I think the "Crap hardware" is the thing that is possibly freaking me out the most.
This is PALM for Lughs sake. What possible excuse could they have for making crap hardware?

Longish post warning...

Palm. The worlds greatest PDA maker. I was going to quote various Wikipedia articles, but you would have to be living under a rock or be in middle school to NOT understand what Palm really represents.

Ever since the big media storm about the iPad came out, the cognitive dissonance has been incredible; Take a CA 2005 Palm TX PDA, and compare its feature-set to that of the iPad; the TX phreaking wins in every category except that of screens.

For the last 2 months, just for the heck of it, I've been making two home-build devices; They are both kit boxes for Palm products, Both dual-boot Linux/Palm-OS. In one, I'm taking Treo 700p guts and using them to drive a 10' screen, with additional RC batteries, mini-qwerty keyboard & SDIO WiFi. As soon as I get the screen incompatibilities worked out, it should make an extremely versatile eBook reader / Netbook, that could be reproduced for under $150 with basic ebay usage.
The other one is an attempt to simply provide a bigger screen (with a different ratio to the other box) for a Palm TX, which should have even more functionality, but be unable to make phone calls without outside hardware (Like, for instance, just sticking a pay-as-you-go phone guts in the box and linking them by bluetooth); This one should be in the $200 range.

The point? Obviously, I'm just wasting my time. but it's obvious to me that Palm has completely lost all focus.

Oh, I'm documenting all steps and will make them available when I'm done.

If you get another chance to do work for law enforcement, don't turn it down just based on your experience.
The problem is that you were trying to do work for commission-based Law Enforcement; as a rule, they are idiots, and their administrators were promoted from idiots.

I picked up a bunch of solaris hardware during the dot-bomb for scrap metal prices; none of it was top-end even then, but gods I love their stuff. I loved their software ca solaris 7, but as linux got better...well, I would still take Solaris 10 over most Linux distro's. And I grabbed the free distro of Solaris 10 as soon as I heard about it.
IIRC, in storage I have a SPARCstation 5, a ZX, a ELC, 2 or 3 Sun Ultra 5's, a Ultra Enterprise 3000 (which, BTW, rocks) and some other stuff that I have to think must have been one-offs, like a Solaris laptop and a really very pretty workstation that does not seem to exist; it's Dark orange and blue.

I used to have most up and running, in my little mini-datacenter, but I moved to some place without decent internet and had to move my servers to hosting services (which, by the way, after having everything in my basement from 1994 to 2003, was a convoluted mess from hell to get sorted out).
I might be helping to start up an ISP soon, which means I get my datacenter back up...yay!

there are scads of cybercriminals right here on slashdot.

How many posters in this thread are posting using a neighbors WiFi without permission?
how many of us posted the illegal DeCSS code in posts?
how many people here have downloaded a MP3?
how many people here have discussed baseball without the express written consent....
well, you get the point. We're all criminals.

I don't actually disagree with anything you are saying; The only reason I think you might not be correct in your forecast of future naval weapon system design is that I think we're going to be handed a game changer soon, in the form of directed energy weapons, incredibly fast, and smart, point defense systems, and advances in phased array radar and optical detectors.

Ii do NOT think aircraft are going to be survivable, in either of our projections.

(in other words, we REALLY SHOULD hang on to the Iowa and the Wisconsin for a while.)

perhaps I should introduce myself a bit; I was a Aviation Fire Control technician, rate AQ, last century.
I did intermediate level repair, worked on mainly the F/A-18, but also the F-14 and anything else that had similar hardware and needed something more complicated than swapping out black boxes.
Based on what I know, and i realize that their are a lot of people in the world who know a whole lot more, the only real limiting factor even then was computing power; sure, you have a margin of error with your defensive weapons even if you have a perfect solution, but the controller takes account of that, also, and assigns overkill fire missions to account for it.
As time passes, and computing power gets cheaper, I simply can't see how a battery of directed energy weapon with a decent recycle time would fail to take out ANY missile threat, except in conditions of extremely reduced visibility or, obviously, human error. if the sky was so full of missiles you could walk on them I could see a problem, but if you are in a situation like that, you obviously have some human error in the loop.
The only thing i see as a REAL danger to a intelligently designed and crewed warship of this type would be, obviously, subsurface, or from LARGE incoming projectiles, like from a "main gun" mass driver or cannon.
NOTE: I have no reason to think the US navy currently has a workable, deploy-able directed energy or mass driver weapon; I just think we WILL have before surface combatants are obsolete.

I probably still can't give Too many details, especially when I look at Wikipedia entries on some things I'm very familiar with and see obvious, blatant, (and i have to think purposeful) errors, but any time the carrier I was on was over 50km from land, I was not concerned with any possible threat except potentially subsurface threats.

What you say is logical, but I still don't think you will end up being right; I think the USNs experiments with mass drivers and directed energy weapons will quickly make any new type of missile a great big "meh".
Actually, if you think about that, it would probably take us back to the battleship era; surface combatants with a mix of conventional and ablative armor, active defenses consisting of smaller mass drivers and directed energy weapons and a few missiles, with offensive batteries of large mass drivers, and possibly pulsed laser missile warheads?

or I could be wrong. i just think we'll have a game changer before we are all reduced to using submarines.

