Which hard drive? I have gone nearly 100% SSD and flash.

If you don't want your ideas to be stolen then just don't talk about your ideas. Keep your technological ideas a secret, and only use well-known and cliche ideas in your university assignments. You will still get good marks, since after all the university as it is now is not promoting independent and original thought, and after you get the degree you will be able to do whatever you want with your ideas.

The citizens of NZ should ask for a constitutional amendment to include internet rights as a basic human right, just as Greece did in its 2001 constitution:

Of course even if something is codified into the constitution it could be limited by law (as it does in the case above if you read the PDF) or not implemented at all, but it is in general a good idea even just for the sake of the symbolism itself to have internet rights codified into the constitution.

Nice study that confirms what we all knew: that the downtown is the worst place to live and full of smog. Downtowns developed for safety and economic reasons, but now we have the Internet, so I expect people to start abandoning the downtown to live in suburbs and the countryside close to nature, communicating and working through the Internet (as I do). We really don't need a smog-infected and crime-prone downtown anymore.

Mice are for the weak. I can't understand why not more people use trackballs.

I wonder if he would put his MBA in good use by founding his own startup and what products we could expect from such a startup.

I have found typematrix a very nice keyboard for Dvorak lovers. I use it for coding and everything else. I have the PS/2 version, not the newer USB version, which has a few changed keys. I like it for its big Shifts, central Enter/Backspace, its small size, its matrix layout, and its built-in Dvorak/Qwerty support (so no OS modification is needed). The latter is important in case you type English in Dvorak and another language in Qwerty, if you share the keyboard with Qwertyers or you are just learning Dvorak.

Maybe a few residential courses from OU would be interesting.

In short, they re-invented the Flybook.

I really want them to implement this business model, because it would be a great push for greater GNU/Linux adoption.

I really wonder how they define a blog. So if the law restricts these discussions in blogs, does it mean that you can discuss these issues in a simple webpage, in a wiki, in a gopher server, in a file on an FTP server, in an email, over an IRC server, over VoIP, on a normal weblog operating on a port other than 80, on a password-protected blog, or through a technology not yet invented? Blogs could be obsolete in 10 years just as gopher is obsolete now (but still alive). Does it mean they are going to continue making new laws for every new technology? Good luck to them keeping current with a drive towards technological singularity that accelerates every year.

Do not give/rent/sell school-owned laptops to the students. Just let the students use their own laptops, bought by them or by their families/carers. You can help everyone have a laptop by giving the students gift cards/coupons, or making a special deal with a local computer shop and issuing a prepaid coupon that is valid only for laptops. You can get ideas on the specific implementation by studying how the Greek Government ran its own laptops-for-students programme (which is a special programme for good university students): the student can choose any laptop they want and are the owner of their laptops from the day of purchase; this works easily with the student just visiting a computer shop, saying they want to buy a laptop under the government's programme, the government issues a unique ID number to them which is then given to the shop (if I remember well), and the student gets any laptop they want with a 80% (up to 500 EUR) discount. In this way the student can get any laptop, even with GNU/Linux, with no strings attached, and it is their property. I do not know all the details of the programme, but at least that's what I remember when I happened to read about it.

Just ask yourself what destruction is going to happen to your life if you lose the data. If the answer is "no problem", then hit Delete or just let the data to rot in an old RAID-1 setup until both disks crash and then just stop worrying.

If, however, you have some data that you think are particularly important, you can rent a safe deposit box in a bank for about 30 EUR per year (for an A4-sized box) and put copies of your data in there, paying attention to choose a bank that is too big to let fail :)

Many people install TVs and DVDs, as well as PCs in their cars now, with TFT screens. Should we also see screens banned?

Eee and Wind are not UMPCs, they are netbooks.