A girl in my highschool back in 1988 was used voyager I or II photos (I can't recall which) to calculate the depth of craters on a couple of Jupiter's moons. Which is little different than what the article is describing, but it seems shadows have a lot more information encoded in them. This girl and I ended up winning the science fair and going on to the International science fair, where I felt a bit out of my league. She won a few awards. Apparently at that point no one had thought to do that up to that point. (for those interested, I wired up a photometer to an Apple II and wrote some software to automate variable star photometry, which measures the light from light sources through a telescope over time. It can be used to find the rotation of asteriods, or with a sensitive enough instrument, the change in light from a large planet orbiting a star, stuff like that.)

I have a large amount of personal data as well (also, no pr0n), though I realized some place along the line that it wasn't that important not to lose it. When I die most of will probably be tossed anyhow. Who is going to want to sort through it all.

With that said, I still don't want to get rid of all my data, so I have a drobo with 5-2TB drives, and I also have a linux box with raid set up, that backs up the drobo. But really, think hard about how much effort and expense you want to put towards keeping data. There is probably a whole lot of it that can just be tossed because you will never look at it again. It will probably save you a bunch of time and money to go through all the data and get rid of the stuff you'll never actually use. This actually works well for garages too.

I forgot the Link: http://www.flightgear.org/

If you are interested in a more free experience. There is an excellent OSS flight simulator out there, with tons of aircraft, scenery for the whole planet, etc... There are a number of people who have used it to build their own home walk in simulators. There was one guy a while back who had somehow acquired the front end of an F15 who was working on building it into a simulator environment in his garage. There was some cool stuff going on around this project.

What happens when SolarNet comes on line, or MilkyNet in the next 100 years, would we have to update the constitution again? Internet is a particular technology, it would be pretty lame to go through all the trouble to make an ammendment only to have it be replaced by something else about the time this actually goes into effect in 30 years.

Is Freedom of Speech the same as Freedom of Communication? If so, all we need is a court ruling or two, not a new amendment. If it is something different, then maybe a Freedom of Communication amendment should be added to the constitution.

I last ran windows for a software development job in 1996. Never again. Ever.

Windows boxes: Named for imperial leaders.
Linux boxes: Named for rebel leaders.
Macs: named for planets and moons.
routers: named after spacecraft.

I started this in the late nineties, before I recently quit my job, I was having difficulties finding correct names, and had to use names from the extended universe.

I believe my successors have named everything using functional names. But that was probably after six months of trying to remember that falcon was a router/firewall. and sabe was a linux based dns server. Vader was a windows box that ran some misc software for managing access points.