I'll see your Rackspace and raise an Accenture.
All the competence of Rackspace for only 10x the cost!

I am a frequent International Business (Class) traveler. I am also a Cancer survivor, so after a year of radiation therapy, I figure my body scoffs at whatever the TSA can throw at me. I just take whatever line is shortest – which usually turns out to be the one with the icky scanner.
I like to fly in painter/cargo pants, as that gives me places to keep my devices/wallet without having to get into my back pockets or sit on my stuff. I started to notice that when I wore cargo pants and went through the full body scanner, I got a patdown – every time. Regular pants were easy (except one time I forgot some paper money in a pocket – again with the full patdown).
The BusClass/Express security lines tend to have nicer agents than the usual cattle calls (suppose it helps when you deal with 5% of the people, most who know the drill inside and out). So, one day while getting my 5am patdown, I asked the agent what was up with cargo pants. He looked around shiftily to make sure no other agents were close by, then whispered “They can’t see through more than one thick or two thin layers of clothing, or a few pieces of paper. If we can’t see through all your clothes, we have to pat you down.”

Nifty, well thought out colorscheme (in both "dark" and "light" versions). Even has a VS theme (as well as Putty, Vim, etc.). Anything not directly supported that can have custom themes/color settings can be set to mimic it fairly closely. And it really is easy on the eyes. I personally prefer Solarized-Dark when staring at code.
http://ethanschoonover.com/solarized

AutoCAD still uses AutoLISP as the main scripting engine, and I believe parts of the core.
Since AutoCAD is used to design ~90% of the buildings of the world (and many of the things within) it could be said that chances are high the house/apartment/mansion you live in, the building you work in, and the ergonomic chair you're sitting on were built with Lisp.

There's actually a nice way to make your own menu in Win7 (which MS 'borrowed' from OSX - see my reply below). I haven't been using the Start menu for much besides Thunderbird (which is pinned to the Start menu and can be started by hitting [WinKey],[downarrow])
Make a folder, fill it with shortcuts to your programs. Right-click on the taskbar and select Toolbars >> New Toolbar...
Select your folder and blam, custom "start-ish" menu. I have three on my system: CS5 (with shortcuts to all the Adobe CS5 apps), Apps (Office, Blender, etc), and Tools (putty, winscp, notepad++, etc). Way nicer & faster than the start menu.

Correct, messing with the Applications folder is bad news. Here's how to arrange things how you want (this works up to 10.6, and assume Lion)
1. Create a folder somewhere in your user directory, call it something like "Apps".
2. Drag shortcuts of your apps (not the apps!) into that folder (you can also make subfolders and put the shortcuts in those)
3. Drag that folder to the Dock. Once you turn off the lame default "fan" display, you will have a nice menu of apps. Apps in folders will have cascading menus.

Only downside is it is strictly alphebetical sorting. That can be fixed by renaming the shortcuts/folders

Haven't posted in years, but wanted to sign in to say "what (s)he said"
The version numbering is silly, and the release notes even seem harder to find since ~4.0
There are standards for what constitues a major number upgrade vs minor update. 7 should have been 6.1, and 8 should be 6.2, at best.

IIRC XP Mode is only available in Enterprise and Ultimate versions.
Also, it is merely a license to download and run VirtualPC within Windows 7, which requires you to provide your own (licensed) copy of XP - for which support runs out in 2014.
No gain over running XP naitively (and VirtualPC is a pig to run)