Signal fulfills your first, second, and third requirements nicely, although I see why you suggest rotating responsibility. Your fourth requirement, allowing third-party clients, is sort of implicitly allowed but not encouraged, I think.

There's a company called PacSafe that makes what are essentially collapsible wire cages you can wrap your bag in, and then chain the bag to something solid, like a drain pipe: http://pacsafe.com/ That being said, I went around the world a couple of times without one of these, and did just fine. They tend to draw attention.

Well, it worked for Kirk...

Not a Mac user, and agree their benefits seem pretty good, but wouldn't calling their technical support area the "Genius Bar" imply that Apple does want to hire people a little better than just "expendable?"

Here's a list of which classic Doctor Who stories you can stream through Netflix or Amazon Instant, and here's a list for new (post-2005) Doctor Who.

Why stop at CD quality? It's an old and outmoded format; most music could be resampled at better aural resolutions. Thomas Dolby's promised to release his next album in higher-than-CD quality formats online.

I read Slashdot through RSS -- I only hit the front page once every few days to see if a new poll is up. With a poll RSS, I would respond to all of them.

Say what you will about Eric S. Raymond, reading his (free) book The Art of Unix Programming is the best way to understand the design philosophy behind any Unix system, not just Linux. And it has general applicability as well.

The ironic thing is, I spent three weeks in Tunisia earlier this year, and I encountered Tunisian guys offering to Bluetooth amateur porn from their mobile phone to mine. Sneakernet always wins.

Anyone who thinks that interactive books can't be a force for good needs to go read Neal Stephenson.

You are absolutely correct -- I was a victim of this attack despite using stock Wordpress, with all the latest updates applied. I would have never discovered it, either, if it weren't for Duke University's IT department (the blog was on their subdomain) being incredibly on-the-ball with security checks. Wordpress has unfixed security holes that are being exploited; people need to know!

Had I mod points, you would get them. It's all about the information, Marty!

T-Mobile is basically the only US carrier that seems friendly towards folks with unlocked phones just looking for a SIM card. There's also been some rumblings that they might start offering the first prepaid data service in the US; how likely that is, I don't know. I do know that they used to let iPhone users use their prepaid data plan for Sidekicks, but that is no longer possible. They only blocked port 80, though, so you can still check your mail via IMAP, or SSH to a remote sever somewhere! I've even used Opera before, by passing my traffic through an Opera proxy server. Also, you can get $100 of prepaid credit for $70 by utilizing Bing.com cash back (YMMV) -- and that credit is good for a year. Not bad if you don't do a lot of talking or need port 80.

It's quite easy to set up, using the Ubuntu alternate install cd.