From Daniel Jackson's book on Alloy [1], here are a few of the major examples they provide:

* Leader election in a ring

* Hotel room locking (this one is really cool)

* Media asset library management

* Memory abstractions

[1] http://books.google.com/books?id=DDv8Ie_jBUQC&lpg=PP1&dq=sof...

There's a really wonderful tutorial on Coq [1] that holds your hand through all the theory you need to learn. I took a class that used this tutorial and I found it to be very understandable and practical, with hardly any background on formal methods myself. Yes, it's a steep learning curve, but at least with this tutorial, you know the curve you need to follow.

[1] Software Foundations http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/

Hint: Check out the overview [2] to see the chapter dependencies and decide which chapters you may want to skip.

[2] http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/sf/deps.html

"The court ordered NMC to pay $58,000 as cost under rule 68, this is less then 2% of what the cost was to defend this case."

It has cost Nissan Computer $3M to defend itself? For a local PC repair shop? Either he's highly principled or just lying.

I have an adviser that hates TeX and would prefer to provide comments but no edits. I would love to see an environment where I could both collaborate with other students on writing the TeX, but also have the ability to enable peer review with Crocodoc-style [1] commenting and annotation.

[1] https://crocodoc.com/

I actually had a similar issue recently where I forgot my PayPal password and I didn't know the answers to my security questions. PayPal then sent me a pin through snail mail to the address they had on file. IMO, this bit of inconvenience is worth the added security.