I don't understand. When you say "your phone," are you referring to my desk phone or my cell phone? If I ever lose access to the desk phone, I just unlink it from my Google Voice account, and it'll never receive any of my calls again.

The desk phone provides higher quality voice and better ergonomics. That said, I never gave out my work number because I don't want people to call multiple places, or to chain me to the desk when I'd rather answer their call on my cell.

But I started using my desk phone just this week. I ported my cell phone number to Google Voice, associated both my new cell phone number and my work number with it. Now when anyone calls my cell phone, it rings both phones, and I choose how to answer. I can also make outgoing calls through my work phone, appearing to others that I am calling from my original cell phone number. It's a beautiful system.

Only a liberal arts major would suggest that "anyone" can make a good, usable Linux distribution. Time is not free, you know.

Your grandparent was talking about a specific bock: Shiner Bock. That one is made only in bottles.

That's exactly what the parent was saying.

I'd love it if the project's web site had a howto for installing the necessary components on my existing Linux distribution.

Why would I want to boot a LiveCD/LiveUSB if I already have a perfectly working Linux laptop with all my files and settings? Presumably once you're connected to the mesh network you'll want to be productive, whether it involves instant messaging, email, or whatever else you have set up and configured on your laptop.

Did you check IDv1 and IDv2 metadata? I don't have any Amazon MP3s handy, but as I recall Amazon puts a unique number into the Comment field. That's easy to change or erase. I'd be interested in comparing actual audio data between two purchasers of the same MP3.

Cue rising sales of chemicals that remove ink...

Effective tax rates are much lower than the top tax bracket for a given income. A large fraction of the population pays no income tax, instead paying only FICA at 7.7%. Federal income tax starts only after the standard deduction, which is almost $6k, so you end up paying federal income tax only on $7.4k with a minimum wage job where you work 51 weeks a year for 35 hours a week. That's $738, or an effective tax rate of 5.5%. In all, in a state without income tax this person would pay about 13.2% in total tax -- assuming there are no additional deductions or credits. That's $11,233 per year in take-home pay.

I run my desktop monitors at work in portrait orientation, like God intended.

Is that a way to justify theft?

Some people also benefit from armored money trucks spilling their cargo over a highway.

But it raises the cost of doing business, and ultimately society pays a price for that.

Speed, latency, and amount transferred are all independent variables.

I consider myself an power user when it comes to smartphones. But I transfer less than 500 MB per month. But when I do want to use my measly 500 MB, I don't want to sit around and wait for it. I want it now.

I'm a prime candidate for Verizon's LTE network and their caps: I transfer data judiciously, but I value speed and low latency. 4 GB is a huge amount of data... do you really manage to exceed it?

I am sorry, but nothing you've said is remotely true.

How does ntfsclone replace any Faronics product? I happen to use and love ntfsclone to reimage PCs. It's very nice, and like you said cheap, but it requires a reboot into Windows, a clone process that takes a while, and a mini-setup of Windows where it generates SIDs and other stuff.

Deep Freeze and Clean Slate, on the other hand, allow anyone to reboot or even log off (in the case of Clean Slate) and get everything restored to normal. Now students can get a pristine image for every class period or anytime they want, instead of having me reimage it with ntfsclone daily, weekly, or monthly. In summary, ntfsclone is not a replacement for or a competitor to Faronics or Fortres Grand products. Unless you can point to a free product that has the same functionality, it's not "money wasting."

As far as Faronics being a vendor lock-in -- again I have no idea what you're talking about. Deep Freeze is a single, well-contained product. It does not try to integrate with anything else, take over any other program, or cause any other headaches.

Finally, "mysterious breakage"? Again, Deep Freeze is one of the most reliable products I've ever used. It's reliable because it's simple: it redirects disk writes at the block level, keeps a temporary mapping of these redirects, then purges it at reboot. Clean Slate is similar in results, but it works at the filesystem level, so a logoff is sufficient to reset the PC to a pristine state. Both work very well in my testing and field experience. I'd love to hear about your mysterious breakage.

I am the entire IT department for a private K-12 school. I also teach an accelerated C++ class to high schoolers in that lab over the summer. We have one computer lab with 25 PCs. Here are some of the things I've done or plan to do to make it a pleasant and productive work environment, in no particular order:

1) Have a good projector. Our projector does not support resolutions above 1024x768 and it can be a pain when the working window is needlessly smaller because of large static elements like the taskbar and toolbars.

2) Install in-ceiling speakers connected to the teacher workstation to distribute sound evenly. I recommend in-ceiling speakers from Monoprice.

3) Have a free-for-all shared network drive for students. We have three shared drives: one for students, one for all staff, and one for just office workers. This is probably one of the features that's easiest to set up yet appreciated the most.

4) Use centralized logins. At my school I have a passwordless "student" account with a mandatory profile, while all other accounts are roaming profiles with redirected folders. I've not heard any complaints about this. Students get the same desktop experience on every computer, and teachers love that their settings are shared between computers. I also offer (through the logon pop-up message) to create roaming profiles to students who want this feature, but no one has yet taken me up on this. Probably because no one ever reads that message.

5) Set up Fortres Grand Clean Slate or Faronics Deep Freeze on at least a few computers and configure them such that every account is an Administrator. There will always be students who'll want to install a legit program you haven't foreseen. Let them.

6) Keep software up-to-date. No one likes using Firefox 2.0 or MSIE 6.0 on locked-down PCs. Do this either through group policy (if you're fearless) or by reimaging PCs on student breaks. Reimaging works because everyone's documents and settings already live on the server.

7) This is controversial, but allow students and staff to attach any personal device to the network. We have a schoolwide wireless network, so this allows everyone to stay connected no matter what part of the building they're in. This has been tremendously popular at my school, and so far haven't had any issues.

8) Use standby. No one minds it, and it saves a huge amount of energy. Use something like Faronics Power Save Enterprise if you want fine-grained control, or just configure Windows power settings to go on standby after X minutes of inactivity. As a bonus, standby is also quick to reveal defective RAM. (Bluescreen, "hardware problem, contact manufacturer")

If anyone reading this is in Cedar Rapids / Iowa City of Iowa, I am an IT consultant and would love to implement this at more schools. :-)