month in the USA for $999. Gigabit Ethernet, 4 250GB hard drives (RAID 0, 1 or 5 support), 4 USB ports to attach additional external storage devices, built in print server for sharing a USB printer, blah blah blah. I'm going to buy 2 of them!
You should get into systems integration and industrial automation. There is demand for people with strong electrical and programming skills (more PLC programming than computer programming, but that has been changing). I run a consulting business, and I know two others that have their own businesses as well. We can never find good people to fill positions!
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # 531-byte qrpff-fast, Keith Winstein and Marc Horowitz <sipb-iap-dvd@mit.edu> # MPEG 2 PS VOB file on stdin -> descrambled output on stdout # arguments: title key bytes in least to most-significant order $_='while(read+STDIN,$_,2048){$a=29;$b=73;$ c=142;$t=255;@t=map{$_%16or$t^=$c^=( $m=(11,10,11 6,100,11,122,20,100)[$_/16%8])&110;$t^=(72,@z=(64, 72,$a^=12*($_%16 -2?0:$m&17)),$b^=$_%64?12:0,@z)[ $_%8]}(16..271);if((@a=unx"C*",$_)[20]&48){$h =5; $_=unxb24,join"",@b=map{xB8,unxb8,chr($_^$a[--$h+8 4])}@ARGV;s/...$/1$&/;$ d=unxV,xb25,$_;$e=256|(or d$b[4])<<9|ord$b[3];$d=$d>>8^($f=$t&($d>>12^$d>>4^ $d^$d/8))<<17,$e=$e>>8^($t&($g=($q=$e>>14&7^$e)^ $q*8^$q<<6))<<9,$_=$t[$_]^ (($h>>=8)+=$f+(~$g&$t) )for@a[128..$#a]}print+x"C*",@a}';s/x/pack+/g;eval
TFA has no info on how this is being done. Are the "Cybercriminals" using a regular computer with a wireless card and wired network bridged- forwarding packets and saving a copy for themselves, or are they using a WRT54G with rewritten firmware (OpenWRT?) and to capture packets? Why go through all the trouble when you can park your butt down in the coffee shop with your laptop and latte and sniff everyone directly.
Also it would seem to me that the "evil twin" method would only work with unsecured access points, unless you know the WEP key for the secured access point you are trying to dupe. Anyone trying to connect to their favorite secured AP with their default WEP key would fail to connect to an "evil twin" unless it had the matching WEP key...
I'm working on a project like that right now in my spare time. I mentioned it last month in another post but I was so late to the party that I don't think anybody saw it.
The browser has sort of a tabbed interface- each page is represented by a thumbnail image rather than a tab, and you have the option to render pages into IE or Mozilla containers. It also contains fixed "tabs" for your home page, an XML based Weather view, and an RSS Reader- which can open article links into new "tabs". Most of this stuff is fully functional, but it still needs some posishing. The thumbnail "tabs" are pretty neat though, I patterned them after the OSX dock. When you hover the mouse over thumbnails they expand/zoom and the page title or address appears next to it. This allows page thumbnails to be truly useful while not taking up much screen real estate. This is a small sample screenshot, be nice to the server.:)
The History system I'm working on will be much like you suggest. Since I am already capturing page thumbnails those will be stored, along with other various data that you can search against: URL, last visit, number of visits, Page Title, Meta Tags/keywords, and an optional note field where you can add your own text. This will be implemented in a way where you can sort the history by date or frequently visited sites and browse the thumbnails, or do deep searching based on criteria (I visited a site once, last week, and it was about firefox plugings. Find it for me. Well, not a natural language query, but you get the idea).
Now for the bad news- I've picked up so much contract work that I will not be continuing development on this for at least a couple of months. Anyone who's interested in seeing this someday can e-mail me or add me on their friends list (I'll post a journal entry when it gets near completion).
Comcast owns my area's cable system now. Fortunately they did not build it or mess with it, just purchased it from another company. I have had only one instance of internet downtime in 4 YEARS, and that was only a couple of hours. I keep seeing these stories about horrible uptime on connections for Comcast in other areas and wonder- did they purchase these as well (and they were shit to begin with), or did they build them from the ground up as shit?
