> The authors note in the study that no lethal doses of LSD have been documented

There is record of a lethal dose of LSD. It was administered to a female elephant in a bizarre attempt to induce rut. I don't recall the g per Kg of body mass, but it was rather high as I recall. The elephant appeared fine for a while and then keeled over dead according to the account I read in what I recall was a chemistry journal back in the seventies. The article could have been published in the sixties. I haven't managed to find the reference yet.

Please check IRS regulations for educational and scientific research non-profits (assuming Caltech registered under one of those two provisions), but as I recall the board members of either type of non-profit corporation can only be legally compensated in line with their expenses for such activity. Officers of the corporation have no such restriction. Hence, the CEO of the Red Cross being the highest paid CEO in the U.S.A. when I looked several years ago. (Note: pay != total compensation package)

Sun SPARCs, Power PC Macs, OLPC XO-1, and other computers using Open Firmware as their boot loaders provided access to the built in forth during their boot sequences. As an evolutionary step they required a timely esc press, keyboard mudras, or more complex unlocking process (OLPC) but it was rather fun to type forth in at a big ol' prompt on the console to poke around the hardware and PCI drivers.

While lamenting ready access to programming languages why not wax nostalgic over the loss of the ability to type in and run Javascript in browser location fields? Evolution through security pressure pruned that evolutionary branch.

Yes, those were the days. And these days its easy enough to open a terminal application or web page and get ready access to a plethora of programming languages (csh, bash, javascript, python, haskell, ...) to play with on a laptop or smart phone. I don't think children are suffering too much from these evolutionary paths.

My route:
important documents and long term secrets (including pw to encrypted disk and instructions) in safety deposit box;
more volatile secured data on the encrypted disk -virtual disk- along with frequently needed secrets;
strong password securing disk;
backup the disk regularly.

The myth you stated (the founding myth that Adam Smith used in creating the field of economics) is just that. The fantasy world of barter never existed. The historic progression is from virtual money (ancient Mesopotamia where one silver shekel = one bushel barley = ... and the silver never left the treasury) to coinage (much later) to barter (used mainly by people who were used to cash transactions when currency wasn't available and a system of credit didn't exist.)

Look to John Maynard Keynes (his self described "Babylonian madness") attempting to ascertain the origins of money or a significant body of anthropological research if you wish to dissuade yourself of the fiction in intro economics texts. You will find exceptional uses of barter amongst indigenous peoples (typically were either the parties involved are mimicking or actually near violent conflict or the parties don't know each other and don't expect to encounter each other again so they attempt to swindle each other by bartering.)

No, a more common human endeavor before the state creation of money was that people pooled there excess materials and equitably portioned them out as needed (ex. Iroquois longhouses.) Gifting exchanges were long the norm in some areas until states created markets based on money via taxes. Another alternative still exists commonly, obligations. Debt being the commodification of obligations with a fixed monetization.

For a setting where coinage is scarce or one would protest the state that issues such coinage barter is the historical norm.

Open Cobalt, opencobalt.org, is the successor to Croquet, and it does indeed do all that the OP required with the possible exception of the requirement to not "lock me in to a particular mind-set." To me Smalltalk and Morphic, the interface paradigm, constitute mind-sets, and while one could subclass the Smalltalk compiler within Open Cobalt and play with the metaobject system to be able to work in a language of ones own design there would be a considerable bit of work to mask Morphic to allow work in a different mind-set. I don't think that Morphic would impose the limits that seem implied as the cause for this requirement though. Morphic provides for arbitrarily shaped widgets/windows (allowing for holes and non-contiguous surfaces) as well as focus tracking and interaction across 3D surfaces.

Yes, I have experience with Croquet -though it was some time ago.

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Now for my wish that the OP would have a hand at fixing the SlashDot interface and get it implemented. After typing a longer and more detailed response I Previewed that response only to find that these days white space isn't preserved in posts by default. No problem, Continue Editing to get back to that Options button (just over from the non-destructive Preview button) and see what can be done about inserting some blank lines for readability. Only problem is that clicking on Options and choosing to switch to the old plain text option wound up loosing the comment I'd just typed in. I'm frustrated and sad that Slashdot exhibits this behavior. Please fix it. sigh

Just checked

photography site:photosparks.com

(word on the homepage of a GoDaddy misdirected site) on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. All three responded with NO matches.

Given that "photosparks" doesn't bring up any seemingly related matches either (eg. the search engines have no pages referencing the site) the site might just not have been indexed yet.

NOTE: I repeated this test with a few other misdirected sites obtaining similar results.