Hearing loss severely affects people's social interactions, entertainment, etc. Insurance doesn't cover hearing aids. The ones that work best are expensive, $2500 and up, each. Social isolation is especially harmful to the older population, and so is hearing loss. I think this is an area that could be addressed by open hardware and software, perhaps better than some of the other items on this list. Kickstarter, anyone?

I hum or whistle something complicated requiring full attention (the one I usually use is a Bach piece), in other words, something a little too complicated for getting stuck in my head. This usually unsticks whatever was going around in my head without replacing it.

You may not be allowed to profit from your own criminal behavior, but the 'criminal' is the person making the copy of the copyrighted material (once upon a time this was a tort, i.e. a wrong against someone that one could be sued for, not a crime against the state or general public; that's what these guys are always trying to do: turn torts into crimes so they can sic the government on you), not the specialized search engine or directory of links. The Usenet-indexers are profiting in the same way that Truman Capote profited when he wrote a book about a notorious murder.

Even more so because AT&T decided to market licenses for Unix instead of just distributing, pissing off Stallman, who went and started the Free Software Movement in response.

Yeah, but in a year or two whatever you get him will be obsolete...

I served on a jury in which DNA evidence was presented, along with the expert witness' estimation of probability that two random people would have the same number of matching points of comparison (DNA is only matched at a relatively small number of points in the strand).

In this case, however, there were many people present at the discovery of the object from which the DNA was taken for analysis. As it happens, several of these people were relatives (brother, mother) of the person the prosecution were trying to persuade us was the person that possessed (in legal terms) the object.

The question that I kept hoping the defense attorney would ask was "what are the probabilities of an erroneous match if the people are relatives, not just two random people off the street"? Unfortunately, he didn't.

As it happened, there were so many other peculiarities in this case as well as some pretty bizarre testimony from prosecution witnesses that we voted to acquit without making much of the DNA evidence.

I had a customer with a Drobo. They bought it as a backup device. In my experience it was quite terrible compared to stuffing a bunch of drives in a box and running FreeNas or something on it. The device itself is quite expensive, and we had lots of problems with it, and finally wound up relegating it to a 3rd tier backup role. Among the problems we had;
1. It takes a LONG time to rebuild. It took 3 days to rebuild after a drive failure, during which another drive failure would have caused complete data loss.
2. I/O performance was sub par. I don't remember the exact rates, but in our testing backups would take 3x as long to the Drobo as they would to a simple 1 tb USB drive.
3. We ran into issues with very large files (>50 gigabytes) which the filesystem it was formatted in supported without issue.
4. When we had a hardware failure in the device, which caused it to constantly fail a drive that independent testing showed was fine, and despite the customer purchasing the additional "Drobocare" extended warranty, between getting the run around from their support (who kept making the same suggestions over and over instead of escalating the case) it took over a month to get it replaced, and by the time it was done it would have been cheaper to throw it in the trash. I wouldn't want to rely on them for anything.

Overall it was a very negative experience. The only thing I could recommend them for would be for graphic artists or something that works solo and doesn't have the tech skills to set up a better solution.

640K of memory should be enough for anybody.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

--There, fixed that for you. ;)