I knew it was bad when hand sanitizer started popping up all over the place.

It makes sense for a school to try to protect their property and ensure that it is used for good purposes (studying as opposed to pron), but how would spying on the students ever protect their property?

The really disturbing thing about this isn't that the school could remotely activate the webcams, it's that they did, and they used that power to invade their student's privacy. Besides, the person actually doing the spying must have some serious issues.

In every Humanities class I've ever been, the teachers always try to convey that humans just continually rehash ideas that other people thought up. That people use others ideas to such an extent that almost everything we do is a derivative work. The reuse of ideas, or even small sentences or clips of music, to come up with new works has come to be known as "Fair Use".

I've never read the book in question or any of the books that were "sampled" into it, so it would be idiotic for me to comment as to whether it's Fair Use or not. If she used passages from many books and she included quite a bit of her own writing, then there is nothing wrong with her book. In fact, if her story was original enough there would be no reason for her to even cite the authors she borrowed from.

This is still not what I wanted the iPad to be. I wanted a slate form-factor, laptop comparable specs, non-proprietary ports (USB), a stylus interface, and a slick, new OS. I got a big iPod Touch and a laptop that turns into a big iPod Touch; I don't think I'll buy either.

Most universities kick students out as soon as they are caught cheating. If the cheaters try to go to apply to another school, the last question on the app is usually "Have you ever been disciplined for Academic Dishonesty?", to which answering "yes" is an auto-fail.

Although I worded it particularly oddly, I meant to say that I don't know anyone who works at a large, or even midsize, company that primarily uses Macs. You are correct to point out that Apple computers used to dominate in the 80's, though I know a former Kaypro employee who would dispute that.

I agree that Macs tend to cost less over time, but I was trying to point out that the initial costs (computers, training, etc.) would be higher than if the company used PCs.

It seems like everytime I buy an electronic device I get a cable to go with it. I have so many USB cables that I don't know what to do with them all.

I've never heard of anyone who works at a company that uses Macs. The company I work at uses PCs exclusively, and probably saves quite a bit of money by doing so. My work PC has never crashed, has never had a virus, runs relatively fast, and was probably quite cheap. I do have to have an IT person mess with computer every now and then, and thats usually because a poorly written application fails and needs to be reinstalled. For most businesses switching to Macs would require new IT people, retraining of employees, and finding applications that function in OS X. The computers would also likely cost considerably more than PCs.

When the computers are doing all of the intellectual work what will people do? I doubt that factory jobs would be prevalent as the employees would be replaced by robots. Will we simply laze about all day posting on Slashdot? Or, will our robot overlords kill all of us? It seems like the easy solution would be not to develop advanced AI, it's not going to develop itself...yet.

The electrical components of my gas burning vehicle shorted and caused the rest of the vehicle to be consumed by flames in a very smokey manner, certainly smokier than other car I've observed. As the electric parts of the car were responsible for said fire, it seems resonable that electric cars will burst into flames more often than gas burning cars. Therefore, it can be logically deduced that electric cars will result in much more smoke than the fossil fueled alternatives.

This must be why people can think up a comeback before I'm finished with the original joke.