DrHogie asks: "This is an interesting Op/Ed piece on student loans -- and how they bury the graduate in a load of insurmountable debt. As someone who is considering going back to college to finish his degree, are student loans (and the degree they get you) worth the debt load?" Update: 05/09 5:45 GMT by C :I apologize. The link in this story is bad, and I can't locate the original story on Yahoo. In the meantime, here's a replacement story in the same vein, and an article about student debt and how most college kids are having to work more to offset rising tuition costs. The original question is still valid, however. Is college getting to be too expensive for the average high school graduate?

Snafoo asks: "Ximian Evolution allows users to set up LDAP-based shared contact lists, to which multiple users can read and write. However, my company uses MS Outlook 2002, which doesn't support writing to LDAP directories. Currently, we use a kludgy PHP front-end to the LDAP directory for entering new addresses. Short of buying Exchange, is there anything we can do to share write-enabled contact lists with LDAP and Outlook?"

Roadmaster asks: "Usually, the most effective spam filtering techniques are somewhat resource intensive. Heuristic checkers like Spamassassin, or bayesian filters like spamprobe are processor and storage hungry. This is fine for small setups; I've been using spamprobe to filter spam for 3 users with great results. I'm now however faced with a big challenge: a mail server that will eventually be handling mail for over 50,000 users and needs to have some sort of anti-spam measures. What are some good and computationally cheap spam prevention measures?"

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm scanning in user manuals for older lab equipment. I've never used OCR before today, so I installed the Caere Omnipage 9.0 that came with the scanner. I was pretty happy except for a few things. It doesn't seem to want to recognize engineering symbols like the one char +/-,square root, omega, simple equations, it has trouble with super- and subscripts, and it outputs funky Word files. For example, from an 8.5 x 11 original page scanned in at 1 bit at 300 dpi, the output Word file was 10 inches wide, used tons of Omnipage text styles and didn't match the original text's flow. It did do a good job of italicizing headers and recognizing the various sections in a two column page. Googling the news and net just backs up my claims but provides no real solution. A Google search that provides nothing useful looking for best OCR for engineering."

book_reader asks: "I recently came across a set of (the alas) out of print The Phoenix Legacy by M. K. Wren. This is/was an amazingly good classic space opera trilogy. So it got me thinking...what other great sci-fi books have vanished into the ether that I don't know about?"

newkid asks: "Our company needs to upgrade its standard browser, a difficult decision when we factor security, compatibility and the logistics of actually doing it. For compatibility, Internet Explorer is required by internal applications like IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, so we have to keep it. On the security front, expert bulletins keep ranting every week about the latest gaping holes in IE but nobody really seems concerned: for example, many on-line banking services only work in IE, and they don't check for patches. Meanwhile, users do not care, as a large portion of the traffic still comes from IE 5.5, a version discontinued by Microsoft. As for logistics,the software distribution technology and the cost of patching both make the project much larger than we can undertake this year. Our two options are: roll-out IE without patching, or roll-out IE and Netscape, but lock IE so it can only surf on intranet sites, and update NS with rsync or Ant. What is your company doing? What is your strategy? How serious are the security threats? What are the documented security breach caused by IE? We need a reality check."

snow70 asks: "It seems that it is getting harder and harder to justify the decision to re-write rather than hack/patch away on a flawed code base, given the economic situation and the drive to squeeze every last drop out of an existing code base. Are the readers aware of any research articles or reports that extoll the benefits of re-writing in terms of the cost savings in maintenance and support ?" This topic was discussed two years ago, but I think many people who'll find themselves in this situation would also benefit from any research articles or publications as snow70 requests.

erfmuffin asks: "I work for a medium-sized regional ISP. Recently we configured our email gateway to refuse connections to IP addresses that do not resolve (ie no reverse DNS). I am amazed at how many legitimate domains use mail servers with no PTR record! At the same time, we have avoided a great deal of junk mail in one swoop. Wouldn't it be better for mankind if all mail servers refused mail from non-resolvable IPs? Should all legitimate mail servers have valid PTR records or has the world become too lazy to make email delivery, easier?"

mr. mulder asks: "I just attached my TiVo to my home network, giving me the ability to change my recording settings from any browser on my internal network. I would like to take this a step further and enable TiVo config changes from work, but I'm worried about security. SSL would encrypt my traffic, but wouldn't prohibit access. Ideally, I would like an easy, client-less, two-factor authentication solution. Has anyone tried this? Moreover, are there any inexpensive, secure or two-factor authentication products to protect personal/home web URLs? I've considered publishing the page on the web without security, but that leaves me wide-open. I've also considered a VPN solution with my LinkSys Firewall/Router, but it involves a client installation. As an alternative, I've turned to two-factor authentication schemes, including products such as Rainbow's iKey, Authenex's A-Key and RSA's SecureID, but they are too expensive."

Philljd asks: "Computers 4 Kids is an organization run by the IT &amp ;CS department of Wollongong University in Australia that picks up computers from the local area, installs Linux on them and gives them to needy kids. We want to know what Slashdot readers think would be the best choice of distribution and window manager for an average system spec of a Pentium 100, given that the kids are around 10-13."

Deagol asks: "After reading about it several times on Slashdot, I decided to start the Hacker's Diet this month. I've even lost 3lbs so far. I'm looking for software tools to make this thing easier. So far, I've been using Nut to track my calories and see what nutrients I need to balance. Though Nut has been invaluable, it lacks a clean recipe and menu interface (it has them, but it's light on features). I did the usual google/freshmeat/sourceforge search, but turned up very little. gnutrition looks promising, but it's 2 years unmaintained and uses an old version of the USDA database. My requirements are: that it use the current USDA database; have a flexible recipe and menu functions which tracks calories and nutrients; and finally that it runs under Linux (prefer OSS). Multiple-user support and easy of use would be nice, but not required."

gerddie asks: "Lately, we have seen a lot of companies starting to move their graphics stuff from high end to low end linux workstations (e.g. Dreamworks). Of course one reason to do such thing is cut costs, and therefore, at our institute we are going to replace or aging SGI O2s with Linux workstations. I wonder if you have experience with such a transition - especially regarding the usability of such machines for (scientific) visualization? What is working well, and where did you encounter pitfalls?"