Read the article? Why in the world would I want to do that? P-shaw! :)

This was in large part because we tried to just drop the new technology into the classroom with no concept of how to use it to improve education. We kept the same education processes so of course the new technology didn't make a significant difference.

What old Billy-boy is missing is that Tablets [and even PCs still I think] have the *POTENTIAL* to significantly improve education; not by simply dropping them in classrooms, but by completely changing the way education is done. All this technology has the capability to be a major force multiplier for teachers. This requires the radical steps of:

a) Researching and developing curriculum based on the capabilities of the available technologies - something that can't be done overnight. This will take time.

b) Training the teachers and educators on this new curriculum AND the new technology. Unfortunately, far too many current teachers have ZERO tech skills. Seriously, my mother, step-dad and ex-wife are all teachers. My ex is the only one with any tech skills, and nobody else at their schools can even figure out an iPad. This will involve tech skills being part of future teacher certification and training.

c) Most importantly - the financial and political backing of these changes, and the willpower to see it through. Nothing here is a quick fix, and unfortunately educational administrators tend to try new educational 'trends' and drop them at an alarming rate if they don't make insane improvements immediately. Then a decade or two later, the exact same 'trend' comes along with a new name and it happens all over. They are like a serial dieter, they want a quick-fix pill that works instantly and that just isn't going to happen.

This is where the research and development come into play, both on a technological and curriculum basis. PCs/Tablets are obviously not the answer to every possible educational situation. Just because you can come up with one example of a situation which may be difficult to do on a tablet doesn't mean that tablets and other technological innovations can't make a significantly positive impact on education as a whole.
Over time, I hope that touch-screen capabilities improve to the point where you can [with or without a stylus] write as quickly and efficiently on the tablet as you can on a piece of paper with pen and pencil. Until then, paper can still be used for classes which require it, and tablets/PCs can be used for classes which don't.

DSL Used to be awesome, esp if you could get a 3rd party provider like Speakeasy. Once AT&T was able to avoid giving access to Speakeasy though, it went downhill quickly and has sucked ever since.

TWC sucks massively here in Arlington,Tx. One of the issues is that they route me through Houston, even if i'm connecting to my work systems a few miles away. But then if I try to access a system in Houston, it sends the traffic down to Houston, back to Dallas, then back down to Houston.

And those are my options. Nearly non-functional DSL limited to 6Mbps [but only actually getting 3Mbps most of the time] or horribly inefficient TWC at 30Mbps but that routes me all over the place and drops packets like nobody's business...

I think they're trying to do something a bit more detailed and theoretical than seeing how much traffic is going through a given interface...

There is a GPS on the device. I have one and it won't work until it gets a GPS lock. It won't get a GPS lock unless it is near a window, and this information is clearly stated in the documentation.

Would that be the same fantastic protection we put on drones in Afghanistan?, the video from which could be watched using a $26 software program?

Not that I go to a lot of sporting events, but on the few that I do go to, I actually stopped singing [or showing any overt respect for] the national anthem when the government, under Bush, started with their Patriot Act, taking-away-our-freedoms crap. It was too much of a lie. I briefly started again when Obama was elected, but when he signed the NDAA, it decided it was time to stop again.

It's sad really, how many people will sing it proudly, and beam patriotically at the flag, and then turn around and take away your freedoms... :(

"We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Really? Nobody has made the "clay tablets" joke yet? You people are slipping!

It depends on what OS you're running. While linux [and my mac] has ping6 and traceroute6, Solaris 10 does not use separate version of ping/traceroute. So if you have a dual stack network, when it resolves the domain name, if it gets an IPv6 address, it'll ping that address. If it doesn't have an ipv6 interface, it's smart enough to know, and will ping the ipv4 address. Of course if you try to ping an IPv6-only target [ie ipv6.google.com] on a host that only has ipv4, it will say it's an unknown host. It's quite nice. Of course, there's lots of other annoyances with Solaris's ping, like the fact that you can't give a count of how many times to ping unless you also give a packet size. :^/

### Host with dual-stack network

ender@host1:~$ host www.fearthepenguin.net
www.fearthepenguin.net has address 173.236.150.4
www.fearthepenguin.net has IPv6 address 2607:f298:2:122::49f:d613

ender@host1:~$ ping -s www.fearthepenguin.net 56 2
PING www.fearthepenguin.net: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from fearthepenguin.net (2607:f298:2:122::49f:d613): icmp_seq=0. time=37.2 ms
64 bytes from fearthepenguin.net (2607:f298:2:122::49f:d613): icmp_seq=1. time=35.7 ms

