Objectionable is different from illegal.

Gallons per dekimile!!

Erg, my comment was directed at you, but apparently I'm incompetent or something.

It's really not that hard to create a a cell connection and send a text message to a device. Most phones will roam automatically to a site if the site will let them on. I've seen it done (albeit only with 2G) at a Seattle Wireless meeting with a software defined radio and a USRP. To do it legally, you'd (as the advertising agency) just make a deal with one of the carriers to use their licensed frequencies, then essentially MITM the phone and send it a text message when within range.

I thought I was only kidding when I said the security on Blackboard was so bad a 9 year old could hack it.

I'm still amazed that people have failed to realize that digital cameras do a great job of capturing a diagram in a hurry.

You could look into Maemo...

An asset is basically anything that is valuable that can be owned. If something can be traded for something else valuable, it's valuable, and if you can own it, it's an asset.

This is why the paper money in your pocket, despite it having little if any intrinsic value, is an asset. This is also why stocks, bonds, directives, and everything else is also considered an asset. And yes, notes and futures contracts and derivatives, even convoluted ones, are assets.

When you are accounting for a loan you've made, you don't list it as a liability, or a source of income, it is an asset, exactly the same as your checking account is an asset. (When a loan payment is made, the "principal" part of the payment is transferred from the "loan asset" and moved to your "checking account" or wallet or wherever. The interest part is, perhaps unsurprisingly, accounted as income that is transferred to your checking account, wallet, or whatever.)

Everything on wall street is owned by someone, and is of tangible value to someone else, and is therefore an asset. That fact that it may be misvalued by any other party or even the party that owns the asset does not change the fact that it's still an asset. If you can think of something that serves as a counter-example, I'd be interested to hear it, but the mere fact that you can't figure out what the underlying value of some contract is, possibly because you can't understand it, doesn't make it any less of an asset.

(I'm referring here to our economy, mind you, not the world of economic make-believe known as Wall Street).

Our government gives fake money to a private bank which is loaned back at interest, distributed and redistributed, and Wall Street, which deals entirely in assets (convoluted and abstracted as they may sometimes be), is the world of economic make-believe?

Sigh...

Or rsync'ing a maildir. Seriously, NASA? This was the best you could do?

Government programs for the win...