How would you feel if the drone, having malfunctioned, came down in a field and was found by a group of children, who being curious decide to play with it and set it off? Booby traps are despicable.

Announced 1985, released 1988.

Back when I was doing freelance contracting in the early 90s I relied on it. Unix, Xenix, DOS, compiled it on a bunch of things. I could use it to talk to anything, I reckon with the right parameters it could talk to a broken toaster. It may not have been the fastest protocol around but it WORKED. I was sorry to see it closed up, and I'm sorry to see it go.

Oh how this is sooooo close to the mark, wish I had mod points. Like others I gave up reading JP's column. Well that's not quite true, I scanned it just to see who he would be name-dropping this month.

Steve Ciarcia's column, on the other hand... that guy was amazing. Not that I ever built any of his circuits, but he certainly added that technical grunt to the magazine.

...and it's my favourite single-player computer game, and at around 90kb it's not a glutton on disk space. Haven't been keeping up much with later developments, has there been much innovation since then?

According to wikipedia Congreve rockets were invented in 1804, so Doc could have used these.

In Jules Verne's 'Mysterious Island' he writes about how his castaways build a civilisation on a remote pacific island. One of the things they build is a telegraph from scratch. They also build paddle wheels, make guncotton, determine the latitude and longitude of their island, make a secure house out of a cave behind a waterfall, grow wheat from a single husk and a lot of other things. And as a bonus, it has the return of one of Verne's most famous characters (read it and find out who!). This is one of my favourite books, I can definately recommend it to the whole slashdot crowd.

No problem. Your style is to string overly long sentences together with commas. There are five in the fourth sentence of your first paragraph alone. Doesn't that bug you?

Whilst hydraulics might sound like a good idea, remember the operating conditions it's working in - the mean surface temperature is -63C which could severely affect a hydraulic system

...and for the life of me, I don't know why, considering Spirit has shown how easy it is to get bogged even with autonomous ground-plotting software. The Lunar Rover mesh wheels worked perfectly, were lightweight and durable, why not do the same? Alternately, if I were in charge of wheel design I would perhaps consider a more spherical wheel cross-section. I recall something I saw whilst browsing Google Patents which was a 1930's swamp buggy machine that had spherical wheels. The softer the terrain the further it sank down, which in turn increased the ground contact area. Seemed like a good idea to me.

Exactly. Seeing the GPs query, the mesh tires were the first thing I thought of too. They worked on the low gravity and soft surface of the moon, can't see why they wouldn't work on Mars.

This article on Hackaday late last year is about a project to make Homebrew Kodachrome: http://hackaday.com/2009/12/08/homebrew-kodachrome/

I use StrokeIt and do a quick right-left swish, you insensitive clod!

Wish I had mod points, parent is absolutely correct. Stop complaining and trying to find some panacea for your architecture problems. It seems you want to have something you can show your client 'There! it works on THAT browser!' instead of thinking about the common denominator. There's no way I'd be happy having to use not just a particular browser, but a particular version of that browser - who are you trying to kid? The client and the user, it seems. Sorry if this seems harsh but that's my opinion.

...one molecule ought to be enough for anybody!