They are/were a member as well, but the DOE under the Bush administration wanted a single university or company as the prime contractor.

http://www.fra-hq.org/

U of I is not home to the Tevatron. That's a page for people who are at U of I and work on the Tevatron. Illinois (the state) is the home of the Tevatron.

Fermilab was built by the DOE and managed by a consortium of universities. It's now run as a partnership between that consortium and the U of Chicago.

Similarly, I have a Slingshot 300 that I love. I can stick a DSLR with either 24-105 or 70-200 lens in the "holster" part, put a few more lenses and flash in if I want. They make a 350 which is about the same size but with a laptop pocket as well. Should be good for traveling and then when you are out shooting, leave the laptop behind to save on weight.

These bags are really nice because they sit well and keep the camera in the bag, but you can have the camera out of the bag and ready to shoot in just a few seconds.

I'm not at all sure of this. A TV has a lifespan of many years and is quite expensive. These boxes are cheap. I picked up a WD box for $100. Sure, my next TV will probably do everything this box does. But where will I be 2-3 years after my next TV. Will the TV have the processing power to keep up? Will the manufacturer keep putting out new versions of the software for 10 years after I bought the TV? Doubtful.

So a few years down the road I will be buying a new external box to keep up with the latest formats, online services, etc. And I won't care, because the box will cost me $100 instead of $1000+ for a TV.

I don't really "misappropriate" anything except a few watts of power as it is my drive in an eSATA enclosure.

My workflow with unison takes care of most of the concerns you have as it has inode based detection of changes and does do hashes of files and lets me choose which change is correct if there is a question. In my time of doing this, I once had a drive start to go bad and it was easy to recognize and correct.

Both machines are linux, so I don't worry much about viruses.

And we know the poster is American, right? Actually, given that he was gone four weeks, he probably isn't American.

What I do. First, I use Lightroom to manage everything which lets me categorize and rate.

I keep one hard drive at home on my desktop. I keep another at my office attached to that desktop. I use unison to keep the two in sync. So I have offsite backup.

On my laptop, I keep two sets of photos. First is the recent stuff I've taken that I'm "working" on. The second set is only stuff I rank above a certain level and processed by lightroom into JPGs of reduced size (still bigger than the laptop screen). So I've got my whole collection that I can show to people at any time, but not the original full resolution RAW files. The laptop is kept up to date with the originals also with unison.

I upgrade the size of the offsite and onsite hard drives as needed. They are currently 1 TB each. And I have no need to take an external drive with me anywhere.

Try it before you knock it. You don't have to log in to anything. You turn on your phone (which was probably on already), click once to start the app, click again to pay now. Scan it. The alternative is to pull your wallet out of your pocket, open it, pull out the card, swipe it, put it back. It's basically the same AND I get to have one less card in my wallet. (I have a Starbucks card for the 15 times a year I go there). The one less card is really the nice thing for me.

As Bjarne himself says, "The x is hexadecimal"

Who says this is the end of the story? Plurk can settle or sue for damages. All MS has done with this action is limit those damages.