I really want to know who started that stupid idea. You always want multiple off-site backups of anything important, cloud resources such as gmail and google docs count as one of those sources, you still want others. You also want local copies of any data that you absolutely have to have, what if your local ISP is having troubles and you need to access important documents?

There are a hundred things that could go wrong with using any off-site service as your one and only solution from simple outages and lost passwords to having all your eggs in one basket if someone hacks in or uses elevated privileges to do malicious deeds. The idea that any cloud based resource or offsite backup solution is the be-all, end-all solution for secure data storage is stupid and extremely lazy.

I keep books around because sometimes you don't have access to an internet connection and you want to keep working without worrying about being able to look stuff up when you want.

Suse has something called the build service that provides daily updates to programs you want. I get wine updates nearly every day. even though what you say can be true with other solutions, you can still update without rebooting; you don't have to reinstall everything.

But by looking at students you are biasing yourself. By their very nature students will be less experienced. I could go to any high-school or college and most Tech students wouldn't have heard of Linux, but if you look at those same students 10 years or so later you'll find they probably currently or used to run a Linux computer either at work or as a hobby. I would also be willing to bet that MS includes the servers in their charts and many IT departments use Linux for at least some of their servers.

This isn't exactly true. In some countries, like Japan, the school personnel are not allowed to do any form of punishment that keeps a student from going to class, it is a right that they are expected to have. They also can't be held back a year or otherwise kicked out. This allows many students to goof off and do practically whatever they want. Yet there are many who still strive to learn as much as possible and excel in those classrooms. In reality if a student isn't paying attention if means the teacher is boring for one reason or another, the teach should be trying to engage the students and if there are a scant few who still refuse to pay attention then just let them fail, part of the problems with our educational system is that instead of trying to get everyone to excel and show us their potential we cater to the lowest common denominator who may or may not want to be there in the first place.

better yet, I had a cat that would not only find an escaped hamster but gently carry it to the nearest person so the hamster would get safely back in the cage. The hamsters got really scared but they never were harmed by the cat. after enough escapes they just got used to it.

Not all Siamese cats are like that.

In general cats only make noise because most humans can't (or don't bother trying to) pick up their body language and notice that humans communicate with noise. I've had 7 cats (one of which was full Siamese) and none of them cry out unless you ignore them for a long time (and even then, most of ours would come up to you and paw, nip, nudge, or otherwise get your attention physically before they start to make noise.).

As to whether they inherit the cry, in my experience they do, all of my Siamese mixes inherited the annoying cry of the Siamese but as I said, none of my cats cry unless you give them a good reason to.

Otherwise, I agree with Chabo, though I'll add that you also need to worry about companionship for your cat, some do fine, but most need one other feline in the area to keep them company. Gender doesn't matter, they just need someone to play with when the humans aren't interested and that they can understand easily. Imagine if you lived by yourself and only saw your pets for most of your life, most people couldn't handle that and the same is true about most domesticated animals.

I suggest A Mathematician's Lament also known as "Lockhart's Lament", it was written by Paul Lockhart in 2002. It is a relatively short read and I consider it absolutely essential for anyone in mathematics, but especially the ones who dream of being teachers.

Windows is not ready for the desktop.

just to make a clarification: putting something under the GPL is not the same thing as releasing it as public domain. the GPL and other licenses like it (such as Creative Commons) still protect the works under copyright and allow the owner of the copyright to pursue people who violate the restrictions placed on the use of it. releasing something under the public domain relinquishes all control of the IP and lets people start selling, modifying, and doing whatever they want willy-nilly without any stipulation that they need to release the work as open source or keep it free (whether as in beer or freedom) or anything else.