You may be right. On the other hand, a system that works on modest hardware, that has a solid interface (I have always thought WebOS was the best of the phone user interfaces, conceptually) and that is, like Android, open source, has the potential to fill a very useful niche.

Sort of true, but not really.

If I recall correctly, in addition to commercial support, MoodleRooms also contributed back to the code base. I don't know the percentage of improvements that came from them, or from NetSpot, but I'd bet they were solid components if someone was willing to pay to have them written. And there's all the improvements related to running Moodle as an enterprise app, as opposed to on an old 486 in the back closet, which is often how many installations start out.

If Blackboard's plan is to harm Moodle, they could do worse than taking out some of the key development partners - over time, simply stop contributing. It's slow, but they can't kill the product all at once anyway. So they could collect revenue for a while, and at the same time take development resources away from the community. Eventually the customers decide to move, because the product no longer supports (shiny new thing), and look! they already have a relationship with Blackboard!

If you're lucky, you might be able to donate both globally and locally - the above post references Heifer Int'l, which is HQ'd 30 miles from my house. So I can simultaneously fight poverty far away, and ensure a local employer keeps being a local employer. YMMV, but it's worth thinking about.

Now talking like a pirate will involve phrases like 'tax relief'...

Though in some ways I suppose it always has....

I would point out that much of the recent craziness around mortgages has revolved around the fact that the banks misplaced, misaligned, or outright faked documents. Keeping a copy of the big stuff is important, because more than likely, if it's big, then someone has incentive to pretend it doesn't exist. If the only copy is the one being provided by folks who will lose money depending on what that document says, you may be in trouble.

Marriage and insurance docs fall in this same arena. Things get lost or destroyed sometimes. For example, my original marriage records exist on a small island nation. One solid tsunami, and they're gone. When I turn up 20 years later, noone's going to know or care who I am.

I always buy the lowest level refurb mac mini I can find (paying $300 for an extra 100GB of disk strikes me as insane), and they do a great job. Lower power use, remote control, etc. etc.

Gavron makes an excellent point - I recently got a Nexus One with T-Mobile, and on the map I had solid service at home and at work. When the phone arrived I found a very different reality - roaming everywhere. Don't trust the maps - ask users - when I mentioned T-Mobile to my colleagues at work (too late!) they all knew it didn't work in our area. I could have saved myself a lot of time just by asking a local.

>I'd wager that Blu-Ray is the last physical format for home video that we ever see.

Agreed - as people become more comfortable with the idea of having their 'library' as a digital object, the physical media will, I expect, go away.

> However, there will always be a small minority of people who want a physical copy and that's probably always going to be Blu-Ray.

This, on the other hand, I seriously doubt. Even if all the holographic storage doesn't pan out, something will be the next big thing. Unless 'always' is defined as 'for the next ten years or so'.