----www.fearthepenguin.net PING Statistics----
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max/stddev = 35.7/36.4/37.2/1.1

### Host with IPv4 network only

ender@host2:~$ host www.fearthepenguin.net
www.fearthepenguin.net has address 173.236.150.4
www.fearthepenguin.net has IPv6 address 2607:f298:2:122::49f:d613

ender@host2:~$ ping -s www.fearthepenguin.net 56 2
PING www.fearthepenguin.net: 56 data bytes
64 bytes from apache2-argon.lusaka.dreamhost.com (173.236.150.4): icmp_seq=0. time=37.2 ms
64 bytes from apache2-argon.lusaka.dreamhost.com (173.236.150.4): icmp_seq=1. time=36.8 ms

----www.fearthepenguin.net PING Statistics----
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip (ms) min/avg/max/stddev = 36.8/37.0/37.2/0.29

ender@host2:~$ ping -s ipv6.google.com 56 2
ping: unknown host ipv6.google.com

I haven't used their VPS but you can look into Dreamhost. I've been very happy with my shared web account.

For what it's worth, I used to think I needed a VPS as well. Then I found myself with limited funds for awhile so I transferred my site to Dreamhost on their shared hosting plan. At the time they had a deal that it was around $48 to pre-pay for 2 years. It averages out to about $1.95/month. In addition to the unlimited domains/disk/bandwidth and mysql database, the account comes with 1 free domain registration, easy setup to have email hosted either through Dreamhost themselves or through Google Apps [which I do]. And it comes with a shell account, which is on the webserver itself running Debian. They have all kinds of one-click installs for various blogs and ecommerce options and whatnot.
As for stuff like git, I'm not sure. I see that there are some git commands on the server, but I don't know if it's possible to run a git server.

At first I thought I would hate it, and would be transferring back to a VPS/Dedicated server first chance I got. Well, it's been 2.5 years now and I have no desire to switch back. I haven't really missed having root access, and it's nice not to have to worry so much about managing everything. Admittedly, this is just personal sites of fairly low importance, but I've been happy with the setup so far. And they don't seem to mind me sitting on irssi on the shell account all day. The only thing it does is it will automatically kill any single process which has been running for a week.

Anyway, it's worth a look and if you don't like it, I think they have a relatively painless process to transfer to a VPS.

As an added bonus, they've been against SOPA since November, according to their official blog.

I'd like to point out that Dreamhost appears to have been against SOPA from the very beginning. Here's a post on their official blog from November

For anyone looking for GoDaddy alternatives, there's plenty of options, but as a happy customer I'd personally like to direct your attention to Dreamhost. I don't host anything busy, so my personal sites are happy on their shared hosting platform for which I pay a whopping $1.95/month [$48 total to pre-pay 2 years]. Again, without any crazy high traffic, their shared hosting is plenty fast for me. In addition, I get to host unlimited domains, unlimited space/bandwidth [until it affects the shared server of course] including mysql database. And the account comes with one free domain registration. Additional domains are price pretty typically, $9.95 for com/net/org domains. On top of all that, you get a debian shell account [non-root of course] which has worked out great for me. Obviously if you've got busy sites you might want some dedicated or VPS servers or something but they have those too.

Today I transferred my 3 domains over there and everything went smoothly. Even on GoDaddy's end, amazingly. The transfers were all fully complete within about 1.5 hours.

I don't work for them or anything. I'm just a happy customer.

That's exactly it. Of course that much is not going to be noticeable to GoDaddy, but it's terrible PR. They haven't just lost the LOLcat people. I've transferred away my 3 domains and hundreds of others like me have done the same if I'm to believe the posts here and on Ars. And I, like many others are posting about it on Social network sites and our friends hear about it. And then when they're considering a domain registration, they're more likely to look elsewhere and so on. Given that GoDaddy has bothered to publicly claim to reverse their stance already, it must be making some kind of impact over there.

Maybe not major in and of itself, but apparently the person who owns that domain also has over 1000 other domains registered with GoDaddy, so they'll be losing a fair chunk of renewal money there.

Ditto ditto. My 3 domains are transferred off already. Honestly I've been planning on doing so anyway as GoDaddy sucks in so many other ways, so their change in course on SOPA is too-little too-late.