Way back when Russia was lifting much heavier loads into space than the USA could manage, some (NASA?) people got to wondering out loud how they managed to do that. One suggestion I recall was that they had a stretch of basically railway track, and an electric(?) locomotive+spacecraft-holder+spacecraft. That whole assembly was accelerated along the track. Towards the end, at high speed, the track angled upwards and about then the rockets fired up, lifting the spacecraft off of the locomotive+spacecraft-holder, which was decelerated and retained for reuse. So the rockets got off to a flying start, and were carrying no unnecesary weight. If that was such a nifty-seeming idea back then, could it not still be a nifty idea?

BoA_Destructor

You mean like PC-BSD's PBIs?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pengrowth_Saddledome
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/story.html?id=bb367c51-527e-4abc-b61a-39821fa3f0f9
"Working with British structural engineer Jan Bobrowski, whose firm still lists the Saddledome on its website, the design team came up with the concept of a roof made of precast concrete panels supported by a net of cables. Think of it as a giant tennis racket, a grid of cables, and on this net you drop these concrete panels,"

How about a project that explores millions of unlikely chains of events. It would record all the events, and if any event-sets were to result in unimagined but catastrophic failure, an analysis of the inputs would probably uncover some interesting facts. This could be run by a distributed computing project, like SETI, Folding etc. Toyota would probably not want to facilitate unauthorized analysis of the processors' code etc, but that could all be sealed in a Black Box so as not to be available except to the project client code, and the inputs & outputs would be encrypted and communicated from/to Toyota (or some appropriate authority).

The LightScribe feature on some CD & DVD disks/drives appears to be close to what you want to achieve, i.e. it writes 'bits' that create a visible graphics design ("bits anywhere & everywhere"), without regard to what the bits mean as data. So if you can find the tricks behind that, you might be able to find someone who can implement a similar scheme in a HD.

If a/the government authority was enabled to declare an infected PC as a weapon, they could then come up with some pretext to attack it. Not suggesting this though, as the cure might well be worse than the disease. Thinx: since US Border Security can seize almost any device having data storage, with no evidence, why do they quibble about finding & disabling real threats that operate within their borders?

and if you want it more so, there is PC-BSD (Free BSD with (good) lipstick).

Merdoch (or his minons) did you perhaps mean to type Moloch?

"Future considerations".

"All your base-pair are belong to us" True in some cases, unfortunately, thanks to the USPTO allowing patents on naturally-occurring structures.

I'm probably a minority taste, but I'd pay to have f*ck & sh*t eliminated.

I've had two gizmo failures due to silver contact corrosion, and sulphur was the cause. Silver sulphide is black and apparently a decent insulator (or poor conductor).

My local sulphur source is "sour gas" (Methane contaminated with Hydrogen Sulphide). The H2S is (mostly) removed in gas processing plants before entering the pipeline as 'natural gas', but some small amount escapes to the atmosphere.

because it makes sense. Back in the 1960s & 70s I was working for IBM, when PL/I appeared. It uses Do... End to delineate blocks, and I was OK with that but then found it wasn't enough. So I developed an indentation scheme, jogging right at a Do and jogging back left at an End (white space is ignored in PL/I). This made it much easier to grasp the logical flow at a glance. Unfortunately I didn't keep any examples when I quit programming, but I think it would look remarkably similar to Python (except for the Do & End keywords).