On that topic, i guess it would be a really good idea to write an OTR plugin for the vanilla Android SMS app. Something for my todo list if it hasn't already been done. (PS, you can find my OTR plugin for Finch/libpurple here https://gitorious.org/purple-otr )

Google has been grossly negligent from Day 1. I paid ~ $600 for my G1 phone 2 years ago, and got zilch for customer support from Google, and nobody at T-Mobile was smart enough to even know what to do with any Android technical problems. When people are paying this much real money for a product, by god you better offer them real technical support.

You can't find any dedicated email address or phone number to report issues, the best you can do is file a bug report that's unlikely to be acted on, or post on groups.google.com and hope some bored developer with a few cycles to spare reads your post. That's completely inexcusable for the price people pay for these devices.

I've stuck with it because I've been able to download the source and fix issues I've run into, but only after many days of beating my head against the poorly or non-documented interfaces in the system. But again, regular customers paying real money shouldn't have to do that. For this kind of money, there should be dedicated customer support people who are proficient with the OS and the range of devices, and there should be complete documentation on all of the bundled features.

They claim the battery construction is completely safe, and that the battery keeps operating even after having a bullet fired through it.

http://www.dbm-energy.com/index.php?ms=KolibriAkkuUnterBeschuss

(I'll leave it to you to run it thru google translate if needed...)

My compiler will allow you to write whatever code you want, but it will refuse to compile it into insecure code.

My compiler's source:

main(){exit(1);}

10,000 rounds sounds a bit too generous, are you trying to destroy the army or just kill the leader(s)?

That's also got me thinking down the line of Asimov's psychohistorians. I wonder if enough media has already been moved onto the web that we could harvest enough online data from say, the past 10 years, to feed into a computer model of the world that produces identical results to the historical data. Then if the model is working well, you can start playing what-if games to see what changing one or another factor does to modern life. You could go back further, if you wanted to manually enter all the data, but I doubt you could go back more than a decade or two because there just isn't sufficient data. Dunno.

And then, assuming you have this wonderful computer model, does its existence alter the world that it is modeling? Do you have to keep it a secret so that it's able to model and predict without impacting the world? Imagine if it was just a big Distributed Computing project, and it became well known, commonplace even.

I would guess that the NSA or CIA already has something similar crunching in one of their data centers, but it would be cool to have just for its speculative aspects...

I've often wondered what would have happened in the Roman Empire if Christ had not been crucified; if perhaps some time traveler went back and smuggled him away into exile. I'd like to believe that Christianity would never have arisen, and most of the atrocities done in the name of Christianity would never have occurred. Who knows, maybe the same things would have been done anyway, just in the name of some pagan deity instead. I'd like to see how the world would have turned out without a Catholic Church running Europe for millenia, and what humanity would have achieved instead of spending hundreds of years and generation after generation building huge cathedrals. I'd like to see whether there would still have been Spanish Conquistadors in the New World, or if the native Americans would have been left alone to continue developing their own civilizations.

I'd also like to go back and throw a few defeats in the path of Julius Caesar, before his rise to power, and see how Europe would have shaped up if the Roman Empire's growth was halted far earlier. Wondering if a lot of older religions would have survived in better health. (Which also ties into the Christianity thing as well...)

But all of that would take more than just one free trip. Need to be able to hop back and forth a few times to take in the full effect.

A lot of students are bad at algebra simply because they don't understand what to do with x and y in e.g "y = 2x", so you still need at least part of the test to force them to work all the way to a concrete result from concrete inputs. Again, there's a big difference between theory and practice, and people should be learning both.

blackbook.com already exists. So does datebook.com, playbook.com, and probably anything else you can think up. Since Facebook's trademark scope is so broad, I'd guess all those other guys will be in their sights soon too.

According to this link

http://www.pacificdisc.com/PricingBluRay.html

all BluRay discs are required to have AACS. I also downloaded the license agreement from that page, it's 159 pages long. Not a trivial undertaking...

Or just create your own work, no need to go fishing for something from the public domain.

I've recorded several music CDs in my various bands thru the years. I could go find the current favorite CD DRM scheme, ask for it to be used on my next run of CDs, and go to town. But I guess DVDs are more interesting these days.

Hi-Def camcorders are getting pretty cheap now. Go make a home movie, master it in BluRay format, and have some small-run disc printing house produce it for you. Bingo.