Funny that you mention that, I've been working on a.NET based browser in my spare time. It's sort of a tabbed interface- each page is represented by a thumbnail image rather than a tab, and you have the option to render pages into IE or Mozilla web controls. It also contains fixed "tabs" for your home page, an XML based Weather view, and an RSS Reader- which can open article links into new "tabs". Most of this stuff is fully functional, but it needs work. The thumbnail "tabs" are pretty neat though, I patterned them after the OSX dock. When you hover the mouse over thumbnails they expand/zoom and the page title or address appears next to it. This allows page thumbnails to be truly useful while not taking up much screen real estate.I'll probably hate myself for this later, but here is a quick screenshot I just took. Be nice to my poor server!
I want to add new features based on stuff I've read recently here on Slashdot, including advanced bookmark/history handling (searchable, sortable, meta tags, visit totals, etc). I'll be releasing it into the wild this spring after my work related projects finish up:)
Who needs 5 WAPs when you can use Fake AP and have 50,000 fake ones? Hide your one real access point in plain sight with a sea of beacon frames. Watch wardriver's heads explode when they cruise through your neighborhood!
You must not use the.nospam Usenet newsgroups? Moderation in those cases is primarily to make sure that all posts are on topic - in our case that they all contain.torrent files. Moderators will weed out the pr0n ads, spam, pictures, and exe trojans that inevitably get posted in the newsgroups.
Are you suggesting that a moderator might be held accountable for the posts that ARE allowed to go through (the torrent files)? I'm not sure that they could. Can Slashdot moderators be held accountable for not modding down to oblivion every post with a bittorrent site/link mentioned in it? Or what if they mod them up to make them more visible?
Well most torrent files are between 4K and 200K, so that seems like a possibility. All we need is someone to create an Alt.Torrents newsgroup (or even better- Alt.Torrents.NoSpam and have people moderate it) and then everyone start posting torrents to it. Hell I would probably like that even better! You could fire up the newsreader every day, download ALL the torrent postings in minutes and then pick through them later...
Of course we still have the problem of Tracker sites being vulnerable, but we no longer would need torrent index sites...
You know, I'd like to see the geographic distribution of Slashdot readers. I'm sure there would be the usual clumps in large cites, but it sure seems like I know of or have read posts from a lot of/.ers that live in NH (I'm one of them). Much more than would be expected for the small population. We should band together and bring more high tech services into NH...
Oh, and build a bigger bridge between Dover and Newington/Portsmouth! I swear that 1/4 of the population of NH drives over that during rush hour in the morning and evening. Some parts of NH would not benefit from traffic maps, but Routes 3, 93, 101 and 16 sure as hell would.
Yes, I have an M200 Toshiba Tablet PC (along with a sea of IBM Thinkpads). The Toshiba is my main laptop at the moment, I would highly recommend it to anyone who's seriously looking at Tablet PCs. I like the convertable format much better than the plain "slate" tablets, because you can use your full keyboard when appropriate- I code with the keyboard, and read/draw in tablet mode.
You really should invest in hard drives. I have and never looked back. You're right about not being able to find things on spindles of CDs or DVDs, but having it all in a couple of HUGE drives sorted into folders and subfolders by catagory means you can have it all at your fingertips.
For drives, I recommend the LaCie Big Disk or Bigger Disk. External, Aluminum housing, USB2.0 or DUAL Firewire 800 interface makes them speedy. The Big Disk is 500GB and runs about $449, the Bigger Disk is 1TB and is about $999. I have two Big Disks right now (in addition to large internal drives), and may need to add more storage soon...
I can vouch for Alias Sketchbook too, I have an M200 Toshiba tablet PC here with it installed. It is both a fun and useful drawing program. Gabe (Mike Krahulik) from Penny Arcade has used it quite a bit, and has a tutorial on the Alias site as well.
Slashdot Mirror
VR has a lot of obstacles that probably won't be overcome until a Matrix-like neural interface is invented. There are too many ways a person's senses betray them in present VR simulations. IIRC the vomit problem is caused by your sense of balance/motion (in the inner ear) in disagreement with your visual sense of motion. Some sensitive people get ill watching a video clip of riding a roller coaster!
I can tell you it will be released next month guaranteed... Because I finally caved in and bought an iMac G5 last week! I'm sure it will be released just far enough into April to be conveniently after any 30 day upgrade period :)
Depending on where you live/choose to buy you can meet the average return for the S&P 500. I bought my home near the NH seacoast 3 years ago, and since that time it has increased in value a bit over 10% per year. If I sold tomorrow I would make over $100,000 in profit. Of course then I'd have the problem of finding a new, affordable place to live!
