Not me, I can't program for shit.

I'd imagine someone will produce a Firefox plug-in. I'd also imagine the art galleries involved are asserting a copyright on the image - even though the works of art themselves are in the public domain.

Is there a tool that will zoom into the image to a particular level, capture a segment, pan to the adjacent area, capture that, etc, panning and capturing until it has captured a mosaic of the whole very high resolution image and will stitch the image back together?

Not that I would ever even consider doing anything like that.

That's what I immediately thought of.

Personally, I thought Quickwriting could adapt very easily to a IBM trackpoint type device (what one lesbian friend dubbed the "clit mouse") to allow text input via a device small enough to fit on the end of a device the size of a pen.

There are literally thousands of free to receive signals on C and Ku. You use a C/Ku receiver to move the dish and skew the LNBs. But you use splitters and DiSqe switches and take the signals from the C and Ku LNBs to a new DVB receiver.

Each transponder that used to be dedicated to a single analog standard definition channel now carries dozens of standard definition or high definition MPEG compressed channels. And while some may be encrypted, many more are not. And that includes most sports "back hauls".

One advantage is that these signals are the very best looking MPEG available. Because, in most cases, the HD MPEG signal is going to be decompressed to analog HD, have a logo stuck on it and be recompressed, it has to be very nigh quality to start with. An excellent OTA HD signal can be 19.2 Mb/sec, though usually limited to 12 Mb/sec so they can have a weather channel. On your local cable channel, it might be reduced to a 6 Mb/sec QAM signal. But the DVB signal may be as much as 35 Mb/sec!

Rock star/programmer Todd Rundgren wrote a paint program for this thing called the Utopia Graphics System. It was advertised in the first Apple catalog, but I don't know if it was ever available as a commercial product. Anyone remember it?

Seconded. The two audiologists who run Etymotics, the high-end in-ear monitor company, have been pushing to change the laws that do nothing more than protect profits. The Walkers Game Ear II has received excellent reviews and costs less than $200 and has proven very useful for normal, age-related hearing loss. Get one, try it, and if it doesn't work, re-gift it to an older relative or a hunter.

Thanks for mentioning PenPoint. It was the "choice" of the dreadful "Windows for Pen Computing" that killed it - timid executives went with the "safe" choice. PenPoint was brilliant. As far as I can tell, Microsoft felt threatened by the lack of a distinction between the "OS" and "applications" in PenPoint. I'm sure many of the bright folks from Go wound up at Apple, so hopefully some of the PenPoint concepts will be in there -

I don't believe it was through the entire OS but GoBe Productive, an office application, was built in that way. Shift from the word processor to the spreadsheet using tabs. It was ported to Windows and is still for sale.

...soon to become a supernova...

When they say "soon" is that "soon" in cosmic terms, like say within 10,000 years, or "soon" as within my lifetime?

I've had extensive experience with aiming a TV camera at a TV set using a different video standard. That's how we used to convert video from PAL to NTSC back in the 80s. There were decent quality converters, but they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Presumably NASA used a very good camera to do this conversion, but the Vidicon/Newvicon/Plumbicon cameras of the time had a lot of lag which would show up as blurring and having the adjust the iris of the scanning camera would dramatically limit the dynamic range of the broadcast image. All of which is visible on the moon landing footage as seen.

It sounds like Rutan has found a new use for the Proteus plane he built for Raytheon for the "Angel Halo" system to supply high-speed, low latency bandwidth for a metropolitan area by flying in circles at 60,000 feet. From the Scaled Composites web page about it:

Proteus is a twin turbofan high altitude multi mission aircraft powered by Williams International FJ44-2E engines. It is designed to carry payloads in the 2000-pound class to altitudes above 60,000 feet and remain on station up to 14 hours.

The original plan proposed 3 aircraft on 8 hour shifts. There would be a large AWACS style dish underneath (payload up to one ton) with the jet engines supplying 14 KVA of electricity.

Sounds like they may still deploy the system, with a secondary revenue stream with a camera. The question for Slashdot readers is: would you be so freaked out if the city was going to use the same plane to supply free gigibit wireless?

The Junior High School I attended in the 1970s (Bingham Junior High in Kansas City, MO) had "modular scheduling" in 20 minute increments, some classes were 20 minutes, some 60 minutes...and some 40 minutes.

...when he's emulated a Connection Machine.

I could give a damn about a 3D game controller. But I would very much like to see cheap 3D input devices for animation and motion capture. Perhaps we'll first see this new Wii remote retrofitted to 3D software like Max. Can't happen soon enough!