actually, just to reply to my own post... if i were doing this, what i would do is have an app that locked the tablet to only itself (pretty simple), then have a hard coded set of settings for wifi access and a content server it connected to (all provided by the application)... from the content server i would be able to then unlock the tablet, but to be safe, i'd also add a key combo that unlocked it too (like vol up, vol up, vol down, power power, etc, something complex).

I'd pick the cheapest tablet you can get (that'll support your content), then farm off the app coding to one of the many freelancing sites to do what you need..

tbh, this is a pretty simple thing to do on android - completely locking a tablet isnt hard, and completely locking the content isnt hard either. You could then have various external mechanisms for unlocking them again (via bluetooth, wifi, usb, etc).. as an android coder, i wouldnt think this would take more then a couple of hours personally.

If your determined to do it yourself, stackoverflow is a good place to start looking for ideas on how its achieved.

I always wanted to make my own unlock screen for android, but you cant do that, you have to code an entire launcher which is annoying.

What i wanted in an unlock though was for 3 buttons to come up on the screen in some random locations and have to click them all in order... slide to unlock just annoys me personally.

So i just skimmed it... however i'd find it hard to believe that such a thing is provable to any real extent. There are just too many other factors to play with when trying to apply such a broad brush.

simply put, the language you speak often dictates who you listen too, us here in AU, and no doubt in canada are greatly influenced by what happens in the US - though it wasnt always that way for us (AU) prior to the internet. There were certainly influences, but now those influences are faster and more prevalent. As such, AU'ers themselves are also less healthy, more fat, and more likely to spend money then they were say 50 years ago - yet we still spoke the same language.

Thats a pretty simple example, but in AU, alot of a social infrastruture has changed to be more like the US - AU used to provide much of its services by govt owned facilities - these days the reverse is true, and this impacts health care, so people without money are less healthy (perhaps).

My ultimate point being that today there are just too many other factors at work that could have larger impacts then simply the language you think and any proof derived from such would probably be easily flawed. My humble opinion anyway.

Kewl, so all you need to do to hide things is apparently swallow them?

In Australia we have two huge problems that need solving - paranoia and a willingness of our government to spy on everything we do.

How the internet firewall didnt get rolled out is a mystery to me (even though in part it did manage to make a small appearance in a different form).

I personally wouldn't jump to that conclusion. Considering the sheer volume of stars just in our galaxy even 10000 exoplanets would be an astronomically small figure besides those we're yet to discover.

But just discovering an exoplanet doesn't simply mean "finding life". Who knows one of the planets we've already seen might have some form of life on it. ET's (assuming they're anything like us) may "find" our planet but have no idea whats on it.

All of that also assumes that ET's are behaving something like us. What I mean is that we're trying to find a planet capable of harbouring life based on what we know of life (i.e. our eco system) and hence we're throwing out planets that dont fall into what we believe is a "habbitable location" for life. Without any evidence to the contrary, ET's would probably do something similar. The problem with that is that if life involved in completely different ways (completely alien to us) in locations we wouldn't suspect capable of being fertile are they going to miss us like we're likely to miss them? Are they even interested in finding life on other planets throughout the universe?

Then again, lets say ET's in some solar system were plausibly capable of developing in some way that meant planets like mercury or pluto were "habbitable" for them (unlikely by our reckoning) chances are they'd be so different that once they started looking for life on other planets they'd look for completely different things. for eg, we might look for a planet that gives off a spectrum suggesting it has water or co2/o2/n2 composition in its atmosphere where they might look for something completely different.

But assuming they are similar to us and do look for something similar (and chance upon our planet), how are they going to know we're here? The huge amount of radio EM radiation we give off? Well, we've only been doing that for less then 100 years - consider how far that actually reaches (moving at the speed of light) within our own milky way (around 100,000 light years across) - 100 years doesnt go very far really. According to this little calc (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980123d.html) that would cover around 15000 stars. 15000 of around 200,000,000,000 stars... Doesn't really cover much.

