I use to keep better track of the moon rocks, but then I took an arrow to the knee.

After trying many options over the years I still find the tried and true paper version works the best. I recommend a small netbook + real notepad. There is just no real substitute for paper yet. I love das blinkinlights as much as anyone but when it comes to a classroom environment, a paper and pencil just works. Especially for math formulas. The only college classes where I used a computer to take notes were programming ones. A laptop or netbook works better because you can use VI or other editor of your choice to copy code examples much more quickly. Also doesn't hurt to be able to actually compile and test something right then and there.

Web hosting is one thing. What we're doing is clustering, virtualization, NAS, databases, almost everything. We're going to run the entire company backbone off of this system. If it goes down, we go down. Out of my depth? Not really. I've been doing the GNU/Linux sysadm gig for a while now and I'm RH certified, but I am the only one. Having a support contract means that not only do I have backup if I do get in over my head, the support techs could probably walk one of the junior admins through fixing a problem if I'm unreachable. You'd think that statement alone would be enough to convince someone to purchase support, but no. If I where to be hit by a truck and they had to fix a problem they would spend whatever it took to hire a consultant and get it fixed. If that meant spending more than the cost of years of a support contract then so be it. They would be fine with that because they have no choice. My issue is that, according to what my superiors tell me, if CentOS didn't exist they would gladly purchase Red Hat. The rational is that we could instead invest the software budget in more hardware, except my hardware budget didn't go up, the money just vanished.

From TFA:

Why stop at June 2010?
I’m not going to. I do think that having 15 months or so of history gives a good perspective on how a phone has been treated, but it’s also just a labor issue - it takes a while to dredge through the various sites to determine the history of each device. I plan to continue on and might also try to publish the underlying table with references. I also acknowledge that it’s possible I’ve missed something along the way.

You never know the full effect of legislation until it hits the courts. We'll see if this has any improvement. Personally I feel that new copyright law for software is needed and then limit patents to only physically producible items. No software patents, no business practice patents. If it can't be manufactured, you can't patent it. Patent infringement should be handled first by submitting documentation of a product that is actually being sold and your patent number to the patent office. If an examiner finds that the product matches your patent you may file with the court system. If not, you're out of luck.

Now that freeze dried food is more readily available (http://www.mountainhouse.com/) it isn't as much of a novelty anymore. I am surprised we don't see the heat shield tile technology more. Lining an oven with these might improve efficiency. They just need to work on manufacturing costs.