Lol, I logged in by accident with my gmail account, then with my slashdot account :D

LiVES supports it, so you could always use that instead.

Well, if you were to recite 1 digit per second, it would take around a million years to read the entire number out. I think the audience and speaker would be long gone before that happened.

I believe there is an algorithm for generating just the nth digit of pi. So to check the results they could take a few digits at random and check them. The checking would likely take a long time, but not as long as generating the whole set.

Indeed you are correct - you could have an approximately equal distribution of all digits, but it doesn't tell you anything about the substrings. As a trivial example, a number which contained "13" but never "31" could never contain the string "431". So, to know for sure that you eventually find any given substring within the digits of pi, you need to prove that there is a roughly equal distibution of all digits, plus that all those digits are arranged in every possible ordering.

Well, as long as browsers start to provide html 5 support there isn't a problem. Sites can be upgraded to serve html 5 video, with fallback to flash if the browser doesn't support it.

How can they be so sure that anti-matter was anihilated ? Maybe it just ended up on the other side of the universe.

It's turtles all the way up too then.

Cloud computing is all vapour anyway.

I am surprised that nobody has mentioned it, but what about a server running AFS (Andrew File System).

It has some great features:

Scalable - you can add as many servers as you want
Secure - it uses kerberos by default
Fast - local caches are kept until another client needs them.
Cross platform - openAFS supports pretty much every platform in existence.

I have the same problem with the LiVES project. Over 3 years ago, I managed to compile the sourcecode for OSX/Darwin, it took a lot of fiddling around, but it worked. I excitedly posted the news on the website and mailing lists, but no OSX users seemed interested. Since then, the code has changed a lot, fixes were made for it to compile on IRIX and Solaris.
 
Recently somebody posted a forum message noting how easy it now is to compile under OSX. I again posted this news, and asked if somebody could kindly compile it and send me a link to the resulting binary. Since then...nothing. Hence I have come to a conclusion about OSX users...well, I will let you guess what it is.

The thing is, to keep it clean you have to run virus checkers, spyware removers, adware removers, etc, etc. Windows is just too hard for the average consumer.

In my experience, Linux outperforms Windows and Mac on the low end, the high end, and the middle end.

Free software is never a bad choice.