Im not saying its far fetched as such cause you'll never know what an ET is capable of until you meet one and they explain it to you - but, if they're like us (aside from praying they dont have big guns and are looking for oil) finding "us" has reasonably low odd's.

More introduced species in australia.

I cant help thinking of that simpsons episode with the lizard, which ate the pidgeon, and they got out of control, so they brang in something else.. etc etc...

This is already what Australia is like. Someone brang in rabbits, cane toads, snakes, etc etc... then they brang in something else to combat such things... the only thing ends up suffering in the long run is the native wild life and our ecosystem as a whole.

Australian researchers (or anyone) should be shot in the head when they do the following:
1) consider introducing a new species of anything to this country
2) consider modifying an existing species DNA and introducing that into the country.

I have faith in science, but morons are morons. Anyone who cant learn from the mistakes of the past needs to be locked up or put down so they cant do any damage - they really are cretins. Oh, "but we know more now?" ... your a moron if you actually believe you understand an ecosystem well enough that you can predict the implications of adding a new species of anything to it, being able to control it in the long run or actually measure whats going on when it does get into your ecosystem.

Your an even bigger moron if you think you'll have a endless pit of money from either the government or some other body that will allow you to have the kind of control you need to police such a move for the foreseeable future.

I really wish people like this professor would just cease to exist, they're bad for the planet and our species as a whole. I dont mind if they sit there researching the crap out of anything, but until they can prove they actually understand an eco system in its entirety and the government gets behind them with such a huge wad of cash they can prove they'll have the ability to remain in control, they should be locked in a cage somewhere.

You can just already see the future of something like this:
"turns out that elephant feases combine with a local australian-only plant to produce a toxic substance that is now leaching into our water supply - we must now evacuate australia - thanks for coming".... and then much later from the same professor "oh, we didnt quite take that into account".

If you like php, use it.

Theres a simple quote who's origins i forget (think it was bjarne stroustrup) that goes "there are those languages that people complain about, and those that people dont use".

Sadly, the more people who use language, the more you generate hate, and php is one of the most widely used in existence.

PHP has alot going for it:
- its an elegant language
- its quite quick to write almost anything in
- its generally quite fast
- theres bucket loads of people using it, so finding solutions to problems is easy
- lots of different frameworks if you need them
- tonnes of api support.
- almost every web host supports it.
- the number of people using it generally just helps the code base, bugs get found and dealt with, etc etc etc.

The only reason to switch to another language comes down to the goals your trying to achieve, which aren't really stated. Generally speaking you could achieve any type of web content in any language to an extent. There are few languages that have the support for api's that php does, thats for sure. Perl is probably the only one that beats it in terms of "i want to connect to from my web code".

But it depends also on what you had in mind in terms of switching to.
- Java is a reasonably nice language, very well supported (by vendors) and scales well, but requires significant development time and quite a decent amount of grunt - forces you to abstract your work ad infinitum but sometimes thats a good thing. Lots of different api's, though mileage varies greatly.
- Dot-net i personally find to be somewhat on the buggy side, but again, well supported and well used - often forces you down an MVC framework path, which i dont like.
- Python's probably a better language generally, but for web coding, you get caught up in the basics with python around choosing frameworks and so forth and later if you find the framework you choose wasnt that great, then its re-code time cause frameworks generally dont have easy migration options. My main annoyance with python is that learning python tends to diverge a fair bit from helping you with other languages (i.e. learning python wont help you with c/c#/c++/java/etc).
- Ruby has similar traits to python - you get caught up in the frameworks, the language is nice but doesn't translate easily to other languages.

There are other options, but personally, stick with the top three if its your first coding exercise for content - php, java, dot.net

I'd love to know what hardware your running that doesnt have ipv6 support.... just about every supportable, mainstream vendor does, the short list:

- juniper (screenos and junos)
- cisco
- avaya
- netgear
- hp
- ibm

Actually, I take it back, theres too many. If your running gear right now that cant do a firmware upgrade to support ipv6, you really should be considering replacing it cause it must be decades old. Even still-supported decades old kit from cisco has ipv6 support via firmware upgrades.

To be honest, I cant really think of many vendors that dont support it off the top of my head.