Definitely saw this when I was in business school. A handful of students attempted to use their laptops to take notes, and the problem was trying to fit the lectures into the framework of Word, or Powerpoint. Very hard to insert diagrams (which would be a piece of cake to sketch with a pen and paper.) Also they spent probably half of their time playing with formatting, etc.

In all, it seemed that they spent so much time trying to input the information into their computer that they had no time left to actually pay attention to the lecture. They had even less time (effectively zero) to actually participate in any discussions.

Witless Stenographer is a perfect label for this.

Like others have posted, an MP3 at bitrates comparable to what the digital cellular systems use would probably not work. For CDMA (Verizon and Sprint, plus others) you are talking about a variable rate vocoder with a top bitrate of 8 kbps. The average bitrate would then be much much lower. There is a newer vocoder that can handle voice in less than 4 kbps.

The fewer bits you use per conversation frees up more bits for other conversations, increasing the overall capacity and lowering the cost per conversation to the operator.
Conversely you could dedicate more bits for better quality, and get less capacity, but I would doubt if that will happen.

The companies would probably allow the first few electric cars to recharge, as it would let their green people claim "hey, we're a hip company and we support electric cars." Cheap marketing.

Then, once more people start showing up with their electric cars, and the electric bill grows (at which point to the company it feels more like freeloading), watch them change their mind.

I would be willing to bet that your dad's machine has a bad CD drive. That is the one thing that seems to be in common to all of your tests - dad's machine won't read CD's.
Although I'm confused about which machine you ran a virtual machine but I would also be willing to be that it was yours and not your dad's.

When you need to recharge your phone, just put it in the microwave oven for 30 seconds and whammo you have 4 bars of battery!
Saves you from having to carry your charger with you.

I guess this means that other crap idea of the space elevator is dead? (Maybe if we built a huge wooden badger.)

to get around the taxes maybe they'll go to "ebay-style" pricing: Good in question costs $1 and you can pay tax on that. "Shipping and handling" will cost $199 or whatever it takes to make up the balance.

Then it will take a few years for the govt to close that loophole.

I'm not sure you will be able to take advantage of the best of the speeds for an external drive. Won't your interface be the limiting factor?

Probably better to buy more RAM.

Good luck with that though.

Great answer. Why not convert them into cold hard cash. And once you get the cash then you may be able to put that to better use than taking up space.

Or you could send it to me if you have too much {computers|cash} laying around.

You are so right with this one.

A buddy of mine patented an idea that saved his company $150 million in the first year. He may have gotten a steak dinner out of it.

When his management asked him what he would recommend to his peers to get patents his answer was "don't do it, there is almost no personal benefit in doing it."