Oh, wow. I was re-gifted one of these in about 1987 or so, right around the time I was going into primary school. It had no manual with it, and some of the button labels were missing. I remember playing around with it for hours a day, weeks on end. I remember finally figuring out only about half the modes, probably limited by my childhood ignorance of standard game rules. Still, at it's heart, it was a simple computer with a few binary inputs and a few binary outputs. I can probably credit that device with launching an entire lifetime of experimenting, fiddling, tweaking, hacking, and documenting. Thank you, Bob.

You can also give NewsBlur a try, and if you like it you have two choices: pony up for a full account or self-host, since it is totally open source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Pitchforks. Torches. More effective than phone calls.

Check out the PDroid project. It can patch any rom and will let you select on a by-app, by-API basis whether to provide real data, spoofed data, or no data.

There is votingforjudges.org, which is a great start.

Wish I could help more for other states!

Voted today in Washington state. Well, "today" is a misleading word.

I got my ballot weeks ago, spent about 12 full hours doing research with the provided ~100pg guide and an additional ~200 google searches. Carefully considered each vote, filled in the ovals (or abstained where appropriate), sealed her up, and dropped her off at a dropbox today.

I wish more states worked this way. I shudder to think the number of folks in walk-up-and-vote states that go on a whim, punch the name of a person they've seen on a commercial, and never give it another thought.

It's pretty simple: if SMS is point-to-point, Twitter is broadcast.

Provided you are sane and use a protected account, it's part microblog and part one-to-many SMS. Most folk I know have 25-50 'friends' and it is a heck of a lot easier to tweet "pub at 16:30!" than to text each one individually. Bonus points for being able to stay connected with friends in other states on a day-to-day basis in near real-time.

Now the whole business about having an open account and/or following people you don't personally know? Yeah, I don't get that either.

Is here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDUVe3a496Y

Doesn't EC2 let you request hosts in any of several particular datacentres (which they call an "availability zones") just so you can plan around such location-specific catastrophes? No matter how good the redundant systems, some day a meteor will hit one datacentre and you'll be S.O.L. no matter what if you put all your proverbial eggs in that basket.

Only a fool cares about a single-datacentre outage. This is why it's called "*distributed*-systems engineering", folks.

*bzzzt*

John Spartan, you have been fined one credit for violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.

Be well!

If you debunk a debunker, don't you just get back to the net-zero result?

You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to . . .

Absolutely. Earlier android phones (the Dream and Magic and others) have well-known solutions for operating without an active SIM. The Nexus One is only 3 days old, so it might still need some work, but unlike the earlier locked-down hardware, the N1 is not only open-source, you don't have to "crack" it to replace the firmware.

The XDA forums contain all the info you could ever want about the topic. (http://forum.xda-developers.com/ )

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What kinda weak FUD is this? It's a linux system on which you can gain root access with fair ease! You can packetsniff, block traffic, and swap out whatever bits of the OS you want. If the Big G were spying on you as such, you would not only know, you could do whatever you like about it.

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The participants had better be careful; if their entries - submitted to google, solicited by google - happen to redistribute trademarked Google property in any way such as names, logos, or interaction with google services, they'll just slap them with a Cease and Desist letter shortly after awarding the prize money.