On the plus side, Freenet is coming along nicely. The network itself has gotten far more efficient, and 0.8 is due to be released soon. The freetalk (robust forum system) and web of trust (user moderation) are in beta now, but will be in the 0.8 release, and make it far more accessible than before.

If you are worried about running out of charge while driving through rural areas or something, why not invest in an EV Trailer?

http://www.evnut.com/rav_longranger.htm

It's a bit heavy, but it essentially temporarily turns your car into a hybrid when you need a gas engine for longer trips etc. They will likely become less useful as quick charge stations and battery swap stations become more popular, but it is a good temporary solution.

Also MIT has 18/8 which they are hardly using. I don't see why any university would need more than a /16.

Google isn't evil anymore apparently, so google checkout might be a reasonable option.

Google is no longer filtering search terms for China, that doesn't mean that Google is somehow going to take down the great firewall.

Do you think google got compromised by an IE 0day? I doubt that. it was likely one of the many MANY other buggy pieces of code that everyone has installed all over their companies. Remember every year people spend their firefox 0day and pwn to own lust like they spend their IE and Safari 0day, which means browser bugs are typically worh less than 2k, which is on the low end of the vulnerability market.

What is SSL complicated or something?

Why even have logins at all? Why require passwords? Why not let anyone post under whatever name they want?

Slashdot is a service with accounts and authentication, all of which is made useless when nothing is encrypted. People said the same bullshit about freenode, and then lilo got his password popped because he logged into freenode, in cleartext, at a coffee shop, and the GNAA ran freenode for a week. Remember that? And freenode still doesn't support encryption.

I would bet that mentality of "no one will hack me, I'm not important enough" causes a majority of the security breaches you read about every day. Slashdot is the only web service I know of on the Internet where you are supposed to log in, but is not even running ssl on the web server.

It would be nice if they started building editors for various file formats, so through google docs we could collaboratively do some video editing, programming, photo editing, etc

Hacking used to mean breaking into government databases, and pulling source code from software companies. Now it means building toy robots from kits and making them dance.

Nice comparison, between a phone that came out last year and a phone that just came out. You won't be able to judge anything until you look at the 2010 iphone specs. Apple has been working on a delayed timeline, only releasing features when a major competitor enables the feature first. Now that android has finally gotten it's act together, we will see what apple puts in it's new iphone. I think they will be able to keep up (since they did have a 2 year head start), but if they can't, then I will finally be moving over to android (something I thought I would be doing years ago).

Pocahontas *IN SPACE*

I think the real problem is that all the kids that watched star wars when they were little grew up to be cynical assholes. Yes, every movie sucks, except the ones you watched when you were a kid, I get it.

If you look at it with fresh eyes, the original three had a weaker plot line, worse acting, worse special effects, and significantly worse choreography. C3PO and R2D2 were still there, as the robotic comic relief (to sell toys), and they were still annoying as hell. Maybe it's cool that Lucas originally did so much with such a small budget, and you somehow expect quality to scale linearly as budget increases, but it didn't turn out that way, and saying a movie is better because it is older and had a smaller budget is a pretty weak argument.

Keep in mind that every star wars movie was a kids movie. Kids were the target audience. If you were a kid when you watch one of the movies, you probably liked it, if you were not a kid, it was probably boring and predictable.

So after the hobbit, Tolkien should not have been allowed to write the lord of the rings books?

Wouldn't this be something like Yeti@Home?