Why don't "they" develop a texting system for long-range use? I know the mobile companies would hate it, but a protocol using CW-digital burst on HF channels allocated for this purpose would allow sending a text message along with sender-id, receiver-id, error-correcting, and authentication. The receiver would monitor a set of these channels and filter out the desired messages. One could construct a transceiver that stored received messages with a built-in WLAN and webserver so that a PDA could serve as the GUI so the whole FAMILY could send and receive messages during the whole trip!

Women and Men should think twice before spending years attaining a degree to work in IT. IT is a moving target and its always someone's subjective opinion if a job is being performed well or not. A "profession" is a field where the person has control over their time, methodology, tools, etc. IT people have none of this and are damned to an adversarial relationship with their masters. Don't screw yourself. All of the development and programming work has been transferred to Asia or will be. Don't waste a degree and all its meaning on a fucked up job. Be a real professional or at least a blue collar worker whose work has some respect, standing, and standards.

When I inherit such a monster I just start studying it. Too bad the environment of today's open plan office doesn't allow concentration necessary to learn code. This will doom our planet in a hundred years. If only women in the office could be required to shut up for at least 20 minutes out of every hour.

And at the thankfully now defunct MCI Worldcom near Dallas I was directed by our teamleader, a farmboy from west Texas, to write a program to generate reroutes for use if a circuit went down. He studied my work and said I was "good", but was afraid to put the program into production in case it malfunctioned and he got fired.