I'd like to know more about the protocol feature for the passwords that you mention. I've often wondered how to authenticate safely from a phone without requiring the user to enter their details every time they use it.
Where on wikipedia did you learn about it? (I'm assuming that was what the "Wikipedia++" was for -- If not, care to elaborate?)
Do you know OTR (Off the record messaging). It uses some nice stuff, like the Socialist millionaire protocol which exactly does this. Comparing values (for example passwords) without sending them. I still use salted hashes, which in this case also have to be implemented on client side. I don't think it makes a lot of sense for passwords anyway, because there is SSL. Again, this is just a personal project where I just played with this stuff. However it can still be useful in authentication. See OTR for example. I suggest to read this.
http://www.cypherpunks.ca/otr/Protocol-v2-3.1.0.html
There are also related protocols which might be very handy. Wikipedia is a very good source for finding such stuff. Follow interwiki links and external ones. There are many great protocols allowing you to do amazing things, that seem impossible in first place. I also like it because it shows how great math can be.
Like most people school mostly made me afraid of math and it took a while until I started enjoying it. I guess math (like programming) isn't something you should learn in a school, but something you should learn on your own. It's something you won't learn or enjoy when someone else explains it. You have to get things on your own, especially in your own pace, because people simply have different brains. I guess I'm very off topic now. It just makes me sad when people hate to learn.
I don't know how most states are doing on education budgets, but the districts around me in Texas aren't doing so hot. From what I can tell, we're cutting budgets by 1/6. (I saw spending of 54 billion in 2008-09 with cuts of 9 billion this year in separate reports)
The pricing jump is probably only "ridiculous" to you. Schools (and government in general) make it so hard to sell to themselves that prices in the tens of thousands are normal to them, even for tiny districts.
I don't think the pricing is the hard part - it's getting them to buy. And I'm not convinced those two are completely related.
As much as I'd like to see open access to ACM and other journals, I wonder how much it would benefit anyone? Surely almost everyone doing that work has a subscription. If not an outright membership, at least the University library will get them the articles.
>but who wants a wall of text or a sales pitch when they hit a site?
It may be a fine line, but I've noticed myself hitting a lot of new sites thinking "why don't they just tell me what it is/does and show me some screen shots before I have to sign up?"
I think it's a big deal. I almost always pass without it.
The best approach may be to cookie return visitors and then redirect them to the example, with a way for them to get back to the original LP if possible (landing page).
Where on wikipedia did you learn about it? (I'm assuming that was what the "Wikipedia++" was for -- If not, care to elaborate?)