Name 10 pieces of software that you use on a given basis that don't have analogues on OSX, just for intellectual curiousity.
.NET
1) RSLogix5 (For PLC5 series)
2) RSLogix500 (For SLC and Micrologix series)
3) RSLogix5000 (For ControlLogix series)
4) RSView32 (For PC based HMIs)
5) Panelbuilder32 (For simple Touchscreens)
6) RSNetworx (DeviceNet configuration)
7) RSLinx (PC-PLC communications)
8) KEPware (PC-PLC communications)
9) Visual Studio 6
10) Visual Studio
And there are plenty more where that came from. Obviously I'm a special case, since I work in industrial automation. I have a lot more software than that to run- most of those listed are used to program the various types of Allen-Bradley PLCs and HMIs, I didn't even mention software for other PLC and HMI vendors! (For those that don't know: PLC=Programmable Logic Controller, HMI=Human/Machine Interface.)
The Visual Studio packages get plenty of work creating ActiveX controls to embed in the HMIs, as well as writing software to log and report data, download info from databases into PLCs, etc.
There are many days I'd love to be running OSX, but it is not possible for me. Maybe when I retire...
When you say "new house" do you mean that it's being built for you right now? If so, forget the wireless idea immediately. Go to Home Depot, buy boxes of Cat5/6 cable, spools of coax, and heavy duty speaker cable. Pick out a closet somewhat close to your living/family room and make it the distribution hub for your new home. Get your butt down to the construction site and run coax, network, and speaker wires to all the rooms of the house from this central location. It also wouldn't hurt to run RCA, S-Video, and maybe even VGA or DVI from the closet to the expected location of your main TV.
:)
Any wires that you do not plan to use right away can be left inside the walls (Take pictures of EVERYTHING before they sheetrock the place, you'll be glad you did later when you want to find the wires!). The rest of the stuff should have standard boxes that you can add the appropriate wall plates to later.
Smarthome is your friend for a lot of the finishing touches. I recommend a box like the ChannelPlus that allows you to insert your own audio/video on an unused cable channel. I did that and now I can watch DVDs or Movies coming from the computer in the closet on any TV in the house. ChannelPlus thoughtfully has IR devices that feed back up the coax line to the source so your remote controls will activate everything hidden in the closet.
I could go on and on about this- I've done it for my current home and will be building another home this year. I've already started thinking about improvements to my original layout
I think you may be confused. The iPod mini uses a 4GB CF slot hard drive. This is the model that people have described after removing them from iPod Minis as well as the Nomad MuVo.
:)
Disclaimer- I have never actually broken open an iPod Mini, so it may not contain this exact model hard drive. However, the hard drive I linked to above is exactly the type I would install in my dream device
OK, lets figure it out:
US 1 dollar bill = 6.125 x 2.5625 inches = 15.6953125 Square Inches.
1 Square Foot = 144 sq.inches so we can fit 9.1747 $1 bills per sq.foot.
1 American Football field = 360 x 160 feet = 57,600 Square Feet (including endzones).
Rounding down, we carpet one football field with 528,462 $1 bills.
So with 10 billion dollars we can carpet (astroturf!) 18,922.8 football fields with $1 bills!
I have also been hoping for such a device. Here are my expectations/wishes:
.NET on a 400MHz Intel XScale processor. I believe the original Clio in 1998 was capable of 8 to 12 hours of battery life. I will probably buy one if it is possible to reflash the 64MB Flash ROM with a more agreeable OS. I really like the flip screen so it can be used like a slate or a laptop. Why has no vendor tried this for the Win XP Tablets? Oh well.
1) Ramped down Pentium-M (somewhere between 500MHz and 1GHz)
2) 512MB of RAM
3) A small system hard drive to contain the OS and swap file (like the 4GB iPod mini hard drive). This eliminates the worry of flash memory degradation by using a disk as swap space.
4) Additional storage- user data would be stored on CF of SD cards. The unit should have 2 CF slots and 1 SD/IO slot.
5) Screen- Ideally Transflective for indoor and outdoor use, between 8 and 10 inches across, and a resolution of either 800x600 or 1024x768. The graphics chip should be capable of rotating the displayed image for landscape or portrait viewing.
