From the article, a quote from the boy's father (an engineer who personally taught his son calculus):
"He never discussed his project with me before it was finished and the mathematics he used are far beyond my reach,"

Far beyond his reach? Anyone who has taken a basic calculus course should have the background to follow the nicely reverse-engineered proof featured here on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/u7551/teen_solves_newtons_300yearold_riddle_an/c4t03fl

Seriously, go ahead and try it. Use an integral table for the last step if you have to. The math background of an engineer (multiple courses in calculus and differential equations) should be adequate. I know we don't have the original proof yet, but, given the simple elegance of the above solution, I'll bet it's very similar. Just saying.

When I didn't have a job and couldn't easily afford to make my loan payments, I requested a six-month deferment online. It was approved within a few days. No sweat. My universities still provided transcripts too as I was applying for professional programs at the time. This was 2007-2008, and I see that the possibility of deferment is still available to me today every time I check my balance online.

My understanding, and I hope this is still true, is that as long as you communicate with your lender (in my case the federal government) BEFORE you start missing payments, you'll be okay. However, any hint that you plan on blowing off your obligation, even as little as missing one payment for no apparent reason, will get you into trouble. I don't know where my fellow debtor went wrong here, but I'm wondering if he just missed payments without contacting the lender.

Also, it's a music program he's applying for. Can't they just have him play an instrument or see a portfolio or something? We don't need an official piece of paper to prove everything.

The same basic functions of Google Health can be achieved with a spreadsheet and some organization (except the perhaps convenient share feature). There's nothing groundbreaking here it seems. If you're really hurting for the same interface, I can't imagine it would take very long to write one. And Google provides a raw data file for download, so no need to start over with your records. Software like GNUmed will be major overkill compared to GH, but there might be other simpler alternatives that exist for maintaining a personal health record.

The point about dependence on the cloud is a valid and obvious one. Whether or not a service is free will determine your right to lament its passing on /. apparently (I don't think there is any "whining" here), but the service can be discontinued just the same. If you had been paying for it, you'd receive a refund and an apology, but you'd still lose a service which could have otherwise been sustained with local software.

GH is likely the veritable drop in a big financial bucket, but there's probably more to it than cost. Maintaining secure health records and complying with stuff like HIPAA rules can be treacherous, and I suspect that liability played some role in the decision. Maybe not...