SSDs have a much longer lifespan, which means that they don't have to become cheaper than traditional drives, they just have to be cheap enough that when factoring in their lifespan, their extra cost is more than justified.

Also, because SSDs don't rely on moving parts, the fact that you can't lose one because your laptop took a bump on a subway or you tripped over your tower is another selling point - not only in terms of lower the odds of needing to replace the drive early (and therefore the cost you're paying per drive), but because if what you're storing on the drive is far more valuable than the device itself, you are very much willing to pay extra to lower the chances of a dead drive. Even if you make daily backups, losing say... a day's worth of freelance work is going to cost you a lot more than the cost of the drive.

With that in mind, I'd say even at double to triple the cost, they're worth it. Right now it's more like 10x, but but getting it down to 3x won't take more than a few years, even if getting it equal IS more of a 2020 thing - although I seriously question that number too. 6 years ago I bought a 1gb flash drive for something like $150. 1 year ago I bought a 16gb one for 30 bucks. If 5 years was enough to drop the cost per gigabyte 80-fold, and it's at a 10x multiplier now, I don't think it's going to be long at all before it gets equal, or damn close... and again, damn close is more than good enough with their much longer lifespan.

Windows 7 is an upgrade to Vista, and it performs better. This isn't news.

The problem is that Vista is a HUGE downgrade from XP, and so far everything I've read says that 7 is simply less of an XP downgrade than Vista was. I couldn't care less if it's prettier - it either needs to have some major functionality that XP doesn't (and it doesn't), or it needs to offer a serious performance boost over XP (and it appears to do the opposite.)

If he's looking for the classic, best-known novels, then yeah, if he's planning on teaching a class on the subject, he should already be aware of most, if not all of them.

If he's looking for more obscure stuff - especially short stories - then there's simply no way he's read everything out there, and asking for suggestions he can read helps.

There's also the specific matter that this is a high school class - so if he can get insights from people who have run similar classes, parents of high schoolers into sci fi, and of course, students themselves as to what's likely to seriously engage people in that age group, that has obvious value. Merely being aware of a list of good books doesn't necessarily mean you know what's likely to work well in that age group.

Last but not least, there's the problem of time. High school is usually about ~7 classes at a time compared to the 5 in college, and college usually involves less time in class than work outside of class, whereas high school is the opposite. This means students can do a very, very, finite amount of reading for 1 course, and so the goal is be as thorough as possible with very limited time to work with - which again means that obscure short stories can be important here.

Their free account is rather weak, but I'm quite happy with what I'm paying $20/year for...

1. Actual security. It's the only webmail I know of I can log in through a secure connection, and it includes a no-cache mode so I don't have to worry about messages I read being in the cache on a public (and possibly infected) machine. You can also make a single-use password for when you have to use a machine that has a good chance of having key logging spyware.

2. On the flip side, there's a "log me in for freaking ever" option for when I'm on my own machine, which not only keeps me logged in, but sets the session to 8 hours so I can just leave it open when needed.

3. Long term file storage - especially when I'm developing something, there's a good chance the same file is going to get attached to a bunch of different messages. Needing to upload it only once (and having it already sitting on their servers for when I'm not on the machine I made said file with) is a huge time saver.

4. Full control of the spam filters, including custom entries. I have the tolerance set high (so I don't ever lose stuff to false positives) but deletion turned on for very high scores (so unquestionable spam is purged without me ever having to touch it.) Google gives you ummm... and "on" and an "off". :P

5. Full filter control, including the ability to autofile stuff into folders (the college I went to sends WAY too much crap, so I put that all in a folder, as I occasionally want to read some of it, but would rather not have it clog up my inbox.) Similarly, the ability to shove stuff you get from a mailing list in its old folder is good for the same reason.

6. File space can be used as webspace. Sometimes I need a temporary, quick, static webpage, and really don't want to be bothered downloading an FTP client (and risk leaving the password to my server sitting on a public machine).

7. Aliases - useful both for cutting spammers off, and for being able to select different sigs, whether to save sent mail, etc.

