Slashdot seems to post a lot of stories about improved solar cells, but solar cells never seem to improve.

Only if you can find some way to make the economics work, and we don't seem to be able to do that. Most people do not want to push wheelchairs and wipe butts for a living, and even those jobs are being substantially automated. Virtually all manual labor can be eliminated with current or easily foreseeable technology, and our society doesn't like paying people who don't work, needed or not.

But there is no reason to think all those extra years of potential labor is needed. We already have more people than we need to do the available work.

One component of a solution might be to make lower-resolution versions of the pictures (e.g. use ImageMagick to do a batch scale-down) and store those in multiple copies. You could probably reduce the size by 90% and still have perfectly useable pictures. Obviously lower-resolution is not as good as the original, but it would make it more practical to make many backups, and keep them in many places. Lower-resolution is better than nothing. (This is not meant to replace backup of the originals - just make it possible to make a lot more, and as a result a lot better chance of something surviving.) BTW - Make sure you also backup the captions for the pictures - you are going to do that, right? I've just spent the last few months going through my father's old slides, trying to figure them out. BTW2 - I made a bunch of backups on CDs about 10 years ago. I went through them a few months ago - about 75% were unreadable.

"Edmunton Protocol" produced nothing interesting. "Edmonton Protocol" was more effective.

Copy the bug into your own messages, and swamp their stats base with crap.

And SCCS was far from the first version control system. The major features SCCS introduced was automatic generation of the change files (thanks to diff) which made it much easier to use, and (made possible as a result) keeping the latest version as the "base" version, so applying the change files produced earlier versions, instead of later ones - that produced much better performance for the most common task, getting the latest version.

The reason various governments complained is that RIM is/was more secure than any other company. Now they are no worse than anyone else, better in some situations. The only way to guarantee security is to provide your own encryption (using standard methods, of course). And since we are now being shepherded into closed platforms (thanks, Steve Jobs), that is virtually impossible.

Why would anyone want to print using e-mail? If I print something, it is because I want it on paper, and to get it I have to be near the printer. If I am near the printer, I don't need to use e-mail. I can't imagine any reason for using e-mail o print that would compensate for getting spam.

because attackers are far more likely the U.S. system. Oh - wait. By "our" you are assuming only Americans read Slashdot.

is Release 2.