Actually, yes, you can get out more than you put in. These guys made the machine extrapolate laws of physics without any knowledge of physics or geometry.

They used a genetic algorithm to explain the measurements of a pendulum sways, and in the process the computer "invented"/"learned about" things like adding, substracting, multiplying, dividing, some algebra, conservation of momentum and Newton's second law.

Return all the search results with information about privacy concerns, censorship by the government, hacking into human rights activists' mail accounts, Tiananmen, lying about the age of athletes, IP theft, human organ trafficking, small wages, lying leaders... everything, possibly with video on youtube. Rub their noses in it all the way. With gusto.

Actually, no. Apple traded their stocks for a day with Xerox engineers which had to show them what they've done. And they've done very little compared to things that were in the first Mac GUI. I.e. overlapping windows.

Things like these are documented on Apple's folklore site.

There is only one answer for any tech minded nerd - you would build your own. It's just like BSD/Linux vs. AT&T Unix. When you're accustomed to something that good and suddenly get deprived of it you DIY. From hardware to software, the ideas for such a system are distributed globally and those ideas, principles and implementations should be incredibly difficult to eradicate.

1) look at some weird hobby project you did
2) describe it's functionality in the form of a contest description :)
3) send the contest description to NASA
4) apply your weird hobby project for the contest
5) profit! :D

Plant XO-1 OLPC laptops (or something simpler but with the same network specs) all over the place like mines. Their built-in mesh network capability will ensure that if one is found the whole data pathway would be automatically reconfigured on the fly.

Presto, persistent anonymous bandwidth.

Do not use computers just as substitute for books, use them to help with visualization not previously possible in books. I.e., animations, interactive materials, etc, etc. I know this is just a first step and too many features at once would delay the project, but it's just something to keep one's mind on.

It was a joke.

If you think it's bad where you live, you should try things out here where I live. We've got 1.3 working people on every retired person in a population on 4.5 million :) Incompetent government(s) that are mentally still in the WWII, people that expect the government to do everything for them, no hi-tech (or almost any other as well :) ). Unemployment rate of over 16%, with average pay of ~ $817 a month. Beat that! :)

I guess you've probably heard of this one:

WHY AMERICA 'S ECONOMY FELL OFF THE CLIFF

John Smith started the day early having set his alarm clock (MADE IN JAPAN ) for 6 am. While his coffeepot (MADE IN CHINA) was perking, he shaved with his electric razor (MADE IN HONG KONG) He put on a dress shirt (MADE IN SRI LANKA), designer jeans (MADE IN SINGAPORE) and tennis shoes (MADE IN KOREA).

After cooking his breakfast in his new electric skillet (MADE IN INDIA) he sat down with his calculator (MADE IN MEXICO) to see how much he could spend today. After setting his watch (MADE IN TAIWAN) to the radio (MADE IN INDIA) he got in his car (MADE IN GERMANY) filled it with GAS (from Saudi Arabia) and continued his search for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.

At the end of yet another discouraging and fruitless day checking his computer (MADE IN MALAYSIA), John decided to relax for a while. He put on his sandals (MADE IN BRAZIL), poured himself a glass of wine (MADE IN FRANCE) and turned on his TV (MADE IN INDONESIA), and then wondered why he can't find a good paying job in AMERICA.

AND NOW HE'S HOPING HE CAN GET HELP FROM THE PRESIDENT (MADE IN KENYA)!!!

Anyways, I thought it was funny.

They shot themselves in the foot with MS-DOS 4.0 an nobody even blinked. They released MS-DOS 5.0 and everybody just flocked around it.

is information about hardware interfaces in NetBSD enough to reverse-engineer most of the O2 machine so it could run IRIX natively?

If so, it would be very cool to make a clone of old SGI workstations like O2, but with faster CPU, better OpenGL pipeline, more RAM, USB ports, solid state drives while still being able to run software like original IRIX, Maya, Photoshop, etc. Wouldn't be too bad for the design of the case to stay the same :)

They could have gone with Solaris ;)

Oh, you must be new here. Have you ever heard of a silly little thing called Therac-25? Here's a summary from Wikipedia:

Apparently, some bonehead decided that the hardware lock is too expensive since it can be implemented in software - and removed the physical hardware circuit. So, you never know what those machines can and can't do :)

Why are you all rambling here? Start writing code, slackers! :)

Funny, though, hearing this from Anonymous Coward :D