Really? With an install process that requires an advanced sysadmin and half a day? And a digital money system that's already having leakage troubles?

I wanted to like diaspora. It has great ideas. But to have any chance against Google+ and Checkout, Diaspora better have a 2-minute install process and close to a million user by tomorrow. I'm in the trial. Half my friends are now too. It's _nice_. I wrote a review:

http://unorthodox-engineers.blogspot.com/2011/07/googlepuss.html

Bitcoin's time window will last until Google Checkout is available to merchants world-wide, rather than just the US and UK. No idea how long that will take.

Funny thing is... I bet the main use of Facebook right now is spreading Google+ invitations around.

I think, within the thermodynamic boundary of Tahrir square, we can.

Besides, who cares if it's a troll. It's still an interesting intellectual challenge.

Not up to it? That's OK. Others will have a go.

Hmmm. They can't plant them directly... but they could bring in planter pots. Buckets of soil. Six guys to a tree.

We'd want to fill the square with as many as possible, using the least footprint. So, we need a locally available plant with a relatively small root ball, long stem, and large crown, with a high transpiration rate. This will cool the air and provide shade.

Botanists. We need botanists. They'll know.

Plus, the sudden greening of Tahrir square might be news-worthy by itself.

Well, I'm Australian. We have heat and deserts too, you know. Not everyone here is from Minnesota or Canada.

Yes, it's a long shot. Most of the solutions will be obvious repetitions, which alone can be reaffirming, but we live in hope that one person out there has solved this so thoroughly and elegantly that we will be amazed by their ingenious solution.

People have made excimer lasers from tinfoil and air. I know one guy who invented a nanopore water filter that removes 99.99% of contaminants and is made from mud, coffee grounds, and a cow turd.

Except in the short-term it acts like a sauna, transmitting the trapped heat in the pavement into hot saturated air.

For extra effect, put the burlap tents under the firehose spray, and try to get the mist to block the sun. (Small artificial clouds.)

Spray a firehose upwards through something that will make a fine mist. Most will evaporate, sucking vast amounts of heat out of the air, which will flow downwards onto the crowd, along with the remaining chilled water. You want pressure rather than sheer volume.

Burlap/canvas tents can be cooled with a constant trickle over them in the same way.

Slightly less messy might be a series of hoses that carry chilled water from a tank out to modified hot-water-bottles strapped to people, and then away again, maybe even back to the tank to close the system. Rip a few fridges apart and put the cooling pipes in the tank. Run any waste water over the hotside pipes and then into the drains.

It's like CPU cooling, just on a larger scale: :-)

Wasn't this the plot of an episode of Max Headroom?

Congrats, dude. My best friend was at the launch last year. I hear it's damn cool.

First no Concorde, now no Shuttle. Can't help but feel civilisation is slipping a little.

IP-over-carrier-pigeon was a classic joke, but it made an interesting point... Internet Protocols don't have to be confined to computers. The exact same protocols can be enacted by people. (Just packet size and latency go up :-)

What you describe is already happening. I've read reports of one guy who's barely slept in a week because he keeps driving back and forth across the border, shuttling hard drives to foreign journalists.

Ha! Gonna have to write that one down.

Get some BIG spools of optic fibre, a plough, and some telco-grade routers. Then just run dozens of cables across the border into the edge towns. Then run the local routers (that all lead to Tripoli and their central telecoms hub) backwards.

Failing that, there's an old Interop saying: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station-wagon full of tapes on the freeway."

And over in Telco-Update-Brisbane-Flood is where all the telecommunication engineers are discussing the floods; specifically why their fibre is dark, who's fault it is, and which data centers are running on gens.

This is quite beautiful in it's way: Latest River Heights for Bremer R at Ipswich

At the time of writing, the graph seems to have levelled out at what is expected (hoped) to be the peak of the Ipswich floods.

This curve should be repeated a few hours later in brisbane, when the water reaches us. How long this graph remains at it's currently insanely high mark will determine how much of Ipswich and Brisbane get washed away.

Isn't math pretty?