The Bus Pirate, Logic Sniffer, IR Toy, and Webplatform, I've found more useful than the Flash Destroyer. I use 1 BP to burn replace my huge, old, and partially burned out AVR development board, which cost tens time as much. The Webplatform is really nice as well, I've got a couple of those.

Basic business is to identify your competitors and then look at what they are selling, apparently the Shack can't even figure that out for themselves.

CASE tools could untangle graphs in 1999.

I nearly cried the day I heard Ward Cunningham (creator of the wiki) went to work for MS. I cheered when he left.

Some confs allow student volunteers to attend "non-full" session when not working. Be prepared to talk to people, make contacts, and do all that networking stuff. If your not going to do that, I think your money would be better spent elsewhere.

Call me call me
Let me know you are there
Call me call me
I wanna know you still care

From a business perspective of total cost of ownership, those bugs aren't the expensive ones. It's the ones in critical paths. Where entire projects or systems are at the mercy of a third party vendor. I've seen it happen a few times. In all cases the corporations survived, but spent $M of dollars rewriting/reporting existing production systems.

Same story here. Didn't hesitate to buy a replacement when the first failed after 3 months. The speed difference is just incredible. Bit early to call spinning drives dead for me yet, DVRs for example.

Sounds more like when you're trying to bust someone busting you.