A Yellowbrick sat tracker for two-way comms using the worldwide Iridium constellation, a Linradio software defined radio receiver plugged to a discone antenna, and a Toughbook with Navigatrix GNU/Linux. Aside from the required GMDSS, GPS, radar and so on, of course. Credentials: a few years as radio operator on ships going around the workd

If you care for such things use Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics to help you sort through the manufacturers. Even if you don't agree with their methods it is a good point of reference

Just one example: GreenFreeze tecnology

From the original article abstract:

"...the tendency to stick to truthful answers can be manipulated by stimulation targeted at dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Right hemisphere stimulation decreases lying, left hemisphere stimulation increases lying. Spontaneous choice to lie more or less can be influenced by brain stimulation."

"force you"? "make it impossible"? Where is that bullshit coming from? It shows a significant change, that's very different from the absolute phrases used in the summary.

If you work on a ship and are on transit across time zones, you need to change local time every couple of days to keep your sanity... We still keep UTC on board for servers and on the GPS, but local time is eneded as a basic frame of reference. You can't change your wake up time and beer o'clock all the time!

The Yes Men beat them to it already

Bambuser. We did that here on my ship using an Axis wireless camera, the Axis driver that makes it appear as an USB connected device and Flash video encoder. It worked perfectly, provided a website with an always-on stream of our ship. Bambuser does not have well-developed privacy controls, but for a single user you just provide them with your password. Each of you gets an account and stream to each other. Plus, you can check your remote kitchen from your mobile. And it's free.

A purple blob selling junk to little children sounds evil enough to me

Big vessels have to carry GMDSS, which are multi-channel safety and distress systems to be used in case of fire, man overboard or piracy. They have to be able to run for hours on battery power in case of power failure and to be super reliable. An important part of the system is the Sat C terminal, such as the Sailor DT4646E, which are pretty nicely built and sturdy flat screen PCs with 640k RAM, running DOS and a terminal program for Sat C communications from flash memory. They use 3.5" disk drives -- with a proprietary connector and selling for $150. And this is precisely the less reliable part of the terminal, since the floppy is always inside the drive (for saving messages) and the heads are exposed to the salty air and have to be cleaned (and replaced) often. But the things are still running (always on) after may many years.

I remember when Opera was the only browser that could really zoom into a page to compensate for extra high resolutions

AFAIK fowed text was a candidate for the SVG standard but didn't get accepted in the end. Inkscape still supports it, though they will eventually implement it in a wy that complies with the standard.

I use Inkscape extensively for making maps, and it does pretty much everything I need. I export map layers as PDFs from Qgis and import them into Inkscape one by one, then save them as SVG for further processing.

Since Qgis' export to PDF and SVG sucks, it does require quite a bit of editing of the SVG file to reduce the size and get rid of invisible artifacts. But then one of the best things of working with SVG is being able to edit your graphics file with a text editor and doing, say, find and replace on symbols (to replace those nasty Qgis bitmap symbols for SVG ones) or text. Try that with Illustrator files!

Inkscape does not take advantage of multiple cores (yet), but opening a new instance creates a completely separate process so while one Inkscape window is busy thinking you can keep working on the other at full speed.

The sad part is that i haven't been able to find a free, fully-featured XML editor to do more advanced editing of the SVG file. Eventually I had to settle for oXygen, which is not free and kind of taints my workflow.