I'm in the UK - thats how public liability works here. You can sue anyone you want over anything, but as a business you are required to have that liability covered, while as an individual you are not.

I can already cook and make meals for my friends, why do I need various licenses and inspections to open a restaurant for someone other than a friend / family member?

My home has perfectly fine accident damage for when I invite friends and family over, so why do I need public liability insurance if I then choose to run a business from it that involved people coming over?

Hint - when you aren't doing something for profit, that is taken into account in liability cases. The moment you intend to make a profit from the action, your liability changes and so you need additional insurance to cover it. When running a business in both your own and my examples, the standard that you are held to changes dramatically, even when there is a comparable non-business version of your actions.

So how do we know you aren't a paid AMD shill rubbishing Nvidia for higher sales?

USB-wired Ethernet means reverse tethering. Unfortunately, it really isn't practical on a classroom scale, because of the distances involved, not to mention that general-purpose computers aren't really all that great at handling high-speed network routing for thirty or forty machines to begin with, and USB's excessive CPU overhead just piles on top of that.

It would be cheaper and more reliable to install a dedicated Wi-Fi hot spot in every classroom with a fairly directional antenna on the ceiling, and set the maximum transmit power really low so each classroom acts like its own microcell that is roughly limited to the bounds of the room. Chances are, a single shared Wi-Fi connection is plenty fast enough for a single classroom, and in my experience, as long as you aren't doing tethering, Wi-FI works very well on iOS (the recent WPA2 Enterprise networking authentication changes in iOS 8 notwithstanding). It's only a nightmare on Windows, which is probably one of the reasons that Microsoft is getting stomped into the ground in school markets.... But I digress.

BTW, does anybody else find it odd for an article to say that MS is losing the market? Normally "-ing" verbs imply that something is happening right now. I was under the impression that they had pretty much lost the K-12 market to iPads years ago.

They're their there.

Of course it has limits, they dont have to give everything away for free.

I take it you missed the large Windows offering on AWS then...?

Actually it is free if you want VS integration - Ximarin announced today they were making their Starter offering, which is free, better and also making it integrate with VS like their higher paid offerings.

What about it? The next gen one has already been much talked about (Roslyn) and you can already get access to it.

Mono is actually very incomplete, and I'm not talking about the major components that people usually bring up like WinForms - its missing a lot of the lesser used method overloads in various places, so if your code uses one then you are SOL. You are encouraged to treat it as a bug and submit a report, but its still an issue when you have deadlines approaching.

They are integrating major parts of the development process into other, existing editors rather than porting VS (which would be a huuuuuuuge job) - for example, serious effort is being put into adding debugging and intellisense into SubLime Edit for .Net stuff.

I first read it in my teens when it first came out and was being raved about on here et al, and then I read it again a few years back as I thought my understanding of it might have changed, but it hadn't.

Why do people rate Cryptonomicon as worthy of being filmed? I've read it on two occasions and both times I've felt it to be preachy, naive and rambling - there are much better books out there begging to be made into films or tv series.

Or worse, imagine that they do understand they have to fill the tractors with gasoline... but the tractors run on diesel. (And then they wonder why the tractor engine keeps blowing up.)

"A little learning is a dangerous thing..."

—Alexander Pope

None of those things is dependent on low level coding experience.

That's one way to learn those things. A CS degree is another. The point was that they need to at least have some concept of what's happening below them, regardless of how they got that understanding, and that more and more often, developers lack that understanding because we've made it too easy for people to dive in and write working (but badly written) software. By taking away the steepness of the learning curve, we've eliminated the impetus to actually get a degree, and to take the time needed for reading complex documentation and learning how to write software correctly.

Well, possibly the network data one, but even there you're more likely to screw up by trying to do something low level (like send a byte at a time by hand) than you are by just using the appropriate library functions.

If you're able to do everything with HTTP, there are some decent libraries out there, but if you're doing raw socket networking, the higher level libraries seem even clumsier and easier to screw up than POSIX to me. YMMV.