Ted Nelson really pioneered hypertext concepts - there is no being different for the sake of being different here. What he originally proposed is different to the web - it is far more general and powerful (and not really related to the interface - more about the underlying information model).

If anything, the reality is the opposite of what you suggest. The web is really quite poor at doing a whole bunch of things - but it's what we've got, so clever people have spent time adapting the world of computing to it.

He wrote a very entertaining (if grumpy and a somewhat biased) book about all the things which are wrong with computing called "Geeks bearing gifts".

By brute forcing, I assume you mean find another input that hashes to a predetermined value, not finding two inputs which happen to hash to the same value. Without some mathematical attacks, this very unlikely, no matter how fast the hash algorithm is.

A slower hash will make dictionary attacks on salted password tables more difficult - but generally you would simply run the hash many times to increase the computational load for an attacker. Again, the raw speed of the hash algorithm is unlikely to make much of a difference.

Yes! I had the same kit. Many happy hours :)

What do you do with the hard drive when you leave?

Well, I'm currently working on a project that uses Hibernate in Java, and it's really quite hideous. I speak as someone who designed an object-relational mapping system ten years ago. Hibernate is much more powerful than anything I ever hoped to do - and it still sucks. We're talking about an application with 2 core classes, with a one-to-many relationship. Three tables in the underlying database. So it's about as simple a data model as you can get.

To get it to perform, we're having to manually add indexes to the database instead of relying on hibernates automatic index generation. We're having to specify access patterns in queries and annotations. We have queries with sub-selects, which hibernate just doesn't do well. We have the need to return dynamically generated values along with the objects, which is not obvious with Hibernate, but easy in SQL. We have a mixture of HQL (Hibernate Query Language), JP-QL (Java Persistence Query Language), annotations in the code to specify mappings, and some XML mapping configuration.

It's all so bl**dy complicated, it's not obvious what works well and what doesn't, and what to do about it if it doesn't work well. So we're fighting this thing all the way, and increasingly dropping back down to SQL, which is mature and well understood.

The thing I've learned about Java development and developers is they are in love with interfaces, abstraction and frameworks. And its very nice to have standard ways of doing things, and pluggable interfaces, and modularity, and all that goodness.

In many ways, this code has all the standardisation and modularity that I've been pushing as good things for years. But I guess you can have too much of a good thing. Sometimes, it really is better just to write a simpler thing yourself, instead of wrestling with ridiculously powerful APIs which are trying to satisfy everyone, and yet somehow end up never quite doing the "obvious" thing you happen to want to do.

Having recently worked on setting up a government procurement framework, I can offer this.

It is not uncommon to find that the procurement criteria or legal contracts you have to use explicitly assume that it is licenses to use the software which are being purchased. Since many open source licenses don't work that way, they end up getting excluded by default. This is not an evil plot to exclude open source software, it's just that this is the way software is generally purchased (or at least, it was in the past).

I had many meetings with various government bodies and lawyers to ensure that our framework did NOT make those assumptions. Once everything was properly been explained, I found people were very willing to make the necessary changes.

What makes you say that travel outside the solar system is impossible? We have two probes already about to leave the solar system. Given we have only been travelling through the air for 100 years or so, and into space for the last 50, I'm astonished at your confident predictions of impossibility.

You might be interested in Project Icarus - a serious project to design an interstellar craft, using technologies only slightly in advance of our current capabilities. It's a thought experiment - no-one imagines actually building such a craft in the near future.

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/blog/project-icarus-design-interstellar-spacecraft/

And in any case, who knows how the future will be? It may be very difficult to send humans in their current form on interstellar voyages - but we may change our form, download our minds into nano-scale processors, or even figure out some new physics in the next 100 years!

Nice breakdown of the possibilities, but like many people you mix up evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution says nothing about the origin of life, only about how it changes and adapts to its environment over time. Theories of the creation of life from inanimate matter are called abiogenesis:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article2971369.ece

Regardless of the size of your brain, I think you may have a small mind ;)

Well, my young family and I would quite like to return from Seattle to London at some point. Have another flight booked on Tuesday evening, so will be delayed by 5 days at that point ... but the flight back goes right over Iceland. Seriously considering other options...

But data.gov is not hosting apps, just the data. It's doing this webby thing TBL invented called "linking" to them.

Almost magically, they are actually hosted and written by by entirely different people and organisations, and yet you can access them from data.gov's own pages.

Maybe you should click on one of those "links" at the top of this page and RTFA...

This is just a statistical argument. There are simply far more ways to be disorganised than organised. So it's just very, very unlikely (but not impossible) for large numbers of things to behave in a way that looks like "time-reversal" to us. This is why you get the difference between the scales - it's just the combinatorial explosion you get when arranging large numbers of things.

I seriously wonder why anyone think this provides any deep explanation of time itself - glad to be enlightened if I'm missing something deep (or obvious) here...

You are right about the issue being file formats and physical media, but you are dead wrong about the risks. You have to distinguish between rescuing something which is already obsolete vs. keeping something "alive" as you go along.

If you're talking about rescuing obsolete stuff, then it ranges from hard to impossible, mostly because it generally isn't economic to recreate older media readers. For file formats, it's also expensive, but for some formats will be possible.

If you're talking about migrating information, then physical media is essentially irrelevant, and the process is a no-brainer (large volumes may pose problems, but they aren't media issues). However, migrating unstructured information with complex content (e.g. documents with macros) to new formats is extremely hard (if not impossible), as each format has different capabilities. It just isn't possible to transform the information losslessly. Over time, this inevitably results in information loss.

LOCKSS - Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe:

http://lockss.stanford.edu/lockss/Home