I am fairly confident that the NSA has been keeping a copy for them.

In terms on on hand survival gear, I could make it for a week or so if I was careful with the water I had (water heater has 50 gallons I could use), but I know how to make my own clean water and can scavenge/hunt/gather pretty much indefinitely.

That is not always the case. I worked for a university and we only used MAK licenses for production, KMS was too much of a PITA to deal with.

I can already tell when people are lying 75% of the time, and I work in an office where we do x-rays, and I dont want to know how much extra radiation I am soaking in...

I have to agree here. In the last 5 years I have managed over 1500 Dell desktops, laptops and workstations, and it is not very common to have to chat with someone in Laos or wherever the Dell support team is these days.

To be fair, this is only for their business grade products (Optiplex, Latitude, Precision). I worked at a college helpdesk for several years and the Dell home products (see: Inspiron) are garbage. I have done a bit of side-by-side price comparison of Dell home and business machines, and for a similar spec machine you might pay 50 bucks more and get the 3 year NBD on site warranty, as opposed to the mail in 1 year warranty for home grade stuff.

While in college, I worked doing tier 2 support for the campus IT department, and every semester we would have professors come in trying to get some (usually archaic) material out to students electronically, only to find out that it wouldn't work on a Mac, or that students couldn't open a .docx file because they had a torrent copy of Office 2003. This was a great source of frustration for a lot of professors. Then you had the ones that told you on the first day of class that you were not to bring your computer in to class, even though the institution required that all students purchase a laptop (on their own, not from a few defined models to make support easier).

Does anyone know if prisons use RFID technology to track prisoners? I feel like that might be a better use than tracking students. How about parolees? High tech house arrest, could force checking in at home/PO office/rehab electronically... Of course, some kind of implanted or second layer of verification would be needed for this, but maybe its the way of the future.

Maybe it was totally random- à la Steve Jobs?

This was a few years back, we had a few applications that could give us some insight on our PCs, but there were a lot of APs (about 60 IIRC) in a relatively small building. It was hard to get a good handle on which one was where, as the applications we had were not designed to analyze the amount of spectrum we had in the building.

The controller was supposed to "optimize" the channels automatically... By that it meant "default to 6" and we had to manually assign a channel to each AP.

I couldn't agree more on this. In the past I worked for a small college, and we were having terrible performance issues with a brand new Colubris (now HP) setup. After turning the broadcast power down on each of the APs, we still had clients jumping from AP to AP. After a lot of head scratching and bringing in a professional WLAN analysis contractor, we found that all of the APs were on channel 6. Adjusting them to a pattern to break this up cleaned up all of the issues for us.

I can't wait for the day when my house is raided because of all of my unregistered, unlicensed hammers. Will there be a Brady Bill for hammers? I can have a sledge hammer, not more than 10 pounds, but there is a 3 day wait to buy a (concealed carry) 6 oz. tack hammer?

I have to agree, I generally like to buy my own new tech as I find things that peak my interest. I have gotten a lot of nice non-tech gifts that I use on a daily basis- wallets, (analog) watch, and my favorite are benchmade knives. They even have a custom shop to make your own Griptilian series with different steel, colors and blade styles: http://www.benchmade.com/customize/default.aspx [benchmade.com]. Maybe add engraving of a special occasion, service or milestone in life.

I DVR virtually everything I want to watch, or at least pause the show for 5 minutes at the beginning and fast forward through live shows. I don't know the last time I actually watched a commercial.

I wish I had mod points. This made my afternoon.