6) Ports- 2 USB 2.0 ports
7) Networking- Wireless 802.11b/g, Ethernet(10/100 is acceptable), Bluetooth for internet access via cellphone (or ability to directly access cell providers networks for a link to the internet).
8) No legacy ports, No optical drive (I can use an external or a shared network device to install software or burn CD/DVDs. No need for the useless power consumption and weight in my device).
I'd expect this all to fit in a 3lb or smaller package with a battery that could power it all for 12 hours of real-world use. That includes backlight if needed, and at least one form of wireless radio active. The thought here is to have an easily portable, always connected device that is capable of working through an entire day on battery power.
On a side note there is a device that may be close enough to what you and I are looking for coming out in April 2005. The Clio NXT (an update to an older device) is planned to run Windows CE 4.2
I have already purchased one of the older Clio 1050 models on eBay with the thought of gutting it out (re-use only the case, screen, keyboard, and battery) and creating my own dream device. Who knows when I'll get around to that project though. Please, if some hardware vendor is listening, build this device and we'll eat them up...
So, uh, what's your girlfriend's name anyway? Just making conversation, no reason to be suspicious ;)
I can appreciate why people might want to do something for the experience of it. I do find that solving problems is enjoyable. I've written my own web browser and wifi sniffers just because I wanted to learn how things worked.
:)
In my personal case, I do not have the time to invest right now, but do have the knowledge. I actually was looking at building an NAS box recently but since then booked a ton of new contract work. In my case, it is easier to spend money on a known, working solution.
Finally, I think it is unlikely that I or the article submitter would be able to build something as small, functional, and attractive as the TeraStation for less money, especially if you value your time highly- lord knows I've pissed away $75 in the last hour browsing Slashdot
Doh, go ahead and mod me down! I didn't realize he already saw the TeraStation, that'll learn me to RTFA! Seriously though, my WHY? is still a valid question...
If you think you can beat a device like the Buffalo TeraStation go for it, you will be rich! It was shown at CES, and goes on sale next month in the USA for $999. Gigabit Ethernet, 4 250GB hard drives (RAID 0, 1 or 5 support), 4 USB ports to attach additional external storage devices, built in print server for sharing a USB printer, blah blah blah. I'm going to buy 2 of them!
You should get into systems integration and industrial automation. There is demand for people with strong electrical and programming skills (more PLC programming than computer programming, but that has been changing). I run a consulting business, and I know two others that have their own businesses as well. We can never find good people to fill positions!
TFA has no info on how this is being done. Are the "Cybercriminals" using a regular computer with a wireless card and wired network bridged- forwarding packets and saving a copy for themselves, or are they using a WRT54G with rewritten firmware (OpenWRT?) and to capture packets? Why go through all the trouble when you can park your butt down in the coffee shop with your laptop and latte and sniff everyone directly.
Also it would seem to me that the "evil twin" method would only work with unsecured access points, unless you know the WEP key for the secured access point you are trying to dupe. Anyone trying to connect to their favorite secured AP with their default WEP key would fail to connect to an "evil twin" unless it had the matching WEP key...
I'm working on a project like that right now in my spare time. I mentioned it last month in another post but I was so late to the party that I don't think anybody saw it.
:)
The browser has sort of a tabbed interface- each page is represented by a thumbnail image rather than a tab, and you have the option to render pages into IE or Mozilla containers. It also contains fixed "tabs" for your home page, an XML based Weather view, and an RSS Reader- which can open article links into new "tabs". Most of this stuff is fully functional, but it still needs some posishing. The thumbnail "tabs" are pretty neat though, I patterned them after the OSX dock. When you hover the mouse over thumbnails they expand/zoom and the page title or address appears next to it. This allows page thumbnails to be truly useful while not taking up much screen real estate. This is a small sample screenshot, be nice to the server.
The History system I'm working on will be much like you suggest. Since I am already capturing page thumbnails those will be stored, along with other various data that you can search against: URL, last visit, number of visits, Page Title, Meta Tags/keywords, and an optional note field where you can add your own text. This will be implemented in a way where you can sort the history by date or frequently visited sites and browse the thumbnails, or do deep searching based on criteria (I visited a site once, last week, and it was about firefox plugings. Find it for me. Well, not a natural language query, but you get the idea).
