Hmm. I am the person who created that Tumblr. I'm not trying to "debunk" anything. Just showing what it really is: sometimes it's nonsense, sometimes it's there's an amusing juxtaposition, sometimes it's a fun Easter Egg.

Tim Robinson, the man behind the Meccano construction you link to, is a trustee of the Plan 28 charity mentioned above.

You are quite correct that we have not built a single demo part. In the two years since I started talking about this project the following has happened:

1. Persuaded the Science Museum to digitize all of Babbage's plans and notebooks (this in itself was a non-trivial task involving a great deal of effort at all levels and they should be thanked for taking on the task).
2. Got the leading Babbage experts to join and work with me (Doron Swade who built the Difference Engine No. 2 and Tim Robinson)
3. Started a UK-based charity (again these things take time as there are legal requirements and the recruitment of a board of trustees)
4. Started research on the Babbage archive itself
5. Begun fund-raising.

No. 4 is non-trivial because there are literally thousands of pages of notes and > 230 large scale plans to decipher. Plus there's a hardware description language to work with. And the archive is not well documented. There are a number of different cross references that conflict with each other. I realize that all this stuff is boring and people would like to see an immediate result, but that's not going to happen. It's years of work to properly study this stuff and build a historically accurate machine.

Note that we have not proposed building the 1,000 memory location machine. That's far too much to demonstrate that it would work and would add to the cost and size. As for the number of parts, until we've deciphered all the plans and come up with a definitive plan that it's hard to answer but we believe there will be roughly 40,000 to 50,000 components to be made.

You are correct that I care about the PR side of things. I need to because I need to raise a substantial amount of money.

But it's far from all PR. There's now a registered British charity with a board of trustees and the pre-eminent Babbage expert, Doron Swade, who built the Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum is running the technical side of the project.

Study of the digitized plans has been underway since February and some first results will be announced this summer. We actively want to build a 3D working model in a tool like Autodesk.

The problem isn't tits. There are other things in porn that would jump out of the screen and nearly hit you in the face.

Coaches and players have been issuing signals and commands by touching different parts of their body for as long as I can remember.

It is supposed to be a public unique identifier, nothing more, but it is being routinely (mis-)used as a secret piece of information, for instance, to authenticate people.

If there is a big enough market for domain name news, it might be interesting to try and steal that domain name!

One thing to keep in mind is that once people are on FB, private information about them can be posted by other people and linked to them via tagging and linking. Because of most default settings in FB, people can't easily control who sees what their friends and families post about them.

Also, the recent article on privacy salience on Bruce Schneier's blog explains why some people put private information on such sites: FB and similar sites have an agressive marketing strategy that emphasizes the benefits of posting such information, while burying privacy concerns deep in hard-to-find pages.

You will have to log in first in order to delete your account. So either log in now, which constitutes use of Facebook after the TOS have been published, and FB will keep the content you're about to delete, or never log in again and leave your content online for FB to do whatever it wants with it.

Facebook: helping you give away your privacy since 2003!

If we are no longer allowed to use pseudonyms on the Internet without getting sued, I'm getting my name legally changed to "Anonymous Coward."