I really hate to say anything critical to a 5 digit slashdot ID, but I'll just assume you are being sarcastic.

There are a multitude of manufacturing processes that would benefit from being in a no- or low-gravity environment, just as there are quite a few that require vacuum.

While "Space has a lot of vacuum", there are a BUNCH of rocks pretty close. the moon is the closest, but there are quite a few others that are reasonably close. and there is plenty of water; we just found a bunch more in the moons polar region. Plenty of oxygen, also; it's currently bound up with other elements, but that's just a process away. biomass...well, who knows. There might be a bunch on one of the jovian moons, or one of the more easily reached asteroids might be a big frozen fishstick. no way to tell until we go look.

the FACT is, we could have easily had a lunar base since the mid 70's; getting all the parts there is the only hard part.
once it's there, it would be almost immediately extremely profitable; the aforementioned manufacturing processes alone would take care of that. and it's damned near free to get something from the moon back to earth, all it takes is a pretty puny catapult.

with all that recently found water, breathable air and drinkable water would be simpler to obtain that it is on a nuclear sub, which by the way is a pretty good model and supplier of the basic power-plant, until such time as you get enough mirrors made.

Anyone in the component industry who thought about it would tell you that a gigantic "clean room" environment, with 1/6th Gravity, and free vacuum, would eventually pay for itself. I'm not certain, but I'm pretty sure that any pharmaceutical company would say so, also.

One other thing, I almost hate to mention: whoever has a moonbase, a solar furnace, and a catapult would automatically have the most potent & versatile weapon in the history of mankind.

What comes to mind when I say "long term survival of the human race"?

Maybe Palm will get it's corporate head out of it's ass, and make a slightly modified palm TX (2005) with a 10" screen. optionally, Throw in a SLC SSD slot along with the SDHC slot so the user can add as much storage as they want. It would probably be a good idea to put a faster ARM in; the original cab be clocked up to 500Mhz, but faster is always better. maybe make it user replaceable? that would rock...
It would probably be good to upgrade the WiFi from 802.11b. and the bluetooth is only 1.1, but both are understandable in a 2005 device, right?
One thing that would be essential, to me at least, would be the ability to run Palm OS as well as WebOS; WebOS is great, Linux based, but there are Debian builds that will run fine on a Palm TX anyway. and I have hundreds of Palm OS applications.

Realistically, just take stock Palm TX guts and a 10" screen and I'd be a happy camper.

Even more realistically, I know there is almost no possible chance that Palm corporate will do anything sane before they go out of business.

I think I would pass on that; it didn't work out so well for the last folks who tried it.

If you want true 3D, you don't need glasses, you need holographic projection.

I've seen working examples as simple as a aquarium filled with very fine glycerin mist with (if memory serves, this was 5-6 years ago) 6 sets of RGB lasers lighting up the droplets at the point where 2 or more similar frequency lasers intersect; the demo I saw had a pretty terrible "framerate", something like 10fps. But that should be an easily solvable hardware problem with enough money thrown at it; you could, I would think, even do away with the enclosure (and possible even the lasers) by doing something with an electromagnetic field and the proper teeny tiny particles.

I think even the aforementioned primitive demo could have gotten a usable frame-rate with the proper software controlling things.

as to "The 3D picture can be created using a handheld with dual 3-megapixel cameras and an 800-MHz TI OMAP 3630 chipset", I imagine that's just an attempt to hype a ancillary product; I'm betting you could do just as well with 2 camera phones duct taped together.

If that sort of thing happens relatively often, it does sound like one of your "foes" might be targeting you. I don't see anything that could be considered a troll in your post.
In reference to your OP, though, have you looked in to the original infoseek formula?

I've been using the above-mentioned device as my EXCLUSIVE means of reading non-fiction for the last 3 years; The screen size is a little annoying, but after the first book, I really didn't notice. I read at least 3 hours per day (I'm retired) and sometimes as much as 8.
Turning the page is unconscious; you either press down on the multi-selector, or tap the screen. Most of the reader software comes with a "timed scroll" feature, but I hate it so don't use it. I charge it every other day, whether it needs it or not. usually not.
Oh, the reason I started using it: I was getting to the age where I was getting farsighted; I was having to hold the books further and further away in order to see them. Now, when I have my reading glasses I can put the font on its "small" setting and get an entire page on the screen at once; without glasses, I put it on medium, which gives me 12 lines at a time.
I have ONE device that lets me read, download new books to read (project Gutenberg of Australia ROCKS, btw), that I can hand to my 6 year old to play Pokemon in a GB emulator, or to my 17 year old to watch a movie, TV or to IM, or to my GF to work on the shopping list or whatever, depending on who is the most bored.
I wish it had a bigger display, preferably something like e-ink. but until something matches at least some of its feature set, I'm sticking with my Palm TX.