Well, for me the easiest of routes was tu ultimately buy a tablet pc. I know you must be a poor student (like me), but bear with me. eBay is your friend. When I had such a dilemma (except not with equations because I'm a med student), I looked around for a solution and finally figured I could make with and old (2003 old) tablet pc. The kind that are tiny because they don't even have a keyboard. I ended up buying a Motion Computing M1300, for around $100, and honestly, it's the best purchase (computer-wise, and price/usefullness) I've ever made. Of course it came without even a pen, charger, HDD or battery, but all of these things, plus a mini USB bluetooth adapter and a bluetooth folding keyboard AND 1.5 GB of ram placed the whole thing at a little less than $200. And it's just a dream for taking notes, I loaded Ubuntu on it, and notes save to either some weird XML format that takes no space at all or slightly bigger PDF files (with a program called Xournal). I've never had the need to do this, but I guess you could also OCR the whole thing and make it searchable. In the end, it's not a gaming computer, but it's definitely smaller and lightner than my normal laptop, the hell of a lot more useful (bigger screen AND faster processor, believe it or not) than a netbook, and ends up costing way less than either of them. All of this was a little over 2 years ago, so I'd imagine with a little luck and patience you might be able to score a similar deal for an even lower price. my 2 cents (and actually one of the few posts that actually try to address your question directly)

Sure you can make laws (almost) as clear as technical documents. In civil law systems (which according to wikipedia is the most prevalent one in the world) the outcome of a trial isn't up to a bunch of manipulable people (jury) or to a potentially corrupt judge. The laws are written as explicitly as possible and in most cases, it's pretty clear what the outcome in any lawsuit should be. Not saying it's a perfect system, but common law isn't the only (and arguably even the better) system out there, and laws CAN be pretty straightforward. Inferring the system is as it is because it couldn't possibly be done any better (or making up excuses for it) is precisely the reason common law prevailed in aglophone countries even though it shouldn't have when written law was introduced into the system.

The thing is, one of Apple's marketing gimmicks for the iPhone isn't the phone itself but also the "possibilities" than having an app market brings, when supposedly every app a developer could imagine would be made available via that market (I can understand the no-porn policy, but only barely). But when they start denying apps because they are "redudant" (meaning competing) with their own apps, because they provide a functionality that competes with that of the carrier's (again understandable, but just barely), or because they support a technology that isn't objectionable, competing or anything like that, but that Apple SIMPLY does not like; then I have a problem with them, and had I been stupid enough to fall for the "future possibilities" tidbit of their marketing campaigns, I would certainly feel ripped off. And hence the need for an awareness "get the fact" campaign for Apple products. Someone suggested above that they make it clear in their ads that apps are subject to a completely arbitrary acceptance process before being made available, and I don't think it's a bad idea. If they did that, they'd get some respect from me, and I for one, would stop complaining about their ill-marketed products which I don't own.

Actually this is the first thing that came to my mind. See, when the body receives a hormone it produces internally at an equal or higher dose than it normally produces it, the gland that produces it is ordered to stop doing so and in time, it tends to attrophy (sp?). This is true for corticoids (hence the reason you can't stop taking them at once, your adrenals won't be able to start again immediatly), and anabolizing steroids (for their testosterone-like properties the leydig cells in the testes are no longer required to produce testosterone and diminish in size and number, and this causes their balls to shrink). From the 6 month period it takes them to get back to normal sperm count it seems a similar thing is happening here (sperm require a microclimate of high concentration testosterone in the testes in order to be produced, and that's partly the reason these shots work). I wouldn't mind at all to get a shot once a month if my gf got sick of the pill, or it caused her side-effects or (gasp!) it lowered her libido, but if my balls are going to shrink I don't think it'd be such an easy decision. Every 2nd year med student knows the external administration of testosterone will hamper the production of sperm but I just always assumed it wasn't used for that application because of the ball-shrinkage problem. Anyone got a link to the actual trial?

Absolutely agreed.

That's not entirely correct. You DO create antibodies against parasites, they're just not super effective against them. And they're actually a different kind of antibodies; whereas for virii and bacteria you creage IgG, for parasites you create (mostly) IgE, and secrete a little IgA in the mucoses to help prevent the parasites from attaching themselves to the lining of the whatever mucose they're invading.

Take a look at the new La Fonera 2.0. It is intended exactly for that kind of thing. And it costs less. www.fon.com

Most of these can be achieved with a modded (to add a battery pack, sd card reader and whatnot) La Fonera.

With a cheap-ass usb-ethernet adapter (or several) you'd get something pretty useful.

Well, sure, but given how cheap solar cells are nowadays, aside from design costs I don't think adding a solar cell would add up to more than 5 bucks or something like that. For the few times that this feature might be useful it might actually not be such a bad idea... But really, in other to make a "greener" phone they NEED to start designing these things with longer userful live's in mind. 18 months average is awfully small. The laptop I'm writing this on is going to be six years soon, why couldn't my phone do that? They need to make the hardware more durable and the batteries' lives too (a-la OLPC). THEN would we be making a positive (or at least less negative) impact on earth.

I've always wondered about the peculiar way in which americans regard autism. Over here in europe it is tought (and taught) as children's psychosis, and treated as such. This news would be roughly equivalent to trying to prove (or even propose!) that schizophrenia is caused by adult vaccinations. Sure, there are developmental theories about chemicals which might possibly alter brain development, but even THOSE theories suggest the effect has to be caused during intrauterine life. And nobody would even dare to put one of those theories'place above plain and simple genetic predisposition. Could anyone in the field help me understand why are these very unlikely theories about autism causes the source of oh so many studies and debates? Does the public not understand very well the disease? Do american psychyatrists see it as something other than children's psycosis or even a very similar schizophrenia?