8. The "bounce" button - deletes a message and sends the sender the standard "this address doesn't exist" autoreply.

9. Real status updates - if something gets screwed up, they tell you exactly what went wrong, what they're doing to fix it, and when it'll be fixed assuming nothing else is borked.

10. Minimal downtime... I think I've seen them die 3 times in ~5 years. I DO have a Gmail account as well, and they're down far more often.

11. I CAN SEND .EXE AND .ZIP FILES. Seriously, as a freelance programmer, Gmail is often useless to me because they don't accept either.

12. Far more customizable, in general. I find Gmail's lack of options annoying.

1. The game minus the educational part should still be a solid game.

Imagine if I took Oregon Trail, but the game was about a colony on another planet running low on a vital resource on the other side of the planet. You choose your profession which determined starting stats, abilities, etc, and packed up a vehicle to drive to the other side... in other words, gameplay exactly the same as OT, but different setting and everything renamed. What's left is a sim with a survival goal, and a strong focus on resource management and random events. It would work just fine as a game on its own.

What if Number Munchers used colored dots on the squares instead of math problems, with each level displaying a list of colors you could or couldn't eat? It'd still be a game about choosing targets carefully and quickly while dodging various monster types.

If the player can't enjoy the game AS A GAME, then no one will stick with it long enough to actually learn anything.

2. Learning should be part of the game, not hastily tacked on.

Sure, you're looking up geography info in Carmen Sandiego, but what you're really doing as a player is following a trail of clues. In time, you'll actually learn stuff about various countries simply because it's part of the game.

There's a flash game called Super Energy Apocalypse. It's an defense RTS with zombies - they attack every night, and you build towers to gun them down. Of course, your base needs power to operate, and like many RTSes, you get this by building power plants. However, instead of just the generic plant, it has various types of actual power plants. For instance, you can build solar panels pretty cheaply, but they don't function at night. This can help you supply research operations during the day and store some energy, but try to rely fully on it and your base runs out of power at night you can get eaten by zombies. Oil plants are extremely reliable, but they pollute heavily, and that makes the zombies stronger. Etc. You have to come up with a power generation scheme that works - and true to life, you can't avoid polluting entirely on many maps, so you have to try to minimize it instead. Result: The player actually walks away with a decent understanding of alternative power sources and their strengths and weaknesses... but he's not taking a class, he's just figuring out how to kill zombies more efficiently. :)

There was a game where you run a lemonade stand and try to make as much money as possible in 30 days. The game is designed to teach you the basics of business - supply and demand, reacting to changing market conditions, long term planning to capitalize on unplanned good conditions and survive unplanned bad ones, etc. You'll never see any of that terminology though - you're just running your stand, making more stuff on hotter days, buying materials when prices are low, being wary of the occasional thunderstorm making you sell nothing, etc. You just try to figure out a strategy to land on a high score list, but ultimately, you're picking up the basics of business in the process.

3. The game needs replay value. Oregon trail has you trying out different professions and starting conditions, Carmen Sandiego has you working up the ranks of a detective agency, etc. This in turn means the player keeps coming back and getting more knowledge (Carmen Sandiego) or further improving a skill (Word/Number Munchers).

4. There needs to be an actual challenge. The crook can get away (Carmen Sandiego), you get eaten (Number Munchers), your base is overrun by zombies (Super Energy Apocalypse). To move on in the game, you have to actually learn something AND actually get better at the game.

5. At ALL times, it plays like a game, not a class. The lesson MUST be part of the game, forcing a player to read stuff that he isn't going to use IN the game results in skipped text or the player simply walking away.

MS released a server product. They recognized that for it to be as profitable as possible, it needed to support Linux, so they produced the drivers to make that happen.

Result: MS makes more money, Linux is usable on more systems. Everyone's happy.

Obviously MS only cares about the money part, but who cares as long as:
1. The code is of sufficient quality. (The reviewers will determine this.)
2. There's valid reason to include it. (There is.)
and 3. They're not trying to exert control or otherwise screw with the Linux model (they GPLed this code, so they pretty much can't.)

