That's a damn good point. How is a kid to learn to think critically about a controversial topic if all he learns is that studying an unpopular or discredited viewpoint (which is to say, reading one of these books) gets him punished? That might create a radical, but it won't create a critical thinker.

I think the AC makes a good point, in that if schools stuck to public domain works for teaching purposes, there'd be more teaching and less pushing of modern agendas.

But teachers could make better choices regardless. A lot of the novels we had to study in junior high onward were, bluntly, dull. That does nothing to encourage kids to read. There are plenty of classics that would attract young readers, if only they knew they existed. Why must it be The Scarlet Letter? why not Scaramouche, which is at least a fun read? or if you want symbolism and social themes, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, where at least something happens to keep young minds attentive (I read it when I was 12, so it couldn't be too bad for that). My 8th grade teacher understood this, which was why our studied classic was The Scarlet Pimpernel.

General fiction is a much larger market. But I've yet to see anything that called itself "speculative fiction" that I cared for, so I'll consider myself warned.

It's a well-known software phenomenon: The time it takes to build and debug a program is proportional to the number of people involved. Some argue that it's closer to the square of the number of people (due to the number of interactions in the graph connecting the portions written by different programmers). If you want a bug-free app developed quickly, give it to one person, and make sure that one person understands the problem well.

Actually, a more fun analysis says that the time is really just a function of the (square of the) number of managers managing the development team. But that might be taking cynicism a bit too seriously.

Which viruses, and which antibiotics? Is it the virus itself or does it rely on a host that's susceptible to antibiotics?

Oh, then my WinME definitely had some VxD drivers, cuz I recall it fishing a Win95 driver out of several options via pawing thru INI files (I can't recall if this was for the SCSI card or the sound card), and the Matrox vidcard definitely had the old type. Whether it had any of the WdM type, then ... dunno. Mainboard was a Tyan server board which was rock solid (and did not have the rollover bug -- didja know that's actually in the hardware, and in only about half the hardware -- Windows just triggered it), and that helps under any circumstances. I'd seen others that were dead-stable too, even on seriously junk hardware like Packard Smell... which woulda had all older drivers and OS never touched since it left the factory.

Main reason I keep looking at linux (other than masochism) is that it's good to have alternatives, but as you say it's never really going to be viable for the masses unless and until they restructure the driver mess, and stop "removing" drivers for older hardware (while saying how good it is for old hardware, WTF? Few versions back Ubuntu pulled support for all vidcards over 5 years old!) ... dandy for a headless server that does one job. Not so dandy for people with random hardware that does many tasks. It needs a wrapper so it can run any damn drivers including Windows drivers, instead of trying to force everyone to come to them with a linux driver.... and keep it updated. If it's supposed to be the OS for everyone, then stop locking out anyone who won't bow to your system, and to the GPL (which in its current incarnation is coersion, not 'freedom'. The BSD license is truly free.)

I've often said that developers should have to work on the slowest hardware that will even run their programs, so they know how the rest of us feel. The fullblown linux desktops are a prime example.

Yeah, I've heard all the excuses... they all boil down to "works for me, sucks to be you". That's not going to draw everyday users, tho it may draw ivory-tower bigots. It's been what, 20 years now? and it still has only about 1% of desktop users. You'd think that alone would cue 'em they're goin' at it wrong if they truly want to attract ordinary users. Most of us don't run server OSs. If you're only going for the server market (and there'd be nothing wrong with that, BSD as an example), admit it and stop bullshitting the rest of us.

All I've seen about Win9 so far is that it kinda reverts to Win7 in the interface dept (at least MS eventually learns from their mistakes, and does something about it!). What's this about $40 or even free?

After something like 20 years I finally found a system that won't run Debian unstable right now. My Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 magnesium tablet + iKey Jumpseat magnesium keyboard. Systemd and GDM break. Bought (for less than full price) because I am a frequent traveler and speaker and really do need something you can drop from 6 feet and pour coffee over have it keep working.

But because of this bug I have ubuntu at the moment, and am not having fun and am eager to return to Debian.

Funny enough it's been tried as a business concept, though under different circumstances. In the mid-90s a company called AngelCorp wanted to build a series of manned aircraft that could loiter at high altitudes for long periods of time to provide high speed internet access. This was shortly before DSL, CableModems, WIfi and T1/T3 connectivity at the workplace would pretty much saturate that market. Bad timing.

Scaled Composites built one ship, the Proteus, a beautiful, revolutionary aircraft that is still in use today for many other payload missions such as airborne laser testing. The Proteus was also the uncle of White Knight I, the mothership for SpaceShipOne.

  The odd thing is, the AngelCorp website still exists, frozen in time.

With advances in battery propulsion and cheap UAV / drone guidance systems, it could be a workable thing for providing temporary access to remote regions.

I don't know anything about Alibaba as a company, or about their stock arrangements. But I do know that over the years the website has worked to become more buyer-friendly and to earn buyer trust. My main concern about this is that they don't go overboard with growth and ruin what so far seems to be a good thing.