If only there was a place where I could borrow copies of book for free, even recent ones. With out advertisements. Possibly people would contribute money and books to it to further the knowledge contained in it. I am not sure such a place exists.

And in another first, customers dump these ISPs(ATT et al) for those that don't tattle on customers. Oh wait, In the US, this is the wrong generation. The don't help rabble-rousers. They take video of security tackling the offender and post it on You Tube.

A good starting point would be what companies and universities are doing with them. Internet filtering is the norm(assume they are going to get around it, have a policy for this). While most companies have a list of allowable programs and then do not place a restriction on install; this may not be right for you. This part would depend on what kind of stuff the help desk will be doing. Monitoring software is up to you(generally not on corporate); personally, I hate it. For me this would severely restrict how i use the laptop(notes transfered to a flash drive to my real computer). it would never see any real use until i bought the thing and reinstalled the OS(even if you already did).

This is what my university is doing now with it's laptop program(I am not a part of it). Personally the monitoring is the crippling part of it. Most profs that i talk to don't use the monitoring part. This may be different with high school, considering most profs don't care what you do with class time as long as you aren't interfering with anybody else. There is one loop hole, and that is that someone can use their own laptop with the monitoring software installed(can someone say vm) (of course i know the prof and will be taking notes in dead tree form).

The main point with a laptop program are basically filtering, software install and monitoring. You find something for those and the rest should be a cake walk. That should give you a starting point, or at least some of what people are doing with laptop programs and my personal opinions on the policies as a student.

I code in C/C++, Java, Perl. Does this make me a voodoo-Islamic-judeo-Christian fundamentalist?

I have seen good and bad looking code from good coding standards. The best idea that I can come up with is: as you are writing the code realize that you are writing it for 2 things, 1. the computer and 2. the next guy that has to look at your code. if you do this then your code will be efficient and easy to understand; this is after all the goal of a coding standard