Although without color it makes most graphic examples in scientific texts impossible to read.

It's been a while since I graduated (in Math), but few, if any, of my college textbooks were in color. Those that were had one color besides black (usually a sort of transparent red). Grade school and high school were a different story, but it is certainly possible to publish college textbooks without a color screen.

I know you're being funny, but interestingly, in most (maybe all) states, you can not carry a sword or long knife in any way that would make it useful for protection. As a country, we have decided that firearms are much safer than swords. Here are a couple of links for discussions of this: http://askville.amazon.com/NYC-legal-carry-pocket-knife-attached-belt-plain-sight-concealed-weapon/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=9649382 http://askville.amazon.com/legal-carry-sword-self-defense/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8859178

Wow - I think you've got your history very mixed up there. Those little red schoolhouses were few and far between. You didn't choose which one to send your kids to based on their performance - you hoped there was one close enough to send your kids to. And there would be ONE that was close enough. Mostly, those one room schoolhouses were successful because they weren't trying to do nearly as much as schools are asked to do today. There were no extra-curricular activities, no football teams, cheerleading squads, chess clubs. There were generally no art classes, and usually no music classes - if it was a city school, and the parents were fairly well off, there might be a piano. They did not teach calculus, or chemistry. And, depending on exactly what period we're talking about, there might absolutely be a school district consolidating some operations for multiple schools in an area. But the real reason those schools were successful is that they didn't have to educate everyone. They could expel troublemakers, and those who weren't interested in being educated could generally leave school when they had had enough (even after compulsory attendance was introduced, it was often possible to get exemptions, at least if you lived on a farm). Nothing against charter schools, but they are a different concept, with a different agenda, goals, and means of acheiving those goals, than the old one room schoolhouse.

I think s/he meant to say that it was added to the money and the pledge of allegiance in the 1950's.

The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door.

Too right on this point. I used to work for Cisco, and was always amazed at the number of bugs filed by customers around really obscure and esoteric features. Every one of those obscure features is in IOS because somebody (usually somebody big with deep pockets) is still using it... Even simple things like OSPF timers - they all have to be adjustable, because some big shop has decided that they can squeeze an extra .1% of bandwidth out of their pipes by fiddling with those timers - and if your new box requires them to reconfigure their whole network to standards (or worse yet, to the values that worked best in Google's network) they're not going to be very interested...

Actually, Congress doesn't get around this at all. The states regulate motor vehicle operation, not the federal government. So, you'd have to look at each state's constitution to see if it was unconstitutional.

Actually, you can - I've done exactly this on my home PC, which was installed from a corporate license (had an MSDN subscription at the time). You need to go through the process manually once - you select everything other than WGA, and when it asks if you really want to ignore that update, you check the box that says something like 'Never ask me about this update again', and click OK. Now, I still get all the critical updates installed automatically, but never have WGA installed on my PC. It's been like that for several years now.