As a fellow civil engineering student, I suggest you check out students.autodesk.com. They've got a bunch of their programs for free, if you are willing to put up with having a small watermark around the outside border of anything you print. It's quite nice.

I still agree, that it's really important to have a lab. I don't need to drag my laptop around with me to classes, and I can check email in a lab between classes or do work on the computers as need. Plus, it helps to be able to have a computer that is for lack of a better term, sterile. I don't have all the distractions of games, bookmarks I check daily, IM, etc. on a lab computer as I do on my own. It's easier to work on one of them than on mine.

...from the results of the Scoop mission. Trying to collect bacteria from outer space and the upper atmosphere is a terrible idea.

If you're teaching them programming, and they might not all use it, maybe you should think about using MS Excel. It seems everyone uses Excel in some form, but the people who can really get into the nitty-gritty of it can do some really useful stuff. Excel is on just about every computer these days, or some similar spreadsheet, and while it's not a traditional programming language, it does require the use of logic to figure out how to set up a series of cells with different commands to give you the answer you want.

Python on the other hand, is much more traditional, and might be a bit more straightforward to teach, but I still think more students would find useful skills they can use everyday in Excel rather than in Python. If they were all going towards engineering or comp-sci, Python would be good, but for the future business people in your class, knowing how to use Excel, and use it very efficiently is a huge plus in the "real world".

I have an EZPass (the east coast automated tag thing on my car). I go to school in Washington, DC, and I live in South Jersey. When I drive, I don't notice the total cost of the tolls, and I think it's because of tag. I asked a friend to pick me up at a train station near the end of the MARC (Maryland's train system) line, and I ended up costing him $13 that he paid out of his wallet, and that's just on the way back from the train. I paid him back, but I didn't realize how many tolls there are on I95.

As far as the idea of turning roads into toll systems, I'd prefer the tags. They're a bit more anonymous than a license plate, which could easily be traced by DMV records. I know many people who own one or two tags and just put it in whatever car they're taking for a long trip. My big worry is the day that the politicians realize you can use these things to track how fast people are driving by comparing the time into the system to the time out with the distance driven. I did read an interesting article the other day about an economist proposing we solve our traffic congestion and road funding problems by implementing a dynamic tolls system on all the major highways. A busy road would have a higher toll than a less crowded road, encouraging people to take the cheaper route, and at the same time, providing funds for the highway system. Usually in my travels between DC and home, or between home and my friends in Delaware, I take either 295, a bit longer of a drive, but less crowded, or the New Jersey Turnpike, which has an exit that is a few miles closer to home, which is more direct but seems to be more crowded when I drive it. With some well placed electronic signs, I could tell which route will have more traffic, and the state would make money on both routes, not just the turnpike.

But if you're not in a position to know how much your university spends on software and be able to compare it to how much revenue the university has, you're not in a position to really make a change to open source. Second, thinking of my dealings with fellow university students (I'm an OSS using university student as well), I know many of them would rather use the MS/proprietary version that just works than deal with often buggy open source software that's not always compatible or has bugs left and right. Your university has to deal with the outside world, which is still deeply entrenched in MS Office, unless you're going to show all your students how to export from Open Office to an MS Office format, expect a lot of complaints. Granted, Open Office isn't as buggy as some things, but if you have engineering students who need a good CAD program, don't count on finding a good open source program for them. I wish you luck, but you're really fighting the tide here.

My systems are named after famous places, and the hard drives named by the first names of people who made that place famous. My MacBook Pro, and related drives: Los Alamos Robert (Oppenheimer) - internal drive Albert (Einstein, ... Okay, somewhat related, this was my original internal drive, now an external) John (Von Neumann) Leo (Szilard, again, only slightly related) My PC / media system: Kitty Hawk Wilbur Orville I used to have my PC drives partitioned and named after the five Space Shuttles, and the system was called Canaveral.

I worked it once as an intern. 9 hour days, 8 hours the first friday, off on the next. It was nice because it gave me a chance to take every other weekend off to go do things with friends, like roadtrips, either back home or to the beach. What I didn't like was that I had an hour and a half commute each way, so the 9 hours, plus commute time made for a really long day. Up at 6, and not usually back until 6 or 7, depending on the traffic through DC. As an intern I was never asked to come in on that day, and the job wasn't one where I had urgent deadlines to meet. In the future, I'm not sure if I would do it. It'd really depend on having a shorter commute and knowing that I had something to do on that Friday.