"They decided to tie their hardware and software together, forcing the end user to buy their hardware - at a drastically increased initial investment cost"

This is because Apple is primarily a hardware provider, something people seem to forget. The software is a loss leader to sell the hardware.

This sort of problem is one of the reasons I hold the radical view that the federal government should not be involved in education (beyond some basic standards saying what an eighth-grade diploma or high school diploma consists of.) It's too far away from the issue and there's way too much involved; the ONLY way that the feds can get any information is to reduce it to a basic level. Which means "one size (doesn't) fit all" education, and we all know that means rote, rote, rote.

Here's my idea: Trust the teachers. Sure, make it so you can swap your kids around a bit easier, but give the teachers the authority to go with their responsibility. Every teacher I know bemoans the amount of time spent teaching to the test. My friend the English teacher would love to be allowed to teach novels before spring. My SiL would like to tailor her education to the wide variety of elementary students she has. My BiL would like to be able to spend time explaining why an education is important because of the students he has from a culture that doesn't value education at all. But with one test after another, they have to spend all of their time trying to meet the deadlines.

I used to be one the side of "big athletics don't do much for a school." And then it happened to my school— I went to Gonzaga, and my senior year they did the NCAA March Madness blitz that took them to the Elite Eight and taught the nation to pronounce it properly. (Gone-ZAG-uh, as in "zig zag.")

The year after that, they took all of the dorms that had been converted to office space and changed them back to dorms. And they rented a wing of a hotel to use as freshman dorm space as well. When I visited the campus two years later, they'd put up a number of new buildings and were making improvements to the engineering and chemistry buildings. Now— a decade later— the footprint of the campus is roughly twice what it was, though the campus had owned much of the land before. (It had mostly been houses that the campus rented out; now there's more dorm space and other buildings.)

The population of campus isn't actually too much higher— about a third again, maybe 4000 undergrads. But the facilities improvement has been immense... and it's all because of the basketball team.

So— as close to a scientific study as you can get, before and after— it seems that a winning team CAN be really good for the rest of the school. I'm sure it can go the other way, but don't discount the power of sports.

Gahh, it stripped a character. It should read More taxes != (does not equal) shrinking national debt.

Just imagine how much MORE national debt we would have if the government had another source of revenue. More taxes shrinking national debt when the budget has little or nothing to do with the revenue stream, except that Congress takes the idea of more money and spends it twice over.

The districts in California are horribly drawn, hence the recent proposition that appoints a non-legislative group to draw the lines. I, personally, would have preferred a simple computer system with a limited number of rules (such as "make the shortest possible outlines" and "follow natural boundaries such as rivers and highways when possible") and required NO input as to voting registration, racial demographics, etc. But I'll take this system. The results won't be obvious until after the lines are redrawn as a result of this year's census but with any luck we'll get districts that are less gerrymandered.

Since it's radio, the opportunity cost is much lower, and he does, in fact, have a number of advertisers. Local nurseries and gardening products.

This also broadcasts on a Sunday morning, which is the old fogey timeslot anyway.

"Do not post anything online you wouldn't want your mother, your boss, or your worst enemy to know."

The biggest local station already gets an increase in viewers when the weather turns sour. It's hardly surprising that they have almost as many meteorologists as reporters.

The way that local TV stations will survive is if they figure out what the newspapers didn't— the local angle will sell. The newspapers cut staff and started relying heavily on the AP, which readers can get just as well online. If the news stations start creating more in-depth local stories, they'll get viewers. And as much as people like to decry the feel-good stories, they're watched, so there's no reason to not make them.

Incidentally, I work as a board-operator on a PT basis at the local talk station. You know who is incredibly popular? The gardening guy. You can't do anything but local for gardening; it just doesn't work.

The comic books Star Wars Tales are pretty good; for example, one did a spoof of Judge Judy with the Emperor in the judge's seat, Darth Vader as the bailiff, and Hans Solo on trial for shooting Greedo. If they went that way, I could see it as being good.

That being said, the chances of them doing comedy in a way different than, say, Jar Jar are slim to none. That's not comedy as much as really bad slapstick, and given recent history, that's what they'll go for. Pity.

One of my respected professors told us flat-out that if you can get paid for work, you should— applying for internships is very counter-productive. I can see the value in certain limited fields (such as animation, mentioned in the article) if they follow the specific rules laid out for under-paid or unpaid interns, but there is absolutely no reason it should spread to the general business community. And if students become convinced that internships are necessary, well, there's a cost savings for the employer with very little benefit to the worker.

My first post-college job was a real job, and I'd had no internship experience prior to that, only good letters of reference from my professors and perhaps a dash of desperation on the part of my employer. But I'd rather work fast food than be an unpaid flunky for a job that didn't really need more than some basic training, which many of these things do. Internships should be left to those fields that demand a high level of immediate competence and inside knowledge, and the rest should be left to legitimate on-the-job training.

We don't have a VAT. Yet.

These stories never seem to mention that while the publishers want $14.99 at the high end, they also want the ability to price below $9.99 for back titles. Amazon has pushed the $14.99 price point so hard in the hopes that people wouldn't notice the cheaper part.

Do not forget the Law of Unintended Consequences. When you raise taxes on gasoline, you also raise prices on food and every other good that needs to be transported, which includes just about everything. The US is flat-out large and even though we try to do large-scale transportation for goods (such as trains and river shipping where applicable), everything comes down to trucks in the end.

Yes, they're diesel. You think that not taxing diesel would work when there's a heavy tax on gasoline?

Various economists have analyzed the effects of Prop 13 and pretty much agree that the effects of the fallout would have normalized within a decade. It's been more than 30 years since Prop 13, and many other taxes (such as Mello-Roos) have been installed to take place of the "lost" property revenue. And yet— the deterioration has only gotten worse. Plus when spending has gone through the roof regardless of revenue, I can't see where loss of one source of income has done more harm than the expansion of educational bureaucracy (up to 40% in some areas.)

I say this as someone who got an excellent public education in the 80s, with all the bells and whistles, and who cannot find a school that offers anything like that now.

Incidentally, remember that recent thing called the housing boom? Look to various states without the protections of Prop 13 to see what happened to homeowners whose property taxes quadrupled or worse in the course of a single year. Oh, and also recall that the property taxes are set when the house is sold— so the vast churn between 2000 and 2006 increased property taxes by astonishing amounts.