Steve Jobs would never have allowed the bulge. He micro-manged everything down to, literally, the millimeter. He would not like the way it looks, feels in your hand, and has no tactile usefulness. Although, perhaps it could be argued that it would help people not cover the lens with their finger.

A group of us asked a waiter who was about 60 years old to take a picture of us the other day with my iPhone. He struggled with it for minutes and kept putting his finger over the lens. I tried to help him but finally gave up. Got some great pics of his finger though :/

FaceTime.... Even if the relatives don't have an iDevice someone near them will or they can probably go to an Apple store.

Most checking accounts (from every bank I've dealt with) have free, automatic bill pay. They will either pay your bill electronically for you OR they will mail a check on your behalf if whoever your paying isn't set up in their system. It's convenient, free, and easy. You just have to plan ahead. They want you to use this service as it makes you a sticky customer.

Also since you're "pushing" payments it's easier for you to control, change, etc. as you don't have to log into 20 different websites.

Agreed. Obviously inflation needs to be taken into account. But since real income is less, most people are losing a ton money over times. Your home should not be considered an investment.

One things that bothers me are realtors. They artificially inflate the value of homes so they can make their commissions. They're commissions are insanely high for the supposed value they provide. I submit some controls are missing there are there is a sort of monopoly (if that's the right term) on selling houses.

One thing I've noticed is that when the jobs were shipped overseas at first the companies were still owned, mostly, by Americans. Now they are slowly starting to get owned by people from other countries. We'll see how that works out for the US.

I read the article and it's scant on details about anything other than they're sucking bandwidth like crazy, taking the Internet down for the entire district, the IT guys were caught way off guard, and the kids and parents like them. The article doesn't talk about how the iPads (it also mentions some ChromeBooks) have improved or otherwise affected grades, education, or anything. Anyone that has actually done have insight on that? Yes, I've Googled it, but it'd be nice to hear from someone in the field. I'm looking at this for a school I volunteer at too. Bandwidth is definitely an issue.

Yes, these are concerns.

I do live in the US where they track the heck out of everyone anyway. However, I actually came from a communist country where there is much fear of the government and people are afraid to speak up. People who do have been known to disappear, etc.

What really bugs me is the common retort "if you have nothing to hide..." Well, why not just strip search everyone (which they basically do at airports), or put a police officer in everyone's house. Or stick a chip in everyone, or start tracking people's thoughts....

All that being said... there's nothing like a Mercedes V8. Can't get it w/o the tracking. Also if my wife or I were in an accident or an emergency it would help. The concierge service (where you can call in and get directions, etc.) is also very useful for someone like me that travels a lot.

Perfect systems? They do not exist.

So have my last two cars. My newest vehicle (CLS 550) does have a "valet" feature that will alert you via email or text if it leaves an area you set. Mercedes can also track its location, supposedly.

Definitely scary stuff, though as I'm one of those people who hates having things in my pockets and almost always leave my wallet in the car. Of course, I can see it from my office window and my house/garage are alarmed.

Kudos to the folks at NASA and JPL for a job well done. Hopefully we'll get some great science out of it.

Awesome can't wait to see how it turns out. Too bad the little ones won't be awake for it.

I'm seeing conflicting reports... Is it tonight (as in a few hours from now) or tomorrow (27 hours from now)?

To answer OP's question. Use OneNote. Awesome online and off, editable by many at the same time, tracks who changed what, securable, and super easy to do documentation in it. We use it to document thousands of network and other devices for our team of techs.

The points you make are mostly related to SharePoint 2007. SharePoint Foundation 2010 installs almost too easily on Windows 2008 R2. there is a like two click prerequisite installer and another similar easy installer for SharePoint itself. It's like a 1 on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10. Then throw in Search ServerExpress 2010 with a super easy install that integrates wi SP and crawls and indexes your file servers and bam, you have some serious just about FREE capabilities. Also third party tools are no longer needed to store files outside of SharePoints MSSQL database. It can be done easily with MSSQL's FILESTREAM feature. Granted setting up Kerberos takes about an extra 15 minutes, but you gain a lot of ease of use for end users.

Have you heard of Office for Mac and Office365 (browser based)?