I say I say I say, how does a floating data center connect to the internet?

Pier-to-pier networking!

But seriously, what bandwidth and latency can you expect from something out in the ocean, unless they drag a wodge of fibres with them or tap into something on the seabed...

His website has, anyway. http://clusterballoon.com/ is giving me 503 errors.

Best/worst one I found had included a plea that he had fair use "as long as democracy exists".

Or just add one of those ridiculous copyright disclaimers you find all over YouTube whenever anyone uploads a whole album. People think using the phrase "For fair use", "Research only" or "I don't own this" is enough.

..after all, isn't this what they've done with Java and MySQL?

Go on, its only 5 pages, it doesn't use too many long words, and if you have comments why not contact the author?

He clearly forgot to add one of those notes on the YouTube video, like "All rights belong to their respectful owners" or the amazing "Under the copyright act of 1976, this video may stay up (if democracy still exists) as it is for DEMONSTRATION PURPOSES ONLY".

Just search for your favourite artist name + "full album" on YouTube for more gems.

I reckon academia is heading towards hiring more programmers. We often have research grants where one of the employed researchers could be a statsy person with publications in the learned journals, or a computery person with lots of stuff shared in github and contributions to open-source projects and so on. The prof as PI on the grant is impressed by the former, I'm (as CI) impressed by the latter. Currently we tend to favour the statsy people, and they are often very poor programmers with little knowledge of version control, testing, Makefiles, awk, all that nerdy stuff that could make their life simpler. So I teach them...

I can only really talk confidently about statistics here (sample size = 1) but I know a bit about other places. University College London has a Research Software Development Team, for example: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/research-software-development/ and the whole development of programming skills for researchers is being pushed by the SSI (software.ac.uk) of which I am a fellow.

You might also want to look at Software Carpentry, a programme for training researchers in programming skills - there may be opportunities there.

So currently there's a few opportunities, but its getting better. A final thought though - you want to leave "the financial-obsession of the business world and would like to work for the overall betterment of humanity instead". Hahahaahha rofl. Academia is just as financially-obsessed as any trading house. I'm spending today doing paperwork for expenses claims, travel, grant proposals... Its all about the money... Oh do I sound disillusioned? Okay, I have probably stopped some people catching malaria, but not today...

Yeah, I mean it's not not rocket science is it?

For a single font and a known language the mapping can be cracked easily by computer - its just a permutation and you can crack it by letter frequency analysis. Once the computer has guessed E and T and a couple of vowels it can dictionary-scan the rest of the text for possible words and get the rest of the letters.

I suppose if you use several fonts then you could use them so that E was 21 in font 1 and 8 in font 2 and so on, and then switch fonts randomly to balance out the number counts. I still think that's crackable, you just have a two-d table of frequencies (number/font) to try.

Any chance you can bung said script on github?

Similar experience with netvibes - it normally starts up blank on my Android phone, I just have to hit refresh. Once in a while it'll tell me I have a negative number of things unread. It has trouble keeping a consistent count of unread items between the title, the menu, and its own 'refresh' button. Oh, and the 'Load More' button appears off the end of my screen sometimes. These are mostly minor annoyances I can live with.

Google Reader never did anything wrong, though.

I suspect the lot moving to New Hampshire have enough firepower to keep however few Egyptian soldiers visit the place out for long enough. Egypt wouldn't waste the effort. They don't claim the place.

Not sure your rant about what the US govt would do to you is relevant.

The real reason its not a reasonable place to found a community is the fact its an uninhabitable inhospitable chunk of desert with no communications links.

There *ARE* unclaimed areas. Gather all the 'Liberty-minded' and ship them off to Bir Tawil:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bir_Tawil

Nobody wants it. Plenty of solar power. Bye!

I went to a hackathon and found the idea of judging and prizes pretty pointless. Took up an hour of valuable hack time. I skipped all that nonsense and went for a walk and got some fresh air for the first time in two days instead.