I've lived in Blacksburg since 2002, and I was just talking about BEV to a friend (VT alum) who moved away a year ago and saw this Google blog post today. In my current house, which is close enough to walk downtown, I still can't get DSL. Fortunately Comcast 8Mb is just barely good enough for my purposes, but I don't make heavy use of torrents or anything like that.
At least I only pay $30/mo, and I still get to stream my favorite shows to my TV, although the quality isn't close to digital cable. I doubt this will improve in the foreseeable future though. We aren't getting FIOS and I'll be surprised when I can get better service for less than double the cost.
3.5mm headphone adapter (first HTC android phone to move away from mini-usb only design)
My HTC Eris has a normal headphone jack
You are absolutely right that the fine is some life-ruining bullshit. If I was hit with a fine like that for an act that impacted society less than something that's actually dangerous, like reckless driving, then I think I'd be inclined to do everything in my power to deliver an equal amount of disruption to those who imposed the fine on me.
I have no doubts that individuals have chosen to disappear for far less than $2 million. Once someone is out of sight, there's a lot of nasty things they could attempt to do with little risk of being caught. That means that this decision not only damages the guilty individual, but could also potentially create a whole new set of problems for the RIAA, the government, and the general public.
I recently moved to Spiceworks too. For the past year I've used OCS-ng, but it didn't run well on 64-bit machines. The documentation also seemed to be lacking. While I'd definitely prefer an open source solution, Spiceworks has been extremely easy so far. There is a good plugin for tracking Microsoft licenses, although I do wish they'd add the ability to track other vendors as well. If I stick with it then I might consider moving the ticketing system to Spiceworks too.
After seeing this post, I think I'll investigate OpenNMS. The main worry I have with Spiceworks is that it's not open source and may eventually become a subscription-based service.
The use of money is all the advantage there is to having money. -- B. Franklin