There's a LOT of reasons to fear some of MS' moves, especially when it comes to open source, but in this case, we're simply looking at a business decision that happens to be beneficial to all parties involved, so why not just take the code (assuming it doesn't suck) and move on? There are MS decisions that need to be fought, but I really, really, don't think this one of them.

A cookie is acceptable if one of the following is true:
1. The user has directly requested it, such as by clicking a "remember these display settings" button.
2. The user has been warned in advance, and EXPLICITLY OPTED IN to it. Explicit means the warning was in plain, easy to read text, in a single paragraph if possible - not buried on page 7 of a EULA or shoved in a privacy policy that's linked in tiny text and no one ever reads.
3. The cookie is a session cookie, and once the user has closed his browser, it will not be possible to link any data gathered with that cookie to that user. (Aggregate data is of course, fine.)

If you're setting a cookie that doesn't meet one of those 3 conditions, then you're violating your users' privacy. Period.

There's actually 3 uses of "free"

1. 0 cost

2. No control exerted - use the code for whatever you want, just don't claim you own it

3. Open source enforced - you MUST make everything that uses the code open source as well

#2 and #3 are both "free as in freedom" and are both open source, but only #3 is "RMS free."

What RMS hates about the Pirate Party's proposal is that expired GPLed code would become #2 instead of #3.

When your copyright expires, the work enters public domain, but the record that it was previously copyrighted doesn't disappear. This means NO ONE can claim to own the material, and EVERYONE can use it in whatever manner they choose.

There is zero risk of a company trying to take ownership of the code, because a work with an expired copyright, is by definition, owned by all.

This is different from someone releasing a piece of code, never claiming copyright on it, and then some random company stealing it and declaring it proprietary, leaving the actual creator unable to use his own code. THIS is the scenario that the GPL was written to prevent.

The only difference between currently GPLed code and formerly GPLed code with an expired copyright is that once it expires, you now CAN choose to use the code in proprietary software as well. It has zero effect on existing (or new) open source projects already using the code. Yes, it stops the "free" label from being virally attached to the code, and Stallman of course hates that, but that doesn't harm open source, only the Stallman ideology of everything MUST be free, including all variants.

All of the gamers I know play games as much as ever, and while the economy has affected many of us, gaming for the most part isn't a very expensive hobby, so very few of us are spending less for that reason. What we ARE doing is spending it in different places.

The numbers can be explained by:
1. The huge popularity of MMOs. Most people are active in an MMO put around half of their gaming time into it, at ~15 bucks/month. That means for the other half, you're more choosy as to what you're willing to buy - and it does also mean you're spending less over all. Very few $50 games are played for more than 1-2 months, but MMOs are usually good for several... a few years in some cases.
2. Webgames and Flash games becoming popular. These ARE profitable games, but there's no buying involved, as they're usually ad-supported instead. Time spent on these games is time when SALES are down, but PROFITS are not.
3. The fact that "US" is in the title. I've been seeing a lot of innovation from KOREAN MMO developers, but basically none from US ones - everything over here is yet another WoW clone, which means I've spent a grand total of 0 on US online gaming this year, and a good amount on Korean. Regular games are slightly better off, but even there, Japan seems to be making most of the games people are actually playing.
4. The fact that It's no secret that EA destroyed most of the US gaming industry, and it never really fully recovered. People were buying mediocre crap when there wasn't anything else to buy, but as translations get better and better, we're simply taking our money elsewhere. (See also: US car industry)
5. Indie gaming has become a significant part of the market... and likely not a part that's being polled for this article's numbers. Again, when the overwhelming majority of the big gaming companies suck, we don't stop gaming, we just take our business elsewhere.

The industry is doing fine, it's just a few crappy US companies that happen to be 1)Huge and 2)Failing. No one will miss them if they finally collapse, and once they do, new companies will replace them - ones that actually produce games we want to play. In the meantime, the rest of the world is supplying us just fine - as well as the US through indie and other side channels.

