'It may be that if it wasn't for Facebook, some students would still find other ways to avoid studying, and would still get lower grades.'

That fits my experience as a parent exactly. I've found that if you deny your children access to one distraction, they will just find another.

Back in college in the 1980's I administered a cluster of Sun2's with 160MB rack mounted hard drives. You could define those days as when a "hard drive" would kill you if dropped on your head from a height of 3 feet.

"Replacing all of the transformers would take months, if not years". Use your imagination: Will stores even be open? Will your employer even require your services?

If you don't think loss of the entire power grid would deeply affect your life, I have to wonder where you live (and that's being kind)

I'm curious about the free Wikipedia access part.
Lock my daughter out of wi-fi and give her one of these when she's supposed to be doing research, to prevent her from getting distracted by AIM all the time :)

It could be the solution of how how to maintain legacy systems in generations to come. They just need to start mapping the genes of a COBOL programmer.

recentf mode, which keeps a list of recently opened files:

(require 'recentf)
(recentf-mode 1)

For bonus points, set a PROJECT environment variable before starting eclipse, and maintain project-specific lists of recently opened files:

(when (getenv "PROJECT")
    ; project-specific recently opened files
    (setq recentf-save-file (concat (getenv "PROJECT") "/.recentf"))
    ; project-specific emacs config
    (when (file-exists-p (concat (getenv "PROJECT") "/.emacs"))
        (load-file (concat (getenv "PROJECT") "/.emacs")))
    ; project-specific TAGS file
    (when (file-exists-p (concat (getenv "PROJECT") "TAGS"))
        (visit-tags-table (concat (getenv "PROJECT") "TAGS"))))

Configure emacs auto-mode-alist to open Java archives with archive-mode, and then edit deployment descriptors contained in the archive without having to extract the archive. Bliss.