I live in a dense residential neighborhood in a metro-suburb right next to Boston and have an active gas leak outside my house. You can smell it two houses in both directions.

The gas company has been here twice. The fire department once. The town fire chief actually called an emergency number at the gas company to ask them to fix it.

Guess what? No fix... 4 months and counting.

The party line the gas company has been giving me is (paraphrased)... "There are too many leaks in the area, so we are triaging. Unless the gas is actively leaking INTO the house (as opposed to outside of the house), we won't fix it for now. Given the Hurricane Sandy response in the mid-atlantic region, things are pushed back even further. We'll keep monitoring the leak. Trust us."

Uh, huh... yeah, my house is going to blow up. Or at the least, one of my trash cans on the curb is turning into a bottle rocket.

A true visionary.

The missus once gave two guys a geek-gasm by dropping a reference to CmdrTaco in a sentence. As she related the story, the guys were dumbfounded that a non-geek (and a woman no less) knew of the great and powerful CmdrTaco.

I don't know what surprised me more-- irrefutable evidence that she actually listens to the geeky things I say or that N=2 nerds congregated in public during the daylight hours.

The parent is spot on... work and home machines are different beasts entirely. What it means to boot in the home setting is a fractional subset of what needs to be accomplished on boot for a work machine.

If I may add to the list of work place boot killers...
(1) Drive decryption. In my industry, this is a government requirement and a common sense moral necessity, but dear Lord does it kill my boot time. Just getting through the login process (which precedes the boot loader) takes a minute.

(2) Drive mounts. These shouldn't stall boot, but they do. Someone with more IT-fu than I want to comment on why my Win7 computer stalls while trying to map NFS shares?

We've never had a problem with someone using our software without citing us appropriately. Most cases people *want* to cite us because it justifies how they used it in their own work and helps them get the paper accepted by the reviewers. If your boss is worried about people not citing your software, then your software is completely derivative anyways (your software does more than just compute the mean, right?).

We were worried about big-pharma companies using our software for drug discovery, so we had UC give us license text that does the following...
- Gives full rights for non-commercial entities to use and modify the software as long as the notice is retained.
- Absolves UC of any damages that might result from using the software
- If you are a commercial entity, you cannot use the software until you contact the University and setup a licensing agreement.

Here is that license text....

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Citation: First Author, et al. Journal of Whatever (2008)
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Copyright 2008 The Regents of the University of California
All Rights Reserved

Permission to use, copy, modify and distribute any part of this software for educational, research and non-profit purposes, without fee, and without a written agreement is hereby granted, provided that the above citation and copyright notice, this paragraph and the following three paragraphs appear in all copies.

Those desiring to incorporate this software into commercial products or use for commercial purposes should contact the Technology Transfer & Intellectual Property Services, University of California,

IN NO EVENT SHALL THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BE LIABLE TO ANY PARTY FOR DIRECT, INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS, ARISING OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

THE SOFTWARE PROVIDED HEREIN IS ON AN "AS IS" BASIS, AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA HAS NO OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE MAINTENANCE, SUPPORT, UPDATES, ENHANCEMENTS, OR MODIFICATIONS. THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS AND EXTENDS NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EITHER IMPLIED OR EXPRESS, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR THAT THE USE OF THE SOFTWARE WILL NOT INFRINGE ANY PATENT, TRADEMARK OR OTHER RIGHTS.