You underestimate the problem of making clean room. It is extreamly complicated. In fact in this problem is the essence of the AI! I would bet for year 2049 as date when AI will pass Turing test. +15 years, and it will achive first scientific discovery beyond human (but this will still be something we will understand). I could be wrong, but then i would put something like 2250, or never.

I think "EPIA SN 10000" or "18000" is the best in kind of performance and energy. I was thinking about some MIPS or ARM based boards, like rt433uah, but there are problems with performance and sata ports. EPIA SN 10000 is standard PC, in really small form factor, and have fanless CPU 1.0GHz, up to 4 GB of ram, 4 sata ports, 2 ethernet ports (one of them is gigabite), audio, ide, compact flash, minipci, and lots of usbs. ANd of course vga. I'm currenlty creating system from it, and mirrored set of 4 caviar green series hard drives + system on compact flash. Eventually i will add one SSD as a kind of cache. All powered prefrebly by ZFS :) All i need now i good and efficient Power Supply for it.

Not only number of characters, also delay beetwen characters! It is quite common to type password in public. any body can check your screen, in when you are giving presentation using projector! I completyl disagrry with proposition of displaying password. They shouldn't be displayed at all, or masked as usual.

Yes for FORTRAN, but no as a first language. Hi, students of Physics and Chemistry here in Cracov Poland also are learning FORTRAN somewhere on first or second year. I think it is horiblle language compared to modern ones, but it is really fast, and libraries are really robust. So FORTRAN is needed, but i think most times students should write C code which talks to FORTRAN libraries, this is simpler. And FORTRAN shouldn't be first language teached. I opt for Phyton, it is so easy to learn complex aplications. I also personally like D. :)

mcedit default syntax coloring is very eye friendly. it is based on some old editors like borland turbo pascal IDE. As far as i known there is colorscheme "far" which is very similar. Its good for working in day and in night, good contrast, and not distracting by too many colors.