Now for the bad news- I've picked up so much contract work that I will not be continuing development on this for at least a couple of months. Anyone who's interested in seeing this someday can e-mail me or add me on their friends list (I'll post a journal entry when it gets near completion).
Comcast owns my area's cable system now. Fortunately they did not build it or mess with it, just purchased it from another company. I have had only one instance of internet downtime in 4 YEARS, and that was only a couple of hours. I keep seeing these stories about horrible uptime on connections for Comcast in other areas and wonder- did they purchase these as well (and they were shit to begin with), or did they build them from the ground up as shit?
Funny that you mention that, I've been working on a .NET based browser in my spare time. It's sort of a tabbed interface- each page is represented by a thumbnail image rather than a tab, and you have the option to render pages into IE or Mozilla web controls. It also contains fixed "tabs" for your home page, an XML based Weather view, and an RSS Reader- which can open article links into new "tabs". Most of this stuff is fully functional, but it needs work. The thumbnail "tabs" are pretty neat though, I patterned them after the OSX dock. When you hover the mouse over thumbnails they expand/zoom and the page title or address appears next to it. This allows page thumbnails to be truly useful while not taking up much screen real estate.I'll probably hate myself for this later, but here is a quick screenshot I just took. Be nice to my poor server!
:)
I want to add new features based on stuff I've read recently here on Slashdot, including advanced bookmark/history handling (searchable, sortable, meta tags, visit totals, etc). I'll be releasing it into the wild this spring after my work related projects finish up
Who needs 5 WAPs when you can use Fake AP and have 50,000 fake ones? Hide your one real access point in plain sight with a sea of beacon frames. Watch wardriver's heads explode when they cruise through your neighborhood!
You must not use the .nospam Usenet newsgroups? Moderation in those cases is primarily to make sure that all posts are on topic - in our case that they all contain .torrent files. Moderators will weed out the pr0n ads, spam, pictures, and exe trojans that inevitably get posted in the newsgroups.
Are you suggesting that a moderator might be held accountable for the posts that ARE allowed to go through (the torrent files)? I'm not sure that they could. Can Slashdot moderators be held accountable for not modding down to oblivion every post with a bittorrent site/link mentioned in it? Or what if they mod them up to make them more visible?
Well most torrent files are between 4K and 200K, so that seems like a possibility. All we need is someone to create an Alt.Torrents newsgroup (or even better- Alt.Torrents.NoSpam and have people moderate it) and then everyone start posting torrents to it. Hell I would probably like that even better! You could fire up the newsreader every day, download ALL the torrent postings in minutes and then pick through them later...
Of course we still have the problem of Tracker sites being vulnerable, but we no longer would need torrent index sites...
You know, I'd like to see the geographic distribution of Slashdot readers. I'm sure there would be the usual clumps in large cites, but it sure seems like I know of or have read posts from a lot of /.ers that live in NH (I'm one of them). Much more than would be expected for the small population. We should band together and bring more high tech services into NH...
Oh, and build a bigger bridge between Dover and Newington/Portsmouth! I swear that 1/4 of the population of NH drives over that during rush hour in the morning and evening. Some parts of NH would not benefit from traffic maps, but Routes 3, 93, 101 and 16 sure as hell would.
Yes, I have an M200 Toshiba Tablet PC (along with a sea of IBM Thinkpads). The Toshiba is my main laptop at the moment, I would highly recommend it to anyone who's seriously looking at Tablet PCs. I like the convertable format much better than the plain "slate" tablets, because you can use your full keyboard when appropriate- I code with the keyboard, and read/draw in tablet mode.
You really should invest in hard drives. I have and never looked back. You're right about not being able to find things on spindles of CDs or DVDs, but having it all in a couple of HUGE drives sorted into folders and subfolders by catagory means you can have it all at your fingertips.
For drives, I recommend the LaCie Big Disk or Bigger Disk. External, Aluminum housing, USB2.0 or DUAL Firewire 800 interface makes them speedy. The Big Disk is 500GB and runs about $449, the Bigger Disk is 1TB and is about $999. I have two Big Disks right now (in addition to large internal drives), and may need to add more storage soon...
I can vouch for Alias Sketchbook too, I have an M200 Toshiba tablet PC here with it installed. It is both a fun and useful drawing program. Gabe (Mike Krahulik) from Penny Arcade has used it quite a bit, and has a tutorial on the Alias site as well.