The question is bang on, but the conclusion a bit negative.

A presentation starts by thinking about where you want the audience to end up; it could be that you just want to impart some knowledge but maybe there are some behaviours you'd like people to change.

You then need to arrange your presentation to take people from one idea to the next in terms that are accessible to them. There's no point in telling someone something if you haven't already told them why it's relevant to them. If they believe it's relevant, it won't be boring.

There's lots of good detail advice on presenting in the comments but it will all be for nothing if you don't start with a coherent idea of what you want to achieve and a structure that makes it simple for your audience to follow.

Indeed. Furthermore, I look forward to the version that is able to make use of trusted computing architecture to get remote attestation that what it is talking to is an untampered-with bot. That should be an interesting day.

Not even... See this.

http://revk.www.me.uk/2011/11/secret-to-accessing-newzbin2-from-bt.html

Of course if you supply pseudo-code, then it's semantically equivalent to maths, so not patentable.

Software patents? Just say no.

Or even just join the Bikers party and stand a better chance of fixing both asinine attitudes at once. In my opinion politicians as a group represent more of a danger than bikers _or_ gamers.

Real men (still) use ed:

http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed.msg.htm

I agree, you should check these out at least.

When we first implemented messagelabs' spam filtering my biggest problem was dealing with a large number of users thinking their email setup was broken, there was such a drop in traffic.