Is Stallman also saying Open Office should be discontinued because it can read a Word document? The .doc standard is closed, heavily patented, rigidly controlled, and arbitrarily changed... yet I think we all agree an office suite that wants to be relevant better be able to save files in that format. So sure, use .odf as your default... but if you can't convert to .doc, you pretty much can't use it in the business world.

What about Wine? That implements the entire freaking Win32 API. If Mono, which implements a single language and a single programming technology for using multiple languages (.net) scares him, Wine must have him jumping at shadows.

Hell, even drivers could fall into this category. If you allow an MS mouse to function in Linux, are you afraid of patent suits there too? I certainly hope not, as mice are something you very much expect to work with zero effort.

C# may have been developed by a big bloated corporation that many consider evil (or at least unethical), but so was C! (AT&T - anyone boycotting C/C++ over warrantless wiretapping? Didn't think so.) Does anyone coding in C or C++ (or making a compiler or IDE for it) seriously fear a patent lawsuit from AT&T?

.net was clearly built as a Windows technology, but that's simply because MS made it. MS pretty much CAN'T claim patents on it, because .net itself implements so many languages that MS had nothing to do with developing, that I think it's safe to say any .net-based patent suit would die in seconds.

I'm no fan of MS, but I really don't see a problem with Mono unless you have Stallmanian paranoia.

Only if you're referring to stocks. If you're talking about anything computer-related and say MS, I think everyone knows who you mean.

With ad hoc networks, security generally IS nonexistant, so this is a definite concern in this sort of situation. The problem with a radio feed is that your only method of data transmission is talking, and your only method of recording is having a recording device on the other end - which might very well be a pencil and a pad in some cases!

A combination approach may be better - if you need to send something urgently and anonymously, radio is probably the better answer, but if you need to send a lot of data around and it's not something where getting snooped will significantly harm the effort, the ad hoc network is probably better.

What about NNTP? Wasn't Usenet explicitly designed to run on limited hardware, an ad hoc network, and with any client simply needing to hit a server - ANY server - to have access to the whole network? Furthermore, because of the way articles propagate, you can use as much or as little coordination as necessary.- as long as everyone can hit a server, and that server can in turn hit another, and so on, your message reaches the whole network. For discussion, use normal groups, for files, use binary groups.

The lack of any central server also seems to be a major plus here - this is a situation where a server admin may very well get suddenly arrested, and since all articles will have already propogated, the destruction of one node leaves the overall network completely in tact - often with multiple routing paths, so nothing short of a door to door scouring of the network can destroy it... and even then, someone likely has everything saved to a USB stick and can smuggle it out and rebuild the network.

This also eliminates any need to constantly pass files and posts around - your server software will handle this automatically.

The main downsides to NNTP are:
1. It's not as user friendly as say... a modern forum system. While it's not all that difficult to use, some people ARE going to need a quick lesson, and that involves a bit of coordination. (It sounds like you're going to be going door to door to build your physical network anyway though, so this shouldn't be a huge issue. It IS going to increase the time involved though.)
2. You're probably going to need a dedicated client - web-based ones generally don't let you access groups that aren't on the main Usenet hierarchies of groups (and your groups won't be.) This means getting software distributed to basically everyone. If most people still have 'net access, and its just restricted, this is trivial. Just point everyone to a Gravity or XNews (or whatever) download, with a few mirror servers in case they filter out the official download. If that fails though, you may literally be down to running door to door with a USB stick to install the software. Again though, as you're probably going building to building to set up hardware anyway, this shouldn't add TOO much of an issue - but again, it's more time.
3. Propogation lag - simply put, messages have to be copied from server to server to server... to client, and when there isn't a good feed, that can take a while - hours sometimes. While that's fine for long term resistance planning, coordination, and generally just staying in touch, you can't count on it in a more urgent situation - you may very well be sending a message off that no one will read until you're already arrested!

It may not be the best or most elegant solution, but given the circumstances I think it's one of the better options.