I've worked with people in the same situation (small office & 1 person IT team) before.

They used Trac (http://trac.edgewall.org/) to keep things organized. It works really well because it has integration with the standard SVN features for software development, while tickets/milestones can be used for non-programming projects. It even scales well with job assignments if you eventually get an IT team.

You completely forgot the current leader in phone OSes, Symbian. It doesn't get many press releases, but it's got more market share than the iphone, Android, WinMo, AND Blackberry combined. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Operating_systems

I use a split solution.

On my desktop running Gnome, I use revelation. It has a handy applet you can add to the gnome toolbar.

You can export your password file to something compatible with PasswordSafe and then do a USB key install on it. Since the file is encrypted, you don't need to worry about people getting access to your accounts if you lose the USB key.

To be fair, the Litl has some pretty cool hardware features that aren't available on standard netbooks. Take the Easel Mode for example: http://litl.com/essays/hardware.htm. There also seems to be a lot of hardware that was customized, such as the keyboard.

Also, this seems to be a pretty open source company and they managed to get the Z series atoms working with linux, so that's also pretty impressive. The money from the hardware purchase goes to subsidize open source community development.

An old laptop will probably give you the lowest power for the cheapest cost. It doesn't sound like reliability or performance is your main concern. You can disassemble it and take out the LCD to save a couple more watts if you want, but a typical laptop draws between 10-20 watts.

A secure system should also have a BIOS password and a locked down boot sequence that doesn't let you insert arbitrary CDs/USB keys. It's a lot more difficult to reset the BIOS on a laptop.

It's really a cool concept. The semantic web movement is allowing this through RDF notation. That's what we really should be arguing for on ./. It goes beyond simple units though, it allows representation of data in any form that suits the user. The downside is that OWL and other extensions to RDF to make it logically consistent are quite complex.

Identifying the areas responsible for trauma and bad memories can be useful for treatment of patients who have experienced things like car crashes. It can help by reducing the effects associated with these memories.
The thing about research is that lots of times the applications are not immediately obvious. Academia does research all the time on subjects that people don't have uses for yet. You're right in pointing out the possible negative side effects of this knowledge though. It's something that is very often unavoidable in research. A good example of this would be nuclear fission and it's range of uses.

If you're planning on using this tablet as a teaching tool and nothing else, I suggest getting an used X61 tablet. They're well under $1000 now and they're portable enough to be brought from class to class easily. They're also extremely durable. I'm using a 5 year old T42 right now with no signs of breaking down.

Germany isn't some kind of arctic region. Their summer is pretty warm (25C). What happens to the efficiency numbers when you stop using the heat and you don't do your dishes?

And for added convenience, you could even have the dedicated appliance dispense cash on the spot! Of course, you'd need to add locks and harden the case with heavier steel.

Wait a sec....

Does it seem strange to anyone else that the Sheriff's office is conducting a raid on the Government offices and is disregarding orders from the justice department?

I always thought that law enforcement was supposed to be the arm of the government. It seems more like the arm is acting of its own accord in this case.