Most of the retail locations are unmanned displays.. Ie at Walmart, grocery stores, etc.

Question ..

2^64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 seconds
signed = 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 seconds
  = 292,271,023,045 years, 114 days, 9 hours, 30 minutes, 40 seconds (year ~365.25 days)
+ epoch = April 24, 292,271,025,015 @ 9:30:40

The article mentions year 29,227,702,659 but appears this is off by about a factor of 10? Granted, ultimately doesn't matter but am I missing something?

I had the same thought when going through the same class. I was hoping to simply test out of it -- ended up compromising with the professor and was able to get all of the class material ahead of time (finished it within two days) but had to take the tests on test days (which I assume is understandable to minimize cheating).

A prior learning assessment would have been nice but atleast it got me out of having to attend every class session.

For your goal on attempting to change the course contents -- yah, good luck .. I'm assuming Microsoft is still pouring a LOT of $$$ into the colleges to make sure their software is being used -- definitely very annoying as other software choices are more than adequate and would require learning concepts vs following step-by-step directions (nothing more frustrating than watching someone pull out a step-by-step instruction sheet and have absolutely NO clue what is actually happening within the program to give them their results).

A forum and some custom LAMP pages ... soooo why not focus on that and leave the server/hosting/etc to someone else? There are a lot of LAMP hosting providers out there that you could use for a few $$ per month.. Go with a company that can give you SSH access so you can get familiar with some CLI management (or concurrently attempting to run the same stuff on a virtualbox linux setup) and perhaps down the road once your more comfortable with the LAMP config, then migrate the site to your own server.

Google is Microsoft's #1 competition right? Of course Microsoft wants Google to continue to use Windows.. not using Windows puts Google at an even further advantage.. its not like Microsoft can drop using Windows for its internal systems.

I think open source will benefit. There will be a certain number of people who are laid off that it will be extremely difficult to find a similar job. I'm thinking of people in industries and service sector jobs that were contracting before the downturn and have become much worse (the printing industry is one in particular I'm very familiar with).

These individuals will need to "reinvent" themselves to an extent. Getting involved in an open source project will give them some experience in a new field. In addition, others may consider this being a good time to start a business (I know many people who have the desire to start their own businesses but have been reluctant due to the imaginary security blanket of a corporate job). If these people want to be successful in this economy with a new venture, they will need to be very smart with their expenses which does generally